‘Man,’ said Mr. Peregrine Touchwood, ‘is a cooking animal.’
The occasion was a memorable one—none other than the institution of the celebrated Cleikum Club at the old Border Inn presided over by Meg Dods1 and immortalized by Sir Walter Scott in St. Ronan’s Well. This red-letter day in the annals of Scottish gastronomy is commemorated in the introduction to The Cook and Housewife’s Manual, by Mistress Margaret Dods (Edinburgh, 1826),2 a work not unworthy to be placed alongside its French contemporary, Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du Goût. After the catastrophe which befell the ancient and honourable house of St. Ronan’s, our friend Mr. Touchwood, more commonly styled the Cleikum Nabob, was, it appears, in some danger of falling into hypochondria— ‘vulgarly, fidgets, a malady to which bachelor gentlemen in easy circumstances, when turned of fifty, are thought to be peculiarly liable’—but evaded the disaster by the happy thought of founding a club of gastronomes. In addition to the founder, ‘who understood and loved good cheer’, the club included Mr. Winterblossom, ‘an old coxcomb, but deep in the mystery’; Dr. Redgill, an English divine who chanced to be taking the waters at St. Ronan’s,1 and who, ‘like a true church man, had a strong leaning to dishes as they are’; Mr. Jekyl, a young life-guardsman who had served in the Peninsula, had ‘French theory’ in the affairs of the kitchen, and was ‘to the full as flighty and speculative as the Doctor was dogmatic’; and lastly, on Meg’s recommendation, Mr. Matthew Stechy, ‘St. Ronan’s auld butler, that kept the first hottle in Glasgow’. Mrs. Dods herself was elected ‘high priestess of the mysteries’. The Nabob explains his design to Dr. Redgill: ‘“To this ancient hostel now—you will scarce believe it—have been confined scores of admirable receipts in cookery, ever since the jolly friars flourished down in the monastery yonder:
