Taking the Short View

When Sydney Smith, a reluctant cleric, was given the living at the remote village of Foston in Yorkshire, this most urbane of men described his predicament as being ‘twelve miles from a lemon’. The country, he thought, was a ‘healthy grave’.

After a spell at Oxford, Smith had first gone to a curacy at Netheravon on Salisbury Plain, near the forbidding cromlechs of Amesbury. There his new position incubated his dislike of the countryside: ‘Nothing can equal the profound, the immeasurable, the awful dullness of this place in which I lie dead and buried.’ Romantics might have enjoyed Stonehenge, but Smith did not. An essayist and preacher, Smith is best approached through his voluminous correspondence, but by every contemporary account, his great achievement was his daily conversation, also voluminous. Additionally, he was an enthusiastic cook and an even more enthusiastic eater. His ambition was to be the ‘Master Cook as well as Master Parson of my village’. He excelled in each, although in old age he recorded some regrets. Digestion, he believed, is paramount: ‘If you wish for anything like happiness in the fifth act of life, eat and drink about one half of what you could eat and drink.’ His approach to food – which combined appetite, generosity and curiosity – anticipated modern ‘mindfulness’. A reliable way to happiness, according to Smith, was to think no further ahead than dinner or tea. Personally, I find this a very helpful view of things. He advised taking this ‘short view’ of life because tomorrow is forever uncertain: we should make it our resolution to be happy today. How can you not adore a man who could write in a recipe, ‘Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl’ or who believed that ‘garlic is power’? Sydney Smith was born in 1771. His father was a merchant who, according to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘bought, altered, spoiled or sold’ more than nineteen properties. His daughter, Saba, so called simply because he enjoyed the sound of the pseudo-Hebraic name, described her grandfather as ‘very clever, odd by nature, but still more odd by design’. These were to prove inherited characteristics. Smith wanted to study law, but his father directed him to the Church, a calling that sent him only a very weak signal. Before coming into an inheritance from his brother late in life, Smith was not a wealthy man. His prosperity was a virtual one based on his astonishing circle of (mostly titled) friends. While a prodigious gourmand, he was cautious about expense, but never in a mean way. Lady Holland sent him some hams from Galicia, recommending that he cook them in wine. Smith replied that he was not high enough in the Church for such luxury and would have, instead, to boil them in water. His reputation was made as a founder in 1802 of the Edinburgh Review, a Whig rival to the Tory Quarterly Review. With typical wit and culinary reference, he explained that for his Review he had wanted the motto ‘We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal’ but was persuaded instead to use a pompous line from Publius Syrus of whose works ‘none of us, I am sure, had ever read a single line’. He had mixed feelings about Edinburgh: ‘as offensive to the nose as it is delightful to the eye’. However, there were compensations: ‘Very good general society, large healthy Virgins with mild pleasing countenances, and white swelling breasts’. Back in London he gave popular evening talks at the Foundling Hospital, but his circle was an aristocratic one. Titled folk took him up but never took him over, as his biographer Alan Bell nicely said. One such was Lord Berkeley of Stratton, whose private – or ‘proprietary’ – chapel near the junction of Hill Street and Charles Street in Mayfair featured Smith as a morning preacher. These proprietary chapels – not part of the established church – were a distinctive feature of urban life in Smith’s day: rather like a TED Talk, they were a popular phenomenon open to the public and to subscribers. Between 1804 and 1806 Smith gave a course of lectures on Moral Philosophy at the Royal Institution. Impostor Syndrome had not been described in his day, but his course was ‘without any exception the most perfect example of impudence recorded in history’. Impudent it may have been, but his lectures were immensely popular, drawing crowds of up to 800 and giving him an ‘absurd pitch of celebrity’. Meanwhile, Smith’s Christianity was one we might all enjoy. With God he was on good terms. God is, he wrote, best served by ‘regular tenour of good actions . . . the luxury of a false religion is to be unhappy’. And, on a trip to Brussels, he noted, ‘I think, possibly correctly, that Heaven might comprise eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets.’ Yet he suffered from low spirits, even as he acquired an enviable reputation for being excellent company, a generous host, an original wit and a principled liberal reformer. The death of his young son Noel made him remark: ‘the life of a parent is the life of a gambler’. His most famous letter was written to Lady Georgiana Cavendish when she was depressed (a condition Freud later described as ‘anger without enthusiasm’). Here is Smith’s entire world view:

