COOK BOOKS.
Theodore Child—an American gastronomic missionary who unfortunately died young while traveling in Persia—remarks in his book, Delicate Feasting, that while there are hundreds of cook books, many of them admirable in their way, and bought by many, few are read or used, for the reason that most of them consist of a vast number of recipes, and "a cook must be already very learned in his art in order to know how to use them with advantage."
In other words, these books fail to explain the principles of the art of cooking—the ways of preserving, developing, and combining Flavors—as I have attempted to do in this chapter.
There are exceptions, and the best of these, so far as I know, is Mary Ronald's Century Cook Book in which various methods of cooking are explained lucidly, so that those who boil, fry, broil, and so on, not only may know what to do but why to do it thus and not otherwise. The different sections, on meats, fish, vegetables, entrées, breads, desserts, etc., all have prefatory pages of most useful condensed information.
A fairly complete list of the best cook books and other treatises on gastronomic topics may be found in Ellwanger's Pleasures of the Table.
No fewer than 2,500 books and brochures, mostly French, are listed in George's Vicaire's Bibliographic Gastronomique.
Probably the best and most widely used of the French cook books are those of Urbain-Dubois. There are seven of them: Cuisine Classique, Cuisine Artistique, Grand Livre des Patissiers et des Confiseurs, Patisserie D'Aujourd'hui, Cuisine D'Aujourd'hui, Ecole des Cuisiniers, and La Cuisine de tous les Pays, which includes recipes of all the nations who know how to eat.
To another French classic, Richardin's La Cuisine Française (L'Art du Bien Manger) with its 2,000 recettes, its menus of historic as well as gastronomic interest, I shall refer in the next chapter.
The Germans and Austrians not only have books on the special ways of preparing food prevalent in different parts of the country, but books about the specialties of other countries, such as the making of marmalade in the English way, etc.
The author of Die Kunst des Essens, Emil Weissenturn, took the trouble to make lists of the still surviving cook books of various countries. Of 17 written in the fifteenth century, 10 were Latin, 1 English, while Germany, Italy and France each contributed 2. In the sixteenth century Latin was still in the lead with 42, followed by Germany with 30 and France with 21. Italy contributed 16, Spain 5, Greece 2, England 2.
In the seventeenth century France heads the list with 104 books; Germany printed 39, 31 were in Latin, 18 Italian, 10 English, 7 Dutch, 1 Portuguese, 1 Swedish. In the eighteenth century Germany comes to the fore with 96, France following with 60 and England with 34; 14 are in Latin, 11 Dutch, 5 Italian, 4 Spanish, 3 Swedish.
In the nineteenth century Germany's lead is still more remarkable—374 books as against 152 contributed by France. England makes a spurt with 118. Italy rises to 15; Sweden contributes 10, Holland 8, Poland 7, while Latin survives with 7.
Of recent English and American books that have come to me for review I liked particularly Nicolas Soyer's Standard Cookery, Marvin H. Neil's How to Cook in Casserole Dishes and Practical Cooking and Serving, by Janet McKenzie Hill, which is a complete manual of not only how to cook food, but how to select and serve it. The author is the editor of the "Boston Cooking School Magazine," and she has a great deal of interesting and valuable information to impart.
In 1911 Soyer's Paper Bag Cookery was published. In it the famous chef who originated paper bag cookery—which has many advantages provided the right kind of paper is used—explained his method. His Standard Cookery includes the substance of the smaller book while at the same time covering all the branches of cooking, with over four hundred pages of menus. Hors-d'Œuvres are here treated more fully than in any other English book, fifteen pages being given to them. No fewer than seventy pages are given to this subject in Escoffier's excellent Le Guide Culinaire.
Chafing dish cooking
French raffinement is shown in many of Soyer's recipes. Under "Fried Eggs," for example the average American cook will read with astonishment that they should be dealt with one at a time and that, with a wooden spoon, the yolk should be quickly covered up with the solidified portions of the white in order to keep the former soft. Imagine Bridget taking so much trouble. She might, perhaps, be induced to heed these directions in making an omelette: "Heat the pan until nearly a brown color. This will not only lend an exquisite taste to the omelette but will be found to ensure the perfect setting of the eggs." Such seeming trifles make perfection.
