IMPORTANCE OF THE ART OF COOKERY.
As man differs from the inferior animals in the variety of articles he feeds upon, so he differs from them no less in the preparation of these substances. Some animals, besides man, prepare their food in a particular manner. The racoon (ursus lutor) is said to wash his roots before he eats them; and the beaver stores his green boughs under water that their bark and young twigs may remain juicy and palatable.
The action of fire, however, has never been applied to use by any animal except man; not even monkies, with all their knacks of imitation, and all their fondness for the comforts of a fire, have ever been observed to put on a single billet of wood to keep up the fuel.
Domesticated animals, indeed, are brought to eat, and even to relish, food which has been cooked by the action of heat.
The variety of productions introduced by our different modes of preparing and preserving food is almost endless; and it appears particularly so when we compare the usages, in this respect, of various countries.
The savage of New South Wales is scarcely more knowing in the preparation of food, by means of fire, than his neighbour, the kangaroo, if the anecdote told by Turnbull be true, that one of these savages plunged his hand into boiling water to take out a fish.
Some writers have humorously designated man to be “a cooking animal,” and he really is so. It is one of the leading distinctions which Providence has seen meet for wise purposes to establish, when it was said that he might eat of the fruit of every tree, and the flesh of every clean beast.
When we contemplate the aliments used by men in a civilized state of existence, we soon become convinced that only a small part of our daily food can be eaten in its natural state. Many of the substances used as aliments, are disagreeable, and some even poisonous until they have been cooked. Few of them are to be had at all seasons, although produced at others in greater abundance than can be consumed.
The importance of a proper and competent knowledge of the true and rational principles of cookery, must be obvious, when it is considered that there is scarcely an individual, young or old, in any civilized country, who has not some time or other suffered severely from errors committed in the practice of this art.
“A skilful and well directed cookery abounds in chemical preparations highly salutary. There exists a salubrity of aliments suited to every age. Infancy, youth, maturity, and old age, each has its peculiar adapted food, and that not merely applicable to the powers in full vigour, but to stomachs feeble by nature, and to those debilitated by excess.”[11]
[11] Ude’s Cookery, p. 25.—Ibid, 23.
Without abetting the unnatural and injurious appetites of the epicure, or the blameable indulgences of the glutton, we shall not perhaps be far out in our reckoning, if we assert, that almost every person is an epicure in his own way.
There are amateurs in boiling potatoes, as particular in the details, as others in dressing beaf-stakes to the utmost nicety of a single turn. Lord Blainey, still more nice, informs us, that hams are not fit to be eaten unless boiled in Champaign. Helluos are not confined to salmon’s bellies, but are to be found among the rudest peasants who love porridge or frumenty—
A salmon’s belly, Helluo, was thy fate;
The doctor call’d, declares all help too late;
“Mercy!” cries Helluo, “mercy, on my soul!
Is there no hope?—Alas! then bring the jowl.”
Pope’s Moral Essays.
Precision in mixing ingredients is as often and as closely laid down for the coarsest dish of the peasant as for the most guarded receipe of the Lady Bountiful of the village. The pleasures of the table have always been highly appreciated and sedulously cultivated among civilized people of every age and nation; and, in spite of the Stoic, it must be admitted, that they are the first which we enjoy, the last we abandon, and those of which we most frequently partake.
“Cookery is the soul of every pleasure, at all times and to all ages. How many marriages have been the consequence of a meeting at dinner; how much good fortune has been the result of a good supper, at what moment of our existence are we happier than at table? there hatred and animosity are lulled to sleep, and pleasure alone reigns.”
Pythagoras, in his golden verses, gives complete proof, that he was particularly nice in the choice of food, and carefully points out what will occasion indigestion and flatulency. He is precise in commanding his disciples to “abstain from beans.” Apicius, declares that he never knew a philosopher who refused to partake of a feast.
