ungarian goulash and Hungarian
rhapsodies are certainly designed to be taken in conjunction....
Russian music tastes of _kascha_ and _bortsch_ and vodka. The happy,
hearty eaters of Russia, the drunken, sodden drinkers of Russia are
reflected in the scores of _Boris Godunow_ and _Petrouchka_.... In
England we find that the great English meat pasties and puddings
appeared in the same century with the immortal Purcell.... But in
America we import our cooks ... and our music. As a race we do not
like to cook. We scarcely like to eat. We certainly do not enjoy
eating. We will never have a national music until we have national
dishes and national drinks and until we like good food. It is
significant that our national drinks at present are mixed drinks, the
ingredients of which are foreign. It is doubly significant that that
section of the country which produces chicken _a la Maryland_, corn
bread, beaten biscuit, mint juleps, and New Orleans fizzes has
furnished us with the best of such music as we can boast. Maine has
offered us no _Suwanee River_; we owe no _Swing Low, Sweet Chariot_ to
Nebraska. The best of our ragtime composers are Jews, a race which
regards eating and cooking of sufficient importance to include rules
for the preparation and disposition of food in its religious tenets.

Most musicians and those who enjoy listening to music, like to eat
(this does not mean that people who like to eat always desire to
listen to music at the same time, but nowadays one has little choice
in the matter); what is more pregnant, most of them like to cook. We
may include even the music critics, one of whom (Henry T. Finck) has
written a book about such matters. The others eat ... and expand.
James Huneker devotes sixteen pages of "The New Cosmopolis" to the
"maw of the monster." And as H. L. Mencken has pointed out, "The
Pilsner motive runs through the book from cover to cover." Dinners are
constantly being given for the musicians and critics to meet and talk
over thirteen courses with wine. You may read Mr. Krehbiel's glowing
accounts of the dinner given to Adelina Patti (a dinner referred to in
Joseph Hergesheimer's lyric novel, "The Three Black Pennys") on the
occasion of her twenty-fifth anniversary as a singer, of the dinner to
Marcella Sembrich to mark her retirement from the opera stage, and of
a dinner to Teresa Carreno when she proposed a toast to her three
husbands.... Go to the opera house and observe the lady singers