THE ANCIENT COOK, AND HIS ART.
It is an incontestable fact, that he who lives soberly does not depend upon his cook for the pleasure which he derives from his repast. Nevertheless, the cook is one of the most important of personages; and even appetite, without him, would not be of the value that it is at present. A great artiste knows his vocation. When the cook of Louis XVIII. was reproached, by His Majesty’s Physician, with ruining the royal health by savoury juices, the dignitary of the kitchen sententiously remarked, that it was the office of the cook to supply His Majesty with pleasant dishes, and that it was the duty of the doctor to enable the King to digest them. The division of labour, and the responsibilities of office, could not have been better defined.
From old times the cook has had a proper sense of the solemn importance of his wonderful art. The Coquus Gloriosus, in a fragment of Philemon, shows us what these artists were in the very olden time. He swears by Minerva that he is delighted at his success, and that he cooked a fish so exquisitely, that it returned him admiring and grateful looks from the frying-pan! He had not covered it with grated cheese, not disguised it with sauce; but he had treated it with such daintiness and delicacy, that, even when fully cooked, it lay on the dish as fresh-looking as if it had just been taken from the lake. This result seems to have been a rarity; for, when the fish was served up at table, the delighted guests tore it from one another, and a running struggle was kept up around the board to get possession of this exquisitely prepared morceau. “And yet,” says the cook, “I had nothing better to exhibit my talent upon than a wretched river fish, nourished in mud. But, O Jupiter Saviour! if I had only had at my disposal some of the fish of Attica or Argos, or a conger from pleasant Sicyon, like those which Neptune serves to the gods in Olympus, why, the guests would have thought they had become divinities themselves. Yes,” adds the culinary boaster, “I think I may say that I have discovered the principle of immortality, and that the odour of my dishes would recall life into the nostrils of the very dead.” The resonant vaunt is not unlike that of Béchamel, who said that, with the sauce that he had invented, a man would experience nothing but delight in eating his own grandfather!
Hegesippus further illustrates the vanity of the genus coquorum of his days. In a dialogue between Syrus and his chef, the master declares that the culinary art appears to have reached its limit, and that he would fain hear something novel upon the subject. The cook’s reply admits us to an insight into ancient manners. “I am not one of those fellows,” says the personage in question, “who are content to suppose that they learn their art by wearing an apron for a couple of years. My study of the art has not been superficial: it has been the work of my life; and I have learned the use and appliances of every herb that grows—for kitchen purposes. But I especially shine in getting up funeral dinners. When the mourners have returned from the doleful ceremony, it is I who introduce them to the mitigated affliction department. While they are yet in their mourning attire, I lift the lids of my kettles, and straightway the weepers begin to laugh. They sit down with their senses so enchanted, that every guest fancies himself at a wedding. If I can only have all I require, Syrus,” adds the artist, “if my kitchen be only properly furnished, you will see renewed the scenes which used to take place on the coasts frequented by the Syrens. It will be impossible for any one to pass the door; all who scent the process will be compelled, despite themselves, to stop. There they will stand, mute, open-mouthed, and nostrils extended; nor will it be possible to make them ‘move on,’ unless the police, coming to their aid, shut out the irresistible scent by plugging their noses.”
Posidippus shows us a classical master-cook instructing his pupils. Leucon is the name of the teacher; and the first truth he impresses on his young friend is, that the most precious sauce for the purpose of a cook is impudence. “Boast away,” he says, “and never be tired of it.” For, as he logically remarks, “if there be many a Captain under whose dragon-embossed cuirass lies a poor hare, why should not we, who kill hares, pass for better than we are, like the Captains?” “A modest cook must be looked on,” he says, “as a contradiction in nature. If he be hired out to cook a dinner in another man’s house, he will only get considered in proportion to his impudence and overbearing conduct. If he be quiet and modest, he will be held as a pitiful cook.”
