'One Who Plays a Good Knife and Fork'

I’ve always prized the word trencherman and admired those who have honestly earned the title. A trencherman should not be confused with a glutton or gourmand, nor is he necessarily a connoisseur or “pioneer of the palate,” to use Tom Waits’ expression. He is an enthusiastic and appreciative feeder. The OED offers a nice turn of phrase as part of its definition: “one who plays a good knife and fork.” The Dictionary notes the noun often comes modified by “good, stout [or] valiant.” In Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice says of Benedick: “He is a very valiaunt trencher man, he hath an excellent stomacke.” Contemporary puritans will frown on the notion of trenchermen. Food is sustenance ingested reluctantly, never a pleasure.   

Chief among literary trenchermen is Charles Lamb. Even his surname is an item on a menu. Among the best-loved of his Essays of Elia is “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig.” In his letters, Lamb is forever celebrating his most recent meal or anticipating the next one. Someone had sent his childhood friend Coleridge a pig, and Lamb got the credit for it. Lamb writes on March 9, 1822:

“It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig turned out so well, --they are interesting creatures at a certain age; what a pity such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank bacon! You had all some of the crackling--and brain sauce--did you remember to rub it with butter, and gently dredge it a little just before the crisis? Did the eyes come away kindly, with no Oedipean avulsion [OED: “the action of pulling off, plucking out, or tearing away”]? Was the crackling the color of the ripe pomegranate? Had you no cursed complement of boiled neck of mutton before it, to blunt the edge of delicate desire?”

I don’t even eat pork (“brain sauce”? “eyes”?) but Lamb’s description got me salivating, as did his prose. Few writers can do that. Given the circumstances of his life (sister murdering mother, his stays in the nut house), Lamb’s gift for joie de vivre and comedy are miraculous. He is fond of lists and catalogs, suggesting his pleasure in the world’s beneficent bounty:

    

“To confess an honest truth, a pig is one of those things I could never think of sending away. Teals, widgeons, snipes, barn-door fowl, ducks, geese,--your tame villatic [OED: “rural, rustic”] things,--Welsh mutton collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or pickled, your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself.”

Lamb was born on this date, Feb. 10, in 1775.