cream-puff inhaler; cake-eater

[Garson O'Toole]

Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> Sounds like BS to me.
>
> A "cake-eater" was a "softy" of a sort easily imagined as attending
> afternoon teas, a common university activity of the era. Moreover,
> red-blooded he-men were expected to eat muscle-building steaks and
> fresh-caught trout, not sweet, debilitating cakes and pastries.
>
> As for "creampuff-inhaler," I too would like to see evidence for its
> independent existence.

Here is an example illustrating the transformative effects of eating
cream puffs. The consumer becomes a "cylindrical, roly-poly type of
the cities."

Cite: Circa 1910, The Invaders: A Story of the "Hole-in-the-wall"
Country  by John Lloyd [Jacque Lloyd Morgan] Page 227, R.F. Fenno &
Company, New York. (Google Books full view)

http://books.google.com/books?id=zfwdAAAAMAAJ&q=%22cream+puffs%22#v=snippet&

[Begin excerpt]
I can think of nothing more effective than a generation or so on Fifth
Avenue, where, according to your old night-hawk friend, Boston Bill,
"they eat cream puffs all day long, and drink wine all night"-truly a
scathing denunciation of the ultra-rich. It may have been that such
enervating luxuries have transformed the western jaw into the eastern
chin (I would mark Algernon O'Houlihan as "Exhibit A"), and it may
have been this same damnable cream-puff vice that has evolved our
tall, gaunt, angular, thin-bellied forebears into the short,
cylindrical, roly-poly type of the cities.
[End excerpt]

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