Alexis, another artist, takes other and higher ground. He says, that in all the arts the resulting pleasure does not depend solely on those who exercise the art; there must be others who possess the science of enjoyment. This is true; and Alexis further adds, that the guest who keeps a dinner waiting, or a master who suddenly demands it before its time, are alike enemies to the art which Alexis professes.
The earthly paradise of the early cooks was, unquestionably, among the Sybarites,—the people to whom the crumpling of a rose under the side on which they lay, gave exquisite pain. They were as self-luxurious as though the world was made for them alone, and they and the world were intended to last for ever. They would not admit into their city any persons whose professions entailed noise in the practice of them: the trunkmaker at the corner of St. Paul’s would have been flogged to death with thistle-down, if he had carried on his trade in Sybaris for an hour, and if a Sybarite could have been found with energy enough to wield the instrument of execution! The crowing of one of the proscribed race of cocks once put all the gentlemen of the city into fits; and, on another occasion, a Sybarite telling a friend how his nerves had been shaken by hearing the tools of some labouring men in another country strike against each other, at their work, the friend was so overcome, that he merely exclaimed, “Good gracious!” and fainted away.
Athenæus, borrowing, if I remember rightly, from one of the authors whose works were in that Alexandrian library, the destruction of which by the Caliph Omar, Dr. Cumming tells us in his “Finger of God,” is a circumstance at which he is rather glad than sorry,—Athenæus mentions the visit of a Sybarite to Sparta, where he was invited to one of the public dinners, at which the citizens ate very black broth, in common, out of wooden bowls. Having tasted the national diet, he feebly uttered the Sybaritic expression for “Stap my vitals!” and convulsively remarked, that “he no longer wondered why the Lacedæmonians sought death in battle, seeing that such a fate was preferable to life with such broth!”
Certainly the public repasts of the Sybarites were of another quality. The giver of such repasts was enrolled among the benefactors of their country, and the cook who had distinguished himself was invested with a golden crown, and an opera ticket; that is, free admission to those public games where hired dancers voluptuously perverted time and the human form divine.
I am afraid that all cooks in remote ages enjoyed but an indifferent reputation, and thoroughly deserved what they enjoyed. The comic Dionysius introduces one of the succulent brotherhood, impressing upon a young apprentice the propriety of stealing in houses where they were hired to cook dinners. The instruction is worthy of Professor Fagan of the Saffron-Hill University. “Whatever you can prig,” says the elder rogue, “belongs to yourself, as long as you are in the house. When you get past the porter into the street, it then becomes my property. So fake away! (Βάδιζε δεῦρ’ ἅμα,) and look out for unconnected trifles.”
And yet Athenæus asserts that nothing has so powerfully contributed to instil piety into the souls of men, as good cookery! His proof is, that when men devoured each other, they were beasts,—which is a self-evident proposition; but that when they took to cooked meats, and were particular with regard to these, why, then alone they began to live cleanly,—which is a proposition by no means so self-evident. In his opinion, a man to be supremely happy only needed the gift of Ceres to Pandora,—a good appetite, and an irreproachable indigestion. These are, doubtless, great portions of happiness; and if felicity can do without them,—which is questionable,—where they are not, comfort is absent, and a good conscience is hardly a sufficient compensation.
If Sybaris was the paradise of cooks, Lacedæmon was their purgatory. They were blamed if men grew fat on their diet, and plump children were legally condemned to get spare again upon their gruel. The Romans, again, restored the cook to his proper place in society. He might be still a slave, and so were greater men than he; but he was the confidant of his master, and there were not a few who would have exchanged their liberty for such a post and chains. And who dare affirm that the coquus was not an officer of distinction? He who knows how to prepare food for digestion and delight, is a greater man, in one particular at least, than Achilles, who could go no farther in culinary science than turning the spit; than Ulysses, who could light fires and lay cloths with the dexterity of a Frankfort waiter; or than Patroclus, who could draw wine and drink it, but who knew no more how to make a stew, than he did how to solve the logarithms of Napier.
