Table traits, with something on them

by Dr. Doran

THE MODERN COOK, AND HIS SCIENCE.

If it were necessary that the cook of the ancient world should be a Sicilian, and that the cuisinier of the ancient régime should be of Languedoc, (the native place of “blanc manger,”) so in these modern times he alone is considered a true graduate in the noble science de la gueule who is a Gaul by birth, or who has gone through his studies in the University of French Kitchens. In England, it must be confessed that great cooks have formed the exception rather than the rule; and that our native culinary literature, however interesting in certain national details, is chiefly based upon a French foundation. And yet we may boast of some native professors who were illustrious in their way. Master John Murrel, for instance, wrote a cookery book in 1630, and dedicated it to the daughter of the Lord Mayor. He starts by asserting that cookery books generally mar rather than make good meats; and then shows what good meats were in his estimation, by teaching how to dress “minced bullock’s kidney, a rack of veal, a farced leg of mutton, an umble pie, and a chewit of stockfish.” He is succulently eloquent on a compound production, consisting of marrow bones, a leg of mutton, fowls and pullets, and a dozen larks, all in one dish.

The Duke of Newcastle, in the last century, had a female cook of some renown, named “Chloe.” General Guise, at the siege of Carthagena, saw some wild fowl on the wing, and, amid the din of war, he thought of “Chloe” and her sauces. She was famous for her stewed mushrooms, and there is an anecdote connected therewith that will bear repeating. “Poor Dr. Shaw,” writes Horace Walpole, “being sent for in great haste to Claremont, (it seems the Duchess had caught a violent cold by a hair of her own whisker getting up her nose, and making her sneeze,) the poor Doctor, I say, having eaten a few mushrooms before he set out, was taken so ill that he was forced to stop at Kingston; and, being carried to the first apothecary’s, prescribed a medicine for himself which immediately cured him. This catastrophe so alarmed the Duke of Newcastle, that he immediately ordered all the mushroom-beds to be destroyed; and even the toadstools in the park did not escape scalping in this general measure. And a voice of lamentation was heard at Ramah in Claremont, ‘Chloe’ weeping for her mushrooms, and they are not!” But, let us turn to trace lightly the genealogy of the cooks of modern times.

The descent of the barbarians from the north was the ruin of cooks as well as of Kings, of kitchens as well as constitutions. Many of the cooks of the classic period were slain like the Druid Priests at the fire of their own altars. A patriotic few fled rather than feed the invader; and the servile souls who tremblingly offered to prepare a fricassée of ostrich brains for the Northmen, were dismissed with contempt by warrior princes, who lived on under-done beef, and very much of it!

But as sure as the Saxon blood beats out the Norman, so does good cookery prevail over barbarous appetites. The old cooks were a sacred race, whose heirs took up the mission of their sires. This mission was so far triumphant, that, at the period of Charlemagne, the imperial kitchen recognised in its chef the representative of the Emperor. The oriental pheasant and the peacock, in all the glories of expanded tail, took the place, or appeared at the side, of coarser viands. The dignity and the mirth of Charlemagne’s table were heightened by the presence of ladies. Brillat de Savarin states, that since that period the presence of the fair sex has ever been a law of society. But in this he errs; for the Marquis de Bouillé, in his admirable work on the Dukes of Guise, affirms that the good civilizing custom had fallen into disuse, but that a permanent improvement was commenced in the reign of Francis I., when the Cardinal of Lorraine induced that Monarch to invite ladies to be present at all entertainments given at Court. Society followed the fashion of the Sovereign; and as it used to be said, “No feast, no Levite,” so now it was felt that where there was no lady, there was no refined enjoyment.

At whatever period the emancipation of the ladies from their forced seclusion took place, from that period the tone of social life was elevated. They went about, like Eve, “on hospitable thoughts intent.” The highest in rank did not disdain to supervise the kitchen; they displayed their talents in the invention of new dishes, as well as in the preparation of the old; and they occasionally well-nigh ruined their lords by the magnificence of their tastes, and their sublime disregard of expense. All the sumptuary laws of Kings to restrain this household extravagance were joyously evaded, and banquets became deadly destructive to men’s estates.

