Savouries

The savoury is an end to a long dinner, a kind of exclamation point following the sweet and preceding the dessert and the port; an entirely English invention. It forms no part of any other cuisine, although it has occasionally been borrowed by the French in anglophile mood. Its original intention was to cleanse the palate after the delicious but cloying sweet and prepare it, in the case of gentlemen, for the port. Ladies very often missed the savoury, their delicate appetites already sated on the seven or so courses which might have preceded it. Gentlemen, on the other hand, sometimes missed the sweet, and this was considered rather discerning and manly.