When it is asserted that it was Cadmus, the grandfather of Bacchus, who first taught men how to eat as civilized beings should, it is thereby further intimated that good eating should be followed by good drinking.
We have heard of cooks in monasteries who made dissertations on eternal flames by the heat of their own fires: so Timachidas, of Rhodes, made patties and poetry at the same stove, and both after a fashion to please their several admirers. Artemidorus was the Dr. Johnson of his own art, and wrote a Kitchen Lexicon for the benefit of students. Sicily especially was celebrated for its literary cooks, and Mithœcus wrote a treatise on the art; while Archestratus, the Syracusan, looking into causes and effects, meditated on stomachs as well as sauces, and first showed how digestion might be taught to wait on appetite. Then theoretical laymen came in to the aid of the practical cook, and gastronomists hit upon all sorts of strange ideas to help them to renewed enjoyments. Pithyllus, for instance, invented a sheath for the tongue, in order that he might swallow the hottest viands faster than other guests, who wisely preferred rather to slowly please the palate than suddenly satisfy the stomach. It is of Pithyllus the Dainty, that it is related how, after meals, he used to clean his tongue by rubbing it with a piece of rough fish-skin; and his taking up hot viands with his hand, like that of Götz von Berlichingen, encased in a glove, is cited as proof that the Greeks used no forks. The spoons of the Romans had a pointed end, at the extremity of the handle, for the purpose of picking fish from the shell.
Then came the age when, if men had not appetites of nature’s making, they were made for them by the cooks; and the latter, in return, were crowned with flowers by the guests who had eaten largely, and had no fears of indigestion. The inventor of a new dish had a patent for its exclusive preparation for a year. But ere that time it had probably been forgotten in something more novel discovered by a Sicilian rival; for the Greeks looked on Sicily as the Parisians of the last century used to look on Languedoc,—as the only place on earth where cooks were born and bred, and were worth the paying. The artists of both countries, and of the opposite ages mentioned, were especially skilled in the preparation of materials which were made to appear the things they were not; and a seemingly grand dinner of fish, flesh, and fowl, was really fashioned out of the supplies furnished by the kitchen-garden. The Greeks, however, never descended to the bad taste of which the diarists of the last century show the French to have been guilty; namely, in having wooden joints, carved and painted, placed upon their tables for show. Artificial flowers may be tolerated, but an artificial sirloin, made of a block of deal, would be very intolerable board indeed, particularly to the hungry guests, who saw the seemingly liberal fare, but who could make very little of the deal before them.
In Sicily, the goddess of good cheer, Adephagia, had her especial altars, and thence, perhaps, the estimation in which the Sicilian cooks were held, who prayed to her for inspiration. Her ministers were paid salaries as rich as the sauces they invented. Something like £800 per annum formed the honorarium of the learned and juicy gentleman. But he was not always to be had, even at that price; and the disgusted Languedocien who would not remain in the cuisine of the Duke of Richmond, when Governor of Ireland, for the sufficient reason that there was no Opera in Dublin, had his prototype among his Sicilian predecessors. The jealousy of the culinary bondsman in Greek households against the free cook from Sicily, must have been sometimes deadly in its results.
The best-feed cook on record is the happy mortal to whom his master Antony gave a city, because he had cooked a repast which had called forth encomium from that dreadful jade, Cleopatra.
But money was the last thing thought of by the wearied epicures of Rome, especially when what they gave belonged to somebody else. When Lucullus spent £1,000 sterling on a snug dinner for three,—himself, Cæsar, and Pompey,—he doubtless spent his creditors’ money; at least, extravagant people generally do. Claudius dined often with six hundred guests, and the Roman people paid the cooks. The dinners of Vitellius cost that sacrilegious feeder upwards of £3,000 each, but the bills were discharged by a levy on the public pocket. When Tiberius ordered several thousands sterling to be bestowed on the author of a piece wherein every thing eatable was made to speak wittily, the author was really paid out of the popular pocket; and when Geta insisted on having as many courses at each repast as there were letters in the alphabet, and all the viands at each course so named that their initials should be the same as that of the course itself, he was the last person who troubled himself about the payment for such extravagance.