The French Kings granted corporate rights to the different trades connected with the kitchen and the table; and perhaps the most valued privilege was that conceded by Charles IX. to the pastrycooks, who alone were permitted to make bread for the service of the Mass.

Montaigne, in his pleasant way, recounts a conversation he had with an Italian chef who had served in the kitchen of Cardinal Caraffa, up to the period of the death of his gastronomic Eminence. “I made him,” says the great Essayist, “tell me something about his post. He gave me a lecture on the science of eating, with a gravity and magisterial countenance as if he had been determining some vexed question in theology. He deciphered to me, as it were, the distinction that exists between appetites:—the appetite at fasting; that which people have at the end of the second or third service; the means of awaking and exciting it; the general ‘police,’ so to speak, of his sauces; and then particularized their ingredients and effects. The differences of salads, according to the seasons, he next discoursed upon. He explained what sorts ought to be prepared warm, and those which should always be served cold; the way of adorning and embellishing them, in order to render them seductive to the eye. After this he entered on the order of table-services,—a subject full of fine and important considerations; and all this was puffed up with rich and magnificent terms; phrases, indeed, such as are employed by statesmen and diplomatists, when they are discoursing on the government of an empire.” We see by this what the “art de la gueule” was in the days of Charles IX., whose mother, Catherine de Medicis, had introduced it into France, as a science whereby men should enjoy life. The same lady introduced also poisoning, as a science whereby men might be deprived of life. Her own career was full of opposing facts like these,—facts which caused a poetic cook to write the epitaph upon her, which says:—

“Here lieth a Queen, who was angel and devil,

Admirer of good, and a doer of evil;

She supported the State, and the State she destroyed;

She reconciled friends, and she friendships alloyed;

She brought forth three Kings, thrice endanger’d the Crown,

Built palaces up, and threw whole cities down;

Made many good laws, many bad ones as well,

And merited richly both heaven and hell.”

The mention of Cardinal de Caraffa, by Montaigne, reminds me that, for a gastronome, the Cardinal was singularly sanguinary in spirit. I know no one to compare with him, except Dr. Cahill, who is not averse to good living, and who has earned so gloomy a notoriety by his terrible sentiment of the massacre of Protestants being “a glorious idea.” Caraffa was enabled to enjoy both his propensities, of swallowing good things and slaughtering heretics. “Having obtained leave from the Pope to establish the Inquisition at Rome, at a time when the resources of the State ran low, he turned his private property to the use of his zeal, and set up a small Inquisition at his own expense.” Thus he could dine within hearing of the groans of his victims; his cook could inform him that the hares and heretics had both been roasted; and he may have been occasionally puzzled to know whether that smell of burning came from the patties or the Protestants.

The Italian cooks were, for a season, fashionable in France; but they had a passion for poetry as well as for pies, and were given to let their sauces burn while they recited whole pages of “Orlando Furioso.” They were critics as well as cooks, and the kitchens resounded with their denunciations of all who objected to the merits of the divine Ariosto. But even the Papal ennobling of a cook could not compensate for an indifferent dinner; and though Leo X., in a fit of modest delight at a sauce made by his cook during Lent, named him from that circumstance “Jack o’ Lent,” or “Jean de Carême,” the French would not allow that such an event authorized the artiste to be dreaming over epics, when he should be wide awake to the working of his proper mystery. But the mystery itself was much obstructed by the political events of the times. There were the bloody wars of the Guises, the troubles of the League, the despotic reign of Richelieu, the cacochymical temperament (as the editor of the “Almanach des Gourmands” would call it) of Louis XIII., and the ridiculous war of the Fronde. The glory of the French kitchen rose with that of the Grand Monarque, and Vatel and Louis XIV. were contemporaries. Vatel slew himself to save his honour! The King had come to dine with Condé; but the cod had not arrived in time to be dressed for the King, and thereupon the heroic artist fell upon his sword, like an ancient Roman, and is immortalized for ever by his glorious folly!

