Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/433

 CHAPTER XVI: PHILADELPHIA AT TABLE

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F interest in the art of eating called for justification, I could show that I come by mine legitimately. My family took care of that when the sensible ancestor who made me an American settled in Accomac, where most things worth eating were to be had for the fishing or the shooting or the digging, so that Accomac feasted while the rest of Virginia still starved, and when my Grandfather, in his day, moved to Philadelphia which is as well provided as Accomac and more conscientious in cultivating its possibilities. It would be sheer disloyalty to the family inheritance if I did not like to eat well, just as it would be rank hypocrisy to see in my loyalty a virtue.

Accomac's reputation for good eating has barely got beyond the local history book, Accomac, I find, being a place you must have belonged to at one time or another, to know anything about. But Philadelphia made a reputation for its high living as soon as the Philadelphian emerged from his original cave, or sooner—read Watson and every other authority and you will find that before he was out of it, even the family cat occupied itself in hunting delicacies for the family feast. And right off the Philadelphian understood the truth the scientist has been centuries in groping after: that if people's