GREAT BRITAIN: Primrose Salad

At Mario's Caprice Restaurant in London's fashionable West End, a guest last week could choose from a menu of caviar, turtle soup, sole bonne femme, roast duck with wine sauce and pineapple, whole baby chickens fried in butter with mushrooms, asparagus in butter sauce, feathery soufflés aflame with brandy, strawberries, peaches in kirsch, crêpes suzette en liqueurs, petits fours. "And," said Mario, "you can have it all if you like." To encourage the dollar tourist trade, Britain's government had lifted the wartime limit of five shillings (70¢ U.S.) per meal.

But few Londoners gorged themselves.

Restaurants reported that their customers would have to relearn the habit of eating five courses instead of three. Complained one waiter: "They have forgotten how to eat." Another reason for Britons' timidity: in spite of their delight that the control is gone and with it the house charge, surtax and other added fees, they cannot afford many of the goodies.

Decontrol of restaurant prices was part of a general tendency to lift price control on food. Last month, when fish in retail stores was decontrolled and fish prices zoomed, housewives refused to buy until fishmongers stopped gouging. Grocers, pleading that last year's drought had made vegetables scarce, put their prices up, and housewives stuck to meat & potatoes, turned away from cauliflower at 2/6, cabbage at a shilling a pound.

This week, led by the 60,000 members of the National Federation of Housewives, British women were boycotting their greengrocers, wearing bows of white tape to show that they wanted prices down. In Huddersfield the local N.F.H. chairman, Mrs. Neil Sykes, advised housewives to make their salads of nettle tops, primrose and cowslip leaves, dandelions and wood sorrel. And in a speech at Reading, Food Minister Maurice Webb made political capital of the boycott.

Said Webb: "This is the private-enterprise way of giving you your food . . . The solution is ... marketing under public ownership. You know you have the remedy in your own hands. You did it with fish; now do it with vegetables."