But there was nothing really heroic in the death of Vatel, whose sword was pointed at his breast by wounded vanity. Far more heroic was the death of the cook of the Austrian Consul, in the late cruel massacre, by the cowardly Russian fleet, at Sinope. The Consul’s cook was a young woman of thirty years of age. The Muscovite murderers were at the very height of their bloody enjoyment, and sending shots into the town, when the cook attempted to cross a garden, to procure some herbs; for Consuls must dine, though half the world be dying. She had performed her mission, and was returning, when a thirty-six pounder shot cut her completely in two. Rather than give up the parsley for her master’s soup, she thus encountered death. What was Vatel and his bodkin, to this more modern cook and the thirty-six pounder, loaded by the Czar for her destruction?

The cooks “looked up” in the nights and suppers of the Regency, and the days and dinners of Louis XV. It would be difficult to say whether under the Regent, or under the King, the culinary art and its professors most flourished. I am inclined, however, to think, that, during the tranquil and voluptuous period of the reign of Louis XV., the cooks of France rose to that importance from which they have never descended. They became a recognised and esteemed class in society, whose spoiled children they were; and, in return, it was very like spoiled children that they behaved. But how could it be otherwise, when the noble, the brave, and the fair girded aprons to their loins, and stood over stew-pans, with the air of alchymists over alembics? It is to the nobility and other distinguished persons in high life, yet not noble, in France, that gastronomy owes many a dish, whose very name betrays to ecstasy. And here are a few of these droll benefactors of mankind.

The Marquis de Béchamel immortalized his name, in the reign of Louis XIV., by his invention of cream-sauce, for turbot and cod. Madame de Maintenon imagined the “cutlets in curl-papers” which go by her name, and which her ingenuity created in order to guard the sacred stomach of the Grand Monarque from the grease which he could not digest. The “Chartreuse à la Mauconseil” is the work, and the most innocent one, of the free and easy Marchioness of that name. A woman more free and easy still, the Duchess of Villeroy, (Maréchale de Luxembourg,) produced, in her hours of reflection, the dish known as the poulets à la Villeroy. They were eaten with bread à la Régent, of which the author was the roué Duke of Orleans. His too “well-beloved” daughter, the Duchess of Berry, had a gastronomic turn of mind, like her illustrious father. She was an epicurean lady, who tasted of all the pleasures of life without moderation, whose device was, “Short and sweet,” and who was contented to die young, seeing that she had exhausted all enjoyment, and had achieved a renown, that should embalm her name for ever, as the inventor of the filets de lapereau. The gigot à la Mailly was the result of much study, on the part of the first mistress of Louis XV., to rid herself of a sister who was a rival. Madame de Pompadour, another of the same King’s “ladies,” testified her gratitude for the present which the Monarch made her of the Château de Bellevue, by the production of the filets de volaille à la Bellevue. The Queen of Louis was more devout, but not less epicurean, than his mistresses; and the petites bouchées à la Reine, if they were not of her creating, were named in honour of Maria Leczinzka. Louis himself had a contempt for female cooks; but Madame Du Barry had one so well-trained, that with a charming dinner of coulis de faisans, croustades de la foie de lottes, salmis de bécassine, pain de volaille à la suprême, poularde au cresson, écrevisses au vin de Sauterne, bisquets de pêches au Noyau, and crème de cerneaux, the King was so overcome with ecstasy, that, after recovering from the temporary disgust he experienced at hearing that it was the handywork of a woman, he consented to ennoble her by conferring upon her the cordon bleu,—which phrase, from that time, has been accepted as signifying a skilled female cook.