In later times, Dr. Johnson is well known to have been exceedingly fond of good dinners, considering them as the highest enjoyment of human life. The sentiments of our great moralist are a good answer to those who think the pleasures of the table incompatible with intellectual pursuits or mental superiority. “Some people,” says the Doctor, “have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat; for my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully, and I look upon it that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind any thing else.” Boswell, his biographer, says of him, “I never knew a man who relished good eating more than he did: and when at table, he was wholly absorbed in the business of the moment.” It was one of the objects which displeased him so much in his Northern tour, that the Scots were rather ignorant of the more refined arts of cookery. A lady in the Isle of Mull, anxious to gratify him for once in a dinner, had an excellent plum-pudding prepared, at some expense, and with the utmost care; but, to her great mortification, the doctor would not taste it, because, he said, “it is totally impossible to make a plum-pudding at all fit to eat in the Isle of Mull.”
Another instance of this philosopher’s illiberal prejudice against Scotch cookery, may also be mentioned. A lady, at whose table the Doctor was dining, enquired how he liked their national dish, the hotch potch, of which he was then partaking. “Good enough for hogs,” said the surly philosopher. “Shall I help you to a little more of it?” retorted the lady. To Dr. Johnson we can add the names of two distinguished physicians, Darwin, and Beddoes, both of whom were most outrageous in their published works against the pleasures of good living; they followed however a very different practice, from what they prescribed to others, as none were more fond of good dinners than these guardians of health.
Cardinal Wolsey, we should have thought, would have had something else to mind than cooking and good eating. But no person was more anxious than he, even in the whirl of the immense public business which he had to transact, to have the most skilful cooks; for all Europe was ransacked, and no expense spared, to procure culinary operators, thoroughly acquainted with the multifarious operations of the spit, the stew-pan, and the rolling-pin.
Sir Walter Scott, has been most happy in the illustration of our ancient manners with respect to good eating, in the character of Athelstan, in the Romance of Ivanhoe.
Count Rumford has not considered the pleasure of eating, and the means that may be employed for increasing it, as unworthy the attention of a philosopher, for he says, “the enjoyments which fall to the bulk of mankind, are not so numerous as to render an attempt to increase them superfluous. And even in regard to those who have it in their power to gratify their appetites to the utmost extent of their wishes, it is surely rendering them a very important service to shew them how they may increase their pleasures without destroying their health.”
In the olden time, every man of consequence had his magister coquorum, or master cook, without whom he would not think of making a day’s journey; and it was often no easy matter to procure master cooks of talent.
By a passage of Cicero[12] we are led to understand, that among other miseries of life, which constantly attended this consular personage and eloquent orator, he laboured under the disappointment of not having an excellent cook of his own; for, he says, “coquus meus, præter jus fervens, nihil potest imitari.” Except hot broth, my cook can do nothing cleverly.
[12] Fam. ix. 20.
The salary of the Roman cooks was nearly £1000.[13] Mark Antony, hearing Cleopatra, whom he had invited to a splendid supper, (and who was as great a gormand as she was handsome,) loudly praise the elegance and delicacy of the dishes, sent for the cook, and presented him with the unexpected gift of a corporate town.—Municipium.
[13] Tabella Cibaria, ps. 19 and 20.
Even in our own times great skill in cookery is so highly praised by many, that a very skilful cook can often command, in this metropolis, a higher salary than a learned and pious curate.
His Majesty’s first and second cooks are esquires, by their office, from a period to which, in the lawyer’s phrase, the memory of man is not to the contrary. We are told by Dr. Pegge, that when Cardinal Otto, the Pope’s Legate, was at Oxford, in the year 1248, his brother officiated as magister coquinæ, an office which has always been held as a situation of high trust and confidence.
