Plum Pudding: Of Divers Ingredients Discreetly Blended & Seasoned

by Christopher Morley

Illustrated by Walter Jack Duncan

192 pages, Paperback

First published May 4, 1910

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

American writer Christopher Darlington Morley founded the Saturday Review, from 1924 to 1940 edited it, and prolifically, most notably authored popular novels.

Christopher Morley, a journalist, essayist, and poet, also produced on stage for a few years and gave college lectures.

Reviews

[Claudia Sorsby · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deeply old-fashioned, charming collection of essays.

Morley offers me a particularly interesting combination of subjects, because he’s often writing about places I know and love, such as New York and Philadelphia, but at a time that’s now so long ago that many of the portraits are shockingly strange and unfamiliar.

It’s amazing to read rhapsodies about uncrowded trains and crystal-blue harbors, and even more amazing to read odes to the pastoral, bucolic pleasures of Long Island (!). I’ve gotten used to sighing as I read about hilariously cheap restaurant meals in old books, but his descriptions of commuters to the old Penn Station as being among the elite of such travelers stopped me cold.

I think I liked the pieces about his Three Hours for Lunch Club best (because they sounded like such fun), but I also particularly liked his “Consider the Commuter” essay. Having grown up as a kid in the NY suburbs (though on the Hudson/Harlem Lines, not the LIRR), with a mom who took the train into the city every day, it rang many bells.

NB: I took longer to read this book than usual because I foolishly left it in a shop, and they had to send it back to me! Thanks, Ruby at Rigby & Peller.

[Phrodrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plum Pudding Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned by Christopher Morley is usually reviews as being about a time now long gone. I summarize it as the serio-comic, mostly amusing musings of a clever commuter traveling mostly through a bucolic, early 20th century Long Island New York. Side trips to Philadelphia, and a touch of Europe. Too many of the sights and locations are now long gone. He makes mention of a lot of places, by name making of himself a tour guide, mostly to places his 3 hours for lunch club enjoyed, but such diners, lunch counters, America’s first automat style food court. (look that one up), clubs and lessor and greater spots for spending time doing little else than sharing convivial conversations.

Christopher morel is better known for his two book traveling book store series: Parnassus on Wheels. First bottom line; I so enjoyed this collection, I will be reading Parnassus. Second bottom line.
It is not so much that he writes of places long gone, he has a vocabulary that also feels long gone. In both cases, I feel a nostalgia, first for places I will never see and second for words I wish we could return to our active vocabulary.