With respect to other dishes and their authors, the vol au vent à la Nèsle owns a Marquis for its father; and the poularde à la Montmorency is the offspring of a Duke. The Bayonnoise, or the Mabonnoise rather, recalls one of the victories of the Duke de Richelieu; and veau à la Montgolfier, well inflated, was the tribute of a culinary artist to the hero who first rode the air at the tail of a balloon. The sorbet à la Donizetti was the masterpiece of the Italian confectioner of the late Duke of Beaufort. He had been to the Opera; and one of the composer’s charming airs having given him an idea, he brooded over it, till, an hour or so before dawn, it was hatched into reality, when he rushed to the Duke’s bed-chamber, and, “drawing Priam’s bed-curtains in the night,” announced to his startled Grace the achievement of a new sorbet.

The tendrons d’agneaux au soleil, and the filets de poulets à la Pompadour, were two of the dishes invented by the famous lady of that name. The carbonnade à la Soubise, and the carré de veau à la Guemenée, date—the first from the reign of Louis XV., the last from that of Louis XVI.,—periods when the people were famishing. The Pompadour was a great patron of the arts, and especially of the culinary art; and the cuisine des petits appartements, during her reign, was at the very height of its savoury reputation. The Prince of Soubise was a poor General, but a rich glutton; and his son-in-law, the Prince de Guemenée, was famous for his invention of various ragoûts, his inordinate extravagance, and his bankruptcy, with liabilities against him amounting to twenty-eight millions of francs. Madame la Maréchale de Mirepoix was the authoress of cailles à la Mirepoix; and her descendants live on the reputation acquired thereby by their epicurean ancestress. The Bourbons vied with the aristocracy in taxing their genius, and cudgelling their brains, in order to produce new dishes. Thus, the potage à la Xavier was the production of Louis XVIII., in the days of his early manhood; while the soupe à la Condé was a rival dish invented by his princely cousin,—a cousin, by the way, who, when a refugee in England, used to pass his evenings at Astley’s, with his pockets full of apples, which he gallantly presented to ladies as highly, but not as naturally, coloured as the fruit. Perhaps the reputation of the Maréchal de Richelieu rests more on his boudins à la carpe, than on his battles and billets-doux. Finally, a mysterious obscurity conceals from us the name of the inventor of the petites bouchées de foie gras. He is the Junius of gastronomic literature; but if he be guessed at in vain, he is blessed abundantly, as one who has concentrated paradise, (an Epicurean’s paradise,) and given an antepast thereof, in a single mouthful.

The Prince de Soubise was famous in the reign of Louis XV. for giving great dinners, and paying nobody but his cooks, and the young ladies of the opera. He once varied his extravagance by a splendid fête, which was to terminate by a supper. His chef waited on him with the bill of fare for the banquet, and the first article which attracted his attention was “fifty hams.” “Half a hundred hams!” said the Prince, “that’s a coarse idea, Bertrand. You have not got to feed my regiment of cavalry.” “Truly, Prince! and only one ham will appear on the table; I want the remaining forty-nine for adjuncts, seasonings, flavourings, and a dozen other purposes.” “Bertrand,” replied the Prince, “you are robbing me, and I cannot allow this article to pass.” “Monseigneur!” exclaimed the offended artiste, “you doubt my morals, and libel my merit. You do not know what a treasure you possess in me; you have only to order it, and those fifty hams which so terribly offend you, why, I will put them all into a phial not bigger than my thumb!” The Prince smiled, and Bertrand triumphed.

