pastrycook

Updated: June 25, 2025

While thus forlornly occupied, I find that the depressing banquet on the table is, in every phase of its profoundly unsatisfactory character, so like the banquet at the meanest and shabbiest of evening parties, that I begin to think I must have 'brought down' to supper, the old lady unknown, blue with cold, who is setting her teeth on edge with a cool orange at my elbow that the pastrycook who has compounded for the company on the lowest terms per head, is a fraudulent bankrupt, redeeming his contract with the stale stock from his window that, for some unexplained reason, the family giving the party have become my mortal foes, and have given it on purpose to affront me.

Charles Dickens - The Uncommercial Traveller