Twenty-four Little French Dinners and How to Cook and Serve Them

by Cora Moore

THE BUGBEAR OF AMERICAN COOKERY—MONOTONY

It is as strange as it is true that with the supplies that have lately proved sufficient to feed a world to draw upon the chief trouble with American cookery is its monotony. The American cook has a wider variety of foods at his command than any other in the world, yet in the average home how rarely is it that the palate is surprised with a flavor that didn't have its turn on the corresponding day last week or tickled with a sauce that is in itself an inspiration and a delight, not a mere “gravy,” liable to harden into lumps of grease when it cools.

Most of this is simply the result of blindly following tradition. Daughter has accepted mother's precepts, regarding them even as the law of the Medes and the Persians, “which altereth not,” and if it were not that increased prices and, lately, at least, “food regulations,” have veritably compelled her toward a more wholesome simplicity, the United States would probably be what it was called half a generation ago, “a nation of dyspeptics.” And we were a nation of dyspeptics because the great American mother of the latter end of the Nineteenth Century, in spite of all her unequaled qualities in every other direction, and in spite of all the encomiums she received in resounding prose or ecstatic verse for her prowess in the kitchen, was from the points of view of health, economy and wisdom the worst cook in the world.

With prices as they are the American housewife cannot afford to use butter and eggs and flour with the prodigality that was a habit with her mother, but so limited is the average woman's knowledge of cookery that these restrictions merely mean more monotony than ever. It is partly to demonstrate that this state of things is unnecessary and that true food economy is not at all synonymous with “going without” that this book has been compiled.

It is upon variety that the French cook confidently relies to make each dish of each meal not just something to eat because her family must have food, not merely a sop to the Cerberus-gnawings of hunger, but a delight to the eye, to the palate, to the stomach—truly a consummation devoutly to be wished for the American home table, and just as possible to attain as it is possible to procure from the grocer or the nearest pharmacist the ingredients by which these wonders are wrought.

But the average American woman doesn't look beyond her own kitchen and her own traditional row of spice boxes for her flavorings. She has her “kitchen set,” which ordinarily comprises a row of little receptacles labeled “pepper,” “salt,” “cloves,” “allspice,” “ginger,” “cinnamon,” “nutmeg,” and possibly one or two other spices or condiments—rarely more. With these and a bottle each of lemon extract and vanilla, she is satisfied that she is fully equipped as far as flavoring possibilities are concerned.

If she has laid in a box of sage and one of mixed dressing with, perhaps, some paprika and thyme, she views her foresightedness with much complacency. She is supplied with savories.

Then she goes right on sighing, “Oh, for a new meat, instead of the same old round of mutton, pork, beef and fish; fish, beef, mutton and pork,” disclaiming utterly any responsibility for the monotony that is undermining the family health and temper and, quite possibly, its morals.

That is where the American housewife makes her primary and most important mistake. The French, on the other hand, know that there are, literally, hundreds of ways to vary every dish, however ordinary it may be in its primary state. That is their secret of success: unfailing variety coupled with economy.

However, this is not to claim that the American palate would take kindly to all the French cooks' little delicacies, or that it could be cultivated to that degree that makes a Frenchman regard a perfectly balanced meal even as an inspired poem.

Probably Americans, as a class, could never be induced to eat some of the little birds—the mauviettes, the alouettes, the sparrows baked in a pie, that so delight the Frenchman. Also, it is a question whether snails, even if it were possible to obtain the superior Burgundian, fat and juicy and cooked even as our own Oscar used to prepare them for certain Waldorf guests, would ever appeal to the American taste, as even the common hedgerow sort of snail does to the average Frenchman.

It is not that the French dinners of Monte Carlo are necessarily so superior to American shore dinners, or that the little dinners of Paris are so infinitely to be preferred to those, say, of certain places in New Orleans, or that the coppery-tasting oysters of Havre are to be compared with those of our own Baltimore. There is no more to be said, probably, for the woodcock patés of old Montreuil, or the rillettes of Tours, or the little pots of custard one gets at the foreign Montpelier, or the vol-au-vent, which is the pride and boast of the cities of Provence, than there is for grandmother's cookies such as have put Camden, Maine, on the map, or Lady Baltimore cakes, or the chicken pies one goes to northern New Hampshire to find in their glory, or the turkeys that, as much as the Green Mountains, make Vermont's fame.

Still, there is no question but that the American palate would benefit much by being cultivated, not only in the interests of economy, but also with a view to the increase of gastronomic pleasure, for a taste attuned to many variations is as an ear sensitive to the nuances of sweet sounds or an eye trained to perceive delicate tones and tints. It is really a matter for regret that we, as a people, have not been as willing to learn from the French the art of cooking and eating as we have been to acquire from them knowledge of the art of dress. Until we widen our horizon sufficiently to do this, we have not even begun to develop all our food resources or to understand the first principles of true food economy—which is not at all synonymous with “going without.”