The cooks of such epicures must necessarily, however, have been as despotic in the kitchen as their lord was in the saloon. The slaves there, who hurried to and fro, bearing their tributes of good things from the market-place, or distributing them according to his bidding, obeyed the cook’s very nod, nay, anticipated his very wishes. They were, in fact, the ministers of an awful Sovereign. The cook was their Lord paramount. The stewards possessed no little power; but when the fires were lighted, and the dinner had to be thought of, the head cook was the kitchen Jupiter; and when he spoke, obedience, silence, and trembling followed upon his word.
From his raised platform, the Archimagirus, as he was called, could overlook all the preparations, and with his tremendous spoon of office he could break the heads of his least skilful disciples, and taste the sauces seething in the remotest saucepans. The effect must have been quite pantomimic; and to complete it, there was only wanted a crash of discordant music to accompany the rapid descent of the gigantic spoon upon the skull or ribs of an offender. The work was done in presence of the gods, and scullions blew the fires under the gaze of the Lares,—sooty divinities to whom, the legend says, inferior cooks were sometimes sacrificed in the month of December. “But,” as Othello says, “that’s a fable!”
Great Roman kitchens were as well worth seeing, and perhaps were as often inspected by the curious and privileged, as that of the Reform Club. “Order reigned” there quite as much as it did, according to Marshal Sebastiani, at Warsaw, amid the most abject slavery. Art and costliness were lavished upon the vessels, but the human beings there were exactly the things that were made the least account of.
No doubt that the triumph of the art of the cook consisted in serving up an entire pig at once roasted and boiled. The elder Disraeli has shown from Archestratus how this was done. “The animal had been bled to death by a wound under the shoulder, whence, after copious effusion, the master-cook extracted the entrails, washed them with wine, and hanged the animal by the feet. He crammed down the throat the stuffings already prepared. Then, covering the half of the pig with a paste of barley thickened with wine and oil, he put it in a small oven, or on a heated table of brass, where it was gently roasted with all due care. When the skin was browned, he boiled the other side, and then, taking away the barley paste, the pig was served up, at once boiled and roasted.” And such was the way by which the best of cooks spoiled the best of pigs.
According to Plautus, cooks alone were privileged in the old days to carry knives in their girdles. In the “Aulularia,” old Euclio says to Congrio, the cook, “Ad tres viros jam ego deferam tuum nomen,”—“I’ll go and inform against you to the Magistrates.” “Why so?” asks Congrio. “Because you carry a knife,”—“Quia cultrum habes.” “Well,” says the artist, standing on his rights, “cocum decet,” “it is the sign of my profession.” From another of the many cooks of Plautus we learn, in the “Menæchmei,” that, when a parasite was at table, his appetite was reckoned as equivalent to that of eight guests; and when Cylindrus is ordered to prepare a dinner for Menæchmus, his “lady,” and the official parasite, “Then,” says the cook, “that’s as good as ten; for your parasite does the work of eight:”—
“Jam isti sunt decem,
Nam parasitus octo hominum munus facile fungitur.”
The musicians would appear to have lived as pleasantly as the parasites. Simo remarks to Tranio, in the “Mostellaria,” that he lives on the best the cooks and vintners can procure for him,—a real fiddler’s destiny:—
“Musice hercle agitis ætatem: ita ut vos decet.
Vino et victu, piscatu probe electili,
Vitam colitis.”
