Margarine

Harold Nicolson

Lunch at the Beefsteak.  Sit between the Belgian Ambassador [Baron Cartier de Marchienne, age 73] and Lord Esher.  Old Cartier is miserable because the cuisine in Belgium is declining.  This cuisine, he says, which was the finest in the world and superior (as I agree) to the finest French cooking, was based upon the lavish use of butter.  Now they have to use margarine.  The tone in which the old boy used the word “margarine” was replete with all the loathing of the nineteenth for the twentieth century.

   - Harold Nicolson, Diary, October 2, 1945