CHAPTER II.
ON MODERN COOKERY AND COOKERY BOOKS.
I am, in the matters of the kitchen, as will be learned from the previous chapter, no admirer of the wisdom of our ancestors. Cookery is eminently an experimental and a practical art. Each day, while it adds to our experience, should also increase our knowledge. And now that intercommunication between distant nations has become facile and frequent; now that we may make an early breakfast in London and a late dinner in Paris, it cannot be permitted that cookery should remain stationary. Far am I from saying that a dinner should be a subject of morning or mid-day meditation or of luxurious desire; but in the present advanced state of civilization, and of medical and chemical knowledge, something more than kneading, baking, stewing, and boiling are necessary in any nation pretending to civilization. The metropolis of England exceeds Paris in extent and population; it commands a greater supply of all articles of consumption, and contains a greater number and variety of markets, which are better supplied. We greatly surpass the French in mutton, we produce better beef, lamb, and pork, and are immeasurably superior both in the quantity and quality of our fish, our venison, and our game, yet we cannot compare, as a nation, with the higher, the middle, or the lower classes in France, in the science of preparing our daily food. The only articles of food in the quality of which the French surpass us are veal and fowl, but such is the skill and science of their cooks that with worse mutton, worse beef, and worse lamb than ours, they produce better chops, cutlets, steaks, and better made dishes of every nature and kind whatsoever. In fricassées, ragouts, salmis, quenelles, purées, filets, and more especially in the dressing of vegetables, our neighbours surpass us. No good reason can be alleged why we should not imitate them in a matter in which they are perfect, or why their more luxurious, more varied, more palatable, and more dainty cookery, should not be introduced more generally among the higher and middle classes.
The object of sensible people should be to adopt all that is good in the cookery of both nations. While English soups, such as ox tail, mock turtle, giblet, hare, pea soup, and mutton broth have their merits, the French potages à la reine, à la Condé, à la Julienne, and the various purées should not be forgotten. While, also, the practical cook may find copious receipts in English cookery books for the boiling of turbot, cod-fish, john-dorey, and salmon, in the English and Dutch fashion, the sturgeon cutlets of the French, and their filets and béchamels of fish should be also introduced to English favour and attention from French cookery books. Our barons of beef, our noble sirloins, our exquisite haunches, saddles, legs, and loins of Southdown mutton, our noble rounds of boiled beef, and those haunches of British venison, the envy and admiration of the world, are worthy of the highest praise. But, on the other hand, the gigot à l’ail aux haricots blancs ought to be made more favourably known to the Englishman, as well as the filet de bœuf, an excellent every-day dish in the good city of Paris. In any new cookery book, while no English receipt of approved excellence should be cancelled, yet there should also be given within a reasonable compass a short system of French, and a compendium of foreign, cookery. It is desirable that we should learn much from our neighbours, as I have said in a former chapter, in white and brown sauces, in veloutés, in the dressing of vegetables, in the seasoning and flavouring with ham instead of with salt, and in a more profuse use of eggs, oil, and butter.
A new cookery book, pointing out the distinctive merits of the French and English kitchens, is a work urgently needed. In such a manual of the art the readers should be presented with all that is best in the substantial solidity and simplicity of the English kitchen, and all that is most varied, delicate, and harmoniously combined in the kitchen of the French. Both are excellent in their way, and there are already many separate treatises on each; but a fusion or combination of the two systems ought now to be attempted. If any professed cook or amateur succeeds in causing an abandonment of all that is coarse and unwholesome in the English kitchen, and in introducing all that is light, elegant, and varied in the French, he will have accomplished a great object, and have done the health of diners-out and dinner-givers equal service. It is the greatest mistake, in a medical point of view, to suppose that an unvaried uniformity of food contributes either to health or to comfort. Variety is as necessary to the stomach as change of scene, or change of study to the mind, and that variety should be placed in our day within the reach of as many as possible.
As there is scarcely an English family among the higher or middle classes who does not number among its members a retired military or civil servant of the East India Company, or a retired naval officer or Indian merchant, it would be advisable to introduce a chapter in any coming cookery book on Anglo-Indian cookery. Mulligatawney soup, and curries, and pillaus, are exceedingly wholesome.
Neither the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Russian, nor the Polish cookery are deserving of general commendation; but a few national dishes and soups, which have obtained a more general reputation, are worthy of attention and adoption.
Cookery is, above all others, a traditional and practical art, and unless receipts have stood the test of time and experience, and general approval, they are little worth. Cookery books are, for the most part, copies of each other; and the first cookery book is only the most original, because we cannot trace the plagiarism beyond the period when printing was invented. But there is little doubt, that in the rolls of great houses, and in the muniment rooms of colleges, halls, and religious establishments, would be found in vellum manuscript every receipt published in the first English cookery book. And the plagiarism may be tracked, as a wounded man by his blood, from 1470 to 1863. The compilers of all cookery books have, more or less, copied the earlier compilers who preceded; and so it must ever be, till we are foolish enough to reject all experience, and trust to theory or conjecture.
The compilers of any new cookery book should lay no claim to originality. They should avail themselves, though never servilely, of the labours of nearly all their predecessors, and by collation, comparison, addition, retrenchment, and the exercise of their own skill, experience, and discoveries, endeavour to improve on works already in print.
Among the French masters in the science of cookery are, Vatel, La Chapelle, Grimod de la Reynière, Beauvilliers, Ude, Laguipierre, Carème, and Plumeret; but receipts of more general utility for the public at large will be found in the “Cuisinier Royal” and the “Cuisinière Bourgeoise.”
Many of the receipts of Carème require alterations and additions, but some may be adopted in their entirety. Of Carème’s cookery, however, the distinguishing characteristic is profuse expenditure. In order to render such a system not merely easy of adoption, but possible, men cooks, splendid establishments, and colossal fortunes must become much more universal than they ever have been or ever can be.
The object of all should now be not to render the introduction of French cookery difficult and expensive, but easy, and within the reach of persons of moderate fortune.
The present age is distinguished as an age of rapid progress, and the improvements suggested now may, in this day of easy and inexpensive communication with the Continent, become permanently rooted to the British soil before 1869.