Stalino complains in the “Casina,” that, clever as cooks are, they cannot put a little essence of love into all their dishes,—a sauce, he says, that would please everybody. Their reputation in Rome for stealing was much the same as that enjoyed by their Grecian brethren. The scene of the “Casina,” indeed, is in Athens; but Olympio utters a Roman sentiment when he says, that cooks use their hands as much for larceny as cookery, and that wherever they are they bring double ruin, through extravagance and robbery, upon their masters: “Ubi sunt, duplici damno dominos multant.” This is further proved by the speech of Epidicus, in the comedy so called, where that slave-cook speaks of his master’s purse as if it were game, to disembowel which, he says, he will use his professional knife:—
“Acutum cultrum habeo, senis qui exenterem
Marsupium.”
We learn something of the pay of a cook from a speech of one of the craft, in the “Pseudolus.” Ballio, seeing a single practitioner remaining in the square to be hired, asks how it is that he has not been engaged. “Eloquar,” says the cook, “here is the reason:—
“He who, now-a-days, comes here to hire cooks,
No longer seeks the best, that is, the dearest,
But some poor spoil-sauce who for nothing works.
Therefore you see me here alone to-day.
A poor drachma hath my brethren purchased;
But under a crown I cook a dish for no man.
For ’twixt the common herd and me, you see,
There is a diff’rence: they into a dish
Fling whole meadows, and the guests they treat, Sir,
As though they were but oxen out at grass.
Herbs season they with herbs, and grass with grass;
And in the mess, garlic, coriander, fennel,
Sorrel, rochet, beet-root, leeks, and greens,
All go together, with a pound of benzoin,
And mustard ditto, that compels the tears
From out the eyes of those that have to mix it.
“If men are short-lived now, the reason’s plain:
They put death into their stomachs, and so
Of indigestion and bad cookery die.
Their sauces but to think of, makes me shudder;
Yet men will eat what asses would not bend to.
“Who of my dishes eats, obtains at least
Two hundred happy years of life renew’d.
I season Neptune’s fishes with a juice
Made up of Cicilindrum, Muscadel,
Sipolindrum, and Sancapatides.
The odour of my mutton, nicely stuffed
With Cicimandrum, Nappalopsides,
And of Cataractaria a pinch,
Feeds Jupiter himself, who, when I rest,
Sleeps on Olympus, sad and supperless.
As for my potions, he who deeply drinks,
Gulps with the draught the gift of endless youth.”
Finally, after inventing the above names unpronounceable of sauces that do not exist, the boaster adds, that his fee is a crown, provided he is not overlooked; but that if there be supervision to check him in his perquisites, he is not to be hired under a mina:—
“Si credis, nummos; si non, ne mina quidem!”
I do not know if cooks more especially used different fingers in mingling their sauces, according as they were employed on wedding banquets, martial feasts, senatorial entertainments, al-fresco déjeuners, or commercial suppers; but certain it is, that the fingers were sacred to diverse deities. The thumb was devoted to Venus, the index finger to Mars, the longest finger to Saturn, the next to the Sun, and the little finger to Mercury.
I conclude with a remark that I hope will be gratifying to all culinary artists who respect themselves and their calling, and who are anxious to prove that their vocation is of ancient and honourable descent. Cadmus, who introduced letters into Greece, had formerly been cook to the King of Sidon. Thus learning ascended to us from the kitchen; and to the ex-cook of the King of Sidon we perhaps owe all the epics that have ever been written. By this genealogy, even “Paradise Lost” may be traced to the patties of Cadmus. But cooks in England may boast of a noblesse de cuisine, which dates from the Norman Conquest. When William, who wooed his wife Matilda by knocking her down, had established himself in England, he gave a banquet, at which his cook, Tezelin, served a new white soup of such exquisite flavour, that William sent for the artist, and inquired its name. “I call it Dillegrout,” said Tezelin. “A scurvy name for so good a soup,” said the Conqueror; “but let that pass. We make you Lord of the Manor of Addington!” Thus modern cooks may boast of a descent from the landed aristocracy of the Conquest! Some of their masters cannot do as much; and this, perhaps, accounts for the pride of the one, and the simplicity of the other.