We might defend the art of cookery on another principle, namely—on the axiom recognized in the Malthusian Political Economy, that he who causes two blades of grass to grow where only one grew before, is a benefactor to his country and to human nature. Whether or not Malthus is quite right in this, we are not competent to decide; we leave that to Say, Godwin, Ricardo, and[14] Drummond. But certainly it must in many cases be of the utmost consequence, for families in particular, when embarrassed in circumstances, to make food go twice as far as without the art and aid of rational cookery it could do. We would particularly press this remark, as it is founded on numerous facts, and places the art of cookery in a more interesting point of view than any of the other circumstances which we have been considering.
[14] Principles of Currency, and Elements of Political Economy—1820.
Cookery has often drawn down on itself the animadversions of both moralists, physicians, and wits, who have made it a subject for their vituperations and their ridicule.
So early as the time of the patriarch Isaac, the sacred historian casts blame upon Esau for being epicurean enough to transfer his birth-right for a mess of pottage.
Jacob is blamed for making savoury meat with a kid for his father, with a view to rob Esau of the paternal blessing.
Diogenes, the Cynic, meeting a young man who was going to a feast, took him up in the street and carried him home to his friends, as one who was running into evident danger had he not prevented him. The whole tribe, indeed, of the Stoics and Cynics, laughed at cookery, pretending, in their vanity and pride, to be above the desire of eating niceties. Lucian, with his inexhaustible satire, most effectually and humourously exposed these their pretences.
In our own times, we have had writers of eminence who have attacked the use of a variety of food as a dreadful evil. “Should we not think a man mad,” says Addison, “who at one meal will devour fowl, flesh, and fish; swallow oil, and vinegar, salt, wines, and spices; throw down sallads of twenty different herbs, sauces of an hundred ingredients, confections, and fruits of numberless sweets and flavours? What unnatural effects must such a medley produce in the body? For my part, when I behold a table set out in all its magnificence, I fancy, that I see gouts and dropsies, fevers and lethargies, and other innumerable distempers, lying in ambuscade among the dishes.”
All this, and the like is, no doubt, very plausible, and very fine, and, like many other fine speeches of modern reformers, it is more fine than just. It is indeed as good a theory as may be, that cookery is the source of most, or all, of our distempers; but withal it is a mere theory, and only true in a very limited degree. The truth is, that it is not cookery which is to blame, if we surfeit ourselves with its good dishes; but our own sensual and insatiable appetite, and gluttony, which prompt us to seek their gratification at the expense even of our health.
Savages, whose cookery is in the rudest state, are more apt to over-eat themselves than the veriest glutton of a luxurious and refined people; a fact, which of itself, is sufficient to prove, that it is not cookery which is the cause of gluttony and surfeiting. The savage, indeed, suffers less from his gluttony than the sedentary and refined gormand; for, after sleeping, sometimes for a whole day, after gorging himself with food, hunger again drives him forth to the chace, in which he soon gets rid of the ill-effects of his overloaded stomach. Surely cookery is not to blame for the effects of gluttony, indolence, and sedentary occupations; yet it does appear, that all its ill effects are erroneously charged to the account of the refined art of cooking.
The defence of cookery, however, which we thus bring forward to repel misrepresentation, applies only to the art of preparing good, nutritious, and wholesome food.
We cannot say one word in defence of the wretched and injurious methods but too often practised, under the name of cookery, and the highly criminal practices of adulterating food with substances deleterious to health. On this subject we have spoken elsewhere.[15]
[15] A treatise on adulterations of food, and culinary poisons, exhibiting the fraudulent sophistications of bread, beer, wine, spirituous liquors, tea, coffee, cream, confectionary, vinegar, mustard, pepper, cheese, olive oil, pickles, and other articles employed in domestic economy, and methods of detecting them.—Third edition, 1821.
“A good dinner[16] is one of the greatest enjoyments of human life; but the practice of cookery is attended with not only so many disgusting and disagreeable circumstances, and even dangers, that we ought to have some regard for those who encounter them for our pleasure.”
[16] The Cook’s Oracle.—Preface, p. xxxv.