Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/251

230 about. He confessed that he could not remember that they had talked of anything but eating: "and yet," he added, "I came away feeling myself enlarged and liberalized." For to Morris cookery had an important place among the arts of human life, and he knew a great deal about it in theory, and something also in practice. His wonderful memory served him here as in other things. Once he astonished a friend by giving off-hand the recipe for some rather unusual dish, and when she asked how he came to know it, told her that he had once had to stay a night at an inn where there was nothing to read but a cookery book, and had assimilated it in the course of the evening. His happiness in a day's fishing was much enhanced by cooking the fish he had caught. A few years later than this, talk had happened to turn on the problems of domestic service. "I wouldn't at all mind being a cook," Morris said, "for I understand cooking." "Now and again," he went on, "I would give you all a good feast, but feasts are spoiled if you have them every day, and I promise you I should keep up good strict discipline. I should say to you, 'Now this is tripe and onion day,' and on another day, 'Now this is porridge day,' and you should not have any choice." "I wouldn't be a parlour maid," he said in the course of the same discussion. "I wouldn't answer bells after a certain time, and if you rang the bells I should shy my boots at them." In the matter of food, as also of wine (in which he had a fine judgment), his taste was more French than modern English. "I always bless God," he once said, "for making anything so strong as an onion." One of his favourite illustrations of the decadence of England from its mediæval state was the barbarism of modern English cookery and in especial the abuse