The cooks of the young King Louis XVI. remarked, with mingled terror and disgust, that his appetite was rather voracious than delicate. He cared little what he ate, provided there was enough of it; and he looked to nutrition rather than niceness. A succulent joint with him had more merit than the most singular of dishes, the invention of which had perhaps caused three nights of wakefulness to its author. But the aristocracy, the law, and finance, maintained tables which ought to have been the pride of Versailles. Late dinners, or gorgeous suppers, were indulged in to such a degree by the moneyed classes, that it was familiarly said, that of an evening the chimneys of the Faubourg Saint Honoré made fragrant with their incense the entire capital. It was reckoned that, at this period, twenty thousand men had no other profession than that of “diner-out,” which they carried on, like the parasites of old, by retailing anecdotes and news in return for the repast. It was a time when “Monseigneur” thought nothing of dispatching his cook to London to procure a turtle; which, after all, was less extravagant than the process of Cambacères, who had his Périgord pies sent to him through the post, “On His Majesty’s Service.” The Languedocien cooks in France were paid the quadruple of the salary of the family tutor, good eating being so much more essential to life than mere instruction; and, besides, could the family tutor have accomplished any thing that could equal the achievement of the family cook who could bring to table entire a “sanglier à la crapaudine?” The cooks of the age of Louis XVI. invented the “bouillie” and the “consommé,” because mastication was considered by them a vulgar process; and the royal cooks, during Passion Week, manipulated the vegetables placed before the King into the forms of ocean-dwelling fish, and gave to the semblance the taste of the reality for which it passed to the eye.

The glory of gastronomy was again rising when it was suddenly quenched by the revolutionary torrent, and the nation was put on a three years’ meagre dietary by the Jacobins and the Directory. But the Revolution, which affected to hate cooks as aristocratic appendages that ought to be suppressed, sometimes made, where it hoped to mar. The case of Ude is one in point.

Monsieur Ude, like Prince Eugene, was originally intended for the Church. At the breaking out of the French Revolution, he was residing, for instruction, with an Abbé, and master and pupil had to fly before the popular indignation, which, for a time, assailed the Church, and all therewith connected. Ude’s life was in peril in the public streets, and he just saved it, by rushing into the shop of a pastrycook, where he found a permanent asylum. The “house of Ude,” like other great houses, nearly perished in the great political shipwreck of the day, and this particular scion thereof took to the study of practical gastronomy, and became chief supreme in various great kitchens, from that of royalty down to that of Crockford.

When the sluices of the French Revolution were opened, how diverse were the fortunes of those who fled from before it! It was the same with the gentlemen who had followed the fortunes of Napoleon. They were scattered, like the Generals of Alexander, without being able, like them, to retire upon independent sovereignties, and rear dynasties of barbaric splendour. Some went to Greece to crush despotism, some went to Lahore to aid it. A few, like Latour d’Auvergne, took to the Church; but, saving that portly person himself, none had the good luck to reach the archiepiscopate. Those who failed to procure employment in foreign armies, and yet could not lay aside their propensity for killing, went to the East, and prescribed as Physicians. Such of the rest as were absolutely fit for nothing, and willing to do it, inundated England, and undertook the light and irresponsible office of Private Tutors!

But it was the earlier Revolution that afforded examples of the greatest contrasts. Many young men, intended for the Church, changed their profession, and became popular, useful, and rich, in the households of European royalty, as civilizers of the kitchen, who raised cookery from its barbarous condition to a matter of science and taste. Perhaps the most curious of the waifs and strays of the Revolution flung upon our shores, was the Chevalier D’Aubigné, who contrived to live, as so many French gentlemen of that time did, in bitter poverty, without a sacrifice of dignity. He had one day been invited by an English friend to dine with the latter at a tavern. In the course of the repast, he took upon himself to mix the salad; and the way in which he did this, attracted the notice of all the other guests in the room. Previous to the period of which I am speaking, lettuces were commonly eaten, by tavern frequenters at least, au naturel, with no more dressing than Nebuchadnezzar had to his grass when he dieted daily among the beasts. Consequently, when D’Aubigné handled the preparation for which he had asked, like a chymist concocting elixir in his laboratory, the guests were lost in admiration; for the refreshing aroma of a Mayonnaise was warrant to their senses, that the French Knight had discovered for them a new pleasure. One of them approached the foreign magician, and said, “Sir, it is universally known that your nation excels all others in the making a salad. Would it be too great a liberty to ask you to do us the favour to mix one for the party at my table?” The courteous Frenchman smiled, was flattered, performed the office asked of him, and put four gentlemen in a state of uncontrollable ecstasy. He had talked cheerfully, as he mixed gracefully and scientifically, and, in the few minutes required by him to complete his work of enchantment, he contrived to explain his position as emigrant, and his dependence on the pecuniary aid afforded by the English Government. The guests did not let the poor Chevalier depart without slipping into his hand a golden fee, which he received with as little embarrassment, and as much dignity, as though he had been the Physician De Portal taking an honorarium from the hands of the Cardinal de Rohan.