1st. Live as well as you dare. 2nd. Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold, 75° or 80°. 3rd. Amusing books. 4th. Short views of human life – not further than dinner or tea. 5th. Be as busy as you can. 6th. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you. 7th. And of those acquaintances who amuse you. 8th. Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely – they are always worse for dignified concealment. 9th. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you. 10th. Compare your lot with that of other people. 11th. Don’t expect too much from human life – a sorry business at the best. 12th. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy, sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion, not ending in active benevolence. 13th. Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree. 14th. Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue. 15th. Make the room where you commonly sit, gay and pleasant. 16th. Struggle by little and little against idleness. 17th. Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice. 18th. Keep good blazing fires. 19th. Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion. 20th. Believe me, dear Lady Georgiana, Very truly yours, Sydney Smith.

Taking his own advice, Smith made several gourmet trips to Paris. His first, in 1826, found him enjoying mackerel Maître d’hôtel. On his second visit, nine years later, he ate Poulet à la tartare and an almond tart which were so delicious they provided him with ‘impressions which no changes in future life can ever obliterate’. And at a breakfast with the Duc de Broglie where he ate ‘roast fowl, spinach-eggs, apples’, he was agreeably surprised to find the children of the house drinking wine in the morning. However, he found Paris’s sanitation one of the ‘crying evils’ and deplored the lack of tablecloths in even the most aristocratic hôtels particuliers. The mackerel recipe appears in Beauvilliers’s L’Art du Cuisinier (1814). Charmingly, when Smith and his wife moved to Combe Florey, they would sit around the fire and read passages from this cheffy masterpiece to each other: a vicarious extension of Paris in Somerset. Here was an anticipation of the Francophilia monetized by Terence Conran in our own era. Smith’s understanding of French cooking technique also anticipated the wine authority Victor Hazan who explained that, while Italian food focuses on the genius of Nature, French food values the genius of the chef. With crude British butchery in mind, Smith writes: ‘Meat thoroughly subdued by human skill is more agreeable to me than the barbarian Stonehenge masses of meat with which we feed ourselves.’ Stonehenge had made an impression. Meanwhile, even if his place in the history of literature is a modest one, Smith’s position in the history of vinaigrette is nonpareil. The preparation of a good salad dressing is often said to be the test of a cook’s expertise: indeed, a test of character. Smith’s recipe is a superior one, but also distinguished because he wrote it in rhyme.

To make this condiment your poet begs The pounded yellow of two hard boiled eggs; Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve, Smoothness and softness to the salad give; Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl, And, half suspected, animate the whole; Of mordant mustard add a single spoon, Distrust the condiment that bites so soon; But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault To add a double quantity of salt; Four times the spoon with oil from Lucca crown, And twice with vinegar, procured from town; And lastly, o’er the flavoured compound toss A magic soupçon of anchovy sauce. O green and glorious! O herbaceous treat! ’Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat; Back to the world he’d turn his fleeting soul, And plunge his fingers in the salad-bowl; Serenely full, the epicure would say, ‘Fate cannot harm me, – I have dined today.’

His recipe has some similarities with the vinaigrette à l’oeuf in Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking but is altogether more dense. In fact, it became so well-known that Eliza Acton reproduced it in her influential Modern Cookery (1845) and so too did Marion Harland whose Common Sense in the Household was published in America in 1871 and sold more than 10 million copies. Smith, of course, had firm views about the quality of his ingredients. He used Orléans vinegar, so-called because historically Loire wines that had gone sour were offloaded and turned into a condiment in this ‘city of vinegars’. He said Orléans vinegar was ‘almost wine, like a lady who has just lost her character’. To the American gourmet Richard Olney, vinaigrette ‘belongs to the realm of voluptuous experience’. Sydney Smith would have agreed. Reflecting on the quality of English and Scottish cooking late in life, Smith said: ‘It fills me with despair and remorse to think how badly I have been fed, and how my time has been misspent and wasted on bread sauce and melted butter.’ His last trip abroad was to the Netherlands which perhaps confirmed his admiration for French ways in the kitchen: the Low Countries, he declared, ‘are not fit countries for the habitation of man . . . They are usurped from the kingdom of frogs and they are the proper domicile of aquatic reptiles.’ Still, Smith remained cheerful despite the depredations of age and the miseries of a trip to Holland. At the end, he suffered from gout which, with typical wit, he said was the only enemy he did not want at his feet.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 87 © Stephen Bayley 2025