He had communicated his address, and he, perhaps, was not very much surprised when, a few days after, he received a letter in which he was politely requested to repair to a house in Grosvenor Square, for the purpose of mixing a salad for a dinner party there to be given. D’Aubigné obeyed the summons; and, after performing his mission, returned home richer by a five-pound note than when he went out.

Henceforth he became the recognised “fashionable salad-maker;” and ladies “died” for his salads, as they do now for Constantine’s simulative bouquets. The preparer was soon enabled to proceed to his responsible duties in a carriage; and a servant attended him, carrying a mahogany case, containing the necessary ingredients for concocting various salads, according to the respective tastes of his employers. At a later period, he sold, by hundreds, similar mahogany cases, which he had caused to be made, and which were furnished with all matters necessary for the making an irreproachable salad, and with directions how to administer them. The Chevalier, too, was, like old Carré,—whose will was so cleverly made by the very disinterested friends who had never before spoken to him,—a prudent and a saving man; and by the period which re-opened France to the émigrés, he had realized some eighty thousand francs, upon which he enjoyed a dignified retirement in a provincial town. He invested sixty thousand francs in the Funds; with the other twenty thousand he purchased a little estate in the Limousin, and, if he lacked a “legend” to his device, I would have helped him to one in “Sal adfert.”

A Knight over a salad-bowl is not a chivalrous picture; but the stern necessity of the case gave it dignity, and the resulting profits quieted the scruples of the gentleman. When Booth pounced upon Captain Bath, sitting in a dirty flannel gown, and warming his sister’s posset at the fire, the noble and gaunt Captain was taken something aback, and said, in a little confusion, “I did not expect, Sir, to be seen by you in this situation.” Booth told him “he thought it impossible he could appear in a situation more becoming his character.” The compliment was equivocal; but the Captain said, “You do not? By G— I am very much obliged to you for that opinion; but I believe, Sir, however my weakness may prevail on me to descend from it, no man can be more conscious of his own dignity than myself.” The apology of good Captain Bath in Fielding’s “Amelia,” would have served the Chevalier who made salads, had he needed one.

If a salad made the fortune of a Chevalier, it on one occasion made that of a female cook, with whose dexterity in this respect a learned English Judge was so enchanted, that he raised the lucky maiden to the quality of wife. If we discuss the traits of life at table, we have nothing to do with the secrets of household; but an incident, illustrative of the consequences of this match, may be mentioned. The Judge ever after was famous for protracting the sittings in court beyond all precedent and patience; and when weary Barristers were aghast at hearing a new cause called on, when the night was half spent, and fairly remonstrated against the judicial cruelty, the learned husband of his cook would remark with a sigh, “Gentlemen, we must be somewhere; we cannot be better any where than where we now are,”—the half of which assertion was stoutly denied by his hearers.

Our aristocracy are not quite so famous for their invention of dishes as that of France; but their love for good dinners, and their knowledge of what they ought to be, are not inferior to the affection and science of our neighbours. When Lord Marcus Hill officiated as whipper-in to the Whig Government, it was part of his office to order the fish dinner at which Ministers regale themselves when sessional cares no longer molest them. The fish dinners of Lord Marcus are remembered with satisfaction and gratitude; for they were first-rate in their way. The reputation of the Carlton cuisine and cellar is said to be chiefly owing to Sir Alexander Grant, of whom a gastronomic critic says, “No living Amphitryon has given better dinners in his time; and few can boast of having entertained more distinguished guests.” His name, as a patron, reminds me of that of Carême, as a practitioner.