Casserole Cookery is quite important enough to have a book to itself; it is the cookery of the future, and Mme. Neil's monograph of 252 pages should be, like the Century Cook Book and Soyer's Standard Cookery, or Mme. Hill's book, in every kitchen.
In French restaurants more is always charged for casserole dishes than for others and they are decidedly worth it. The Flavor of food is particularly rich and appetizing when it has been cooked slowly in earthenware pots. For braising, pot roasting, and stewing, which are slow-cooking processes, the casserole is far superior to metal pans in every way.
Chafing Dish Cooking is treated in Chapter XIV of the Century Cook Book, and there are several smaller volumes specially devoted to this interesting branch of the art—dining-room cooking it might be called—one by Alice L. James.
Who has not enjoyed a welsh rarebit made in a chafing dish—or terrapin, or lobster à la Newburg, or chicken livers, or crab toast, smelts, venison, etc.?
For housekeepers of moderate means who want to know what wonders of palatable cooking can be achieved with scraps and left-overs, among other things, no guide is better than The Helping Hand Cook Book by Marion Harland and Christine Terhune Herrick. It contains menus for every breakfast, lunch and dinner from the first of January to the last of December.
While purchasers of fireless cookers are always provided with brief printed instructions, I would advise every owner of such a box to get a copy of Margaret J. Mitchell's Fireless Cook Book, which contains full directions, with recipes and menus. The question of seasoning is discussed; there are chapters on meats, vegetables, desserts, etc.; hints as to how to tell good material from bad; directions to prevent over or under cooking, etc.
[V]
A NOBLE ART
NO one who has read the last chapter, and Chapter II can fail to be convinced that cooking is not only a science, but the most important of all sciences—the science on which our health depends more than on any other; a science concerning which Sir Henry Thompson has truly said that an adequate recognition of its value in prolonging healthy life and in promoting cheerful temper, prevalent good nature, and improved moral tone, "would achieve almost a revolution in the habits of a large part of the community."
Nor is cookery merely a science, it is also an art. It can and will be classed in the future as one of the fine arts.
A famous French lawyer once declared that he would not believe in the advent of real civilization until a chef had been elected a member of the Institute of Arts and Sciences.
The details given in the preceding chapter show how a good cook can vary the Flavors of food as a composer varies his orchestral colors; and if she does her work with intelligence and con amore she can get genuine artistic delight therefrom. At the same time she will have the moral satisfaction of knowing that she is giving gastronomic pleasure to those who benefit by her art.
A cook can be genuinely creative, inventing new sauces, new flavors, new combinations, new dishes, with appropriate names for them, thus acquiring universal fame, as did Carême and many others, among them Béchamel, whose name has become a household word the world over, not because he was a marquis but because he invented a new sauce.
From a moral point of view, cooking is one of the noblest of the arts. The old adage that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach is often sneered at as being materialistic if not coarse. It is no such thing; it simply hints at the truth that it is extremely difficult for a man to be amiable and loving when he suffers the pangs of dyspepsia. On this subject one of the 30,000 persons who wrote to the London "Telegraph" in answer to the question, "Is Marriage A Failure?" made some remarks which every young woman who is, or expects to be, a wife should ponder deeply:
Where the husband is an intellectual man, and engaged in intellectual pursuits, good cookery assumes a tenfold importance, as the want of physical exercise entailed by most intellectual occupations renders it imperative that all food eaten shall be of first-class quality and cooked to perfection. The most intellectual man in existence ceases to be intellectual while he has a couple of pounds or so of bad food slowly decaying in his stomach instead of digesting. Is "A Young Girl's" ideal of married life to have the man she loves always bright and cheerful, always intellectual, and generally at his best, and to have as strong and healthy, and even brighter and better company, at sixty and seventy than at twenty-four? I am sure it is. Then let her give him a chance of realizing that ideal by giving the utmost attention to his dinners, so that the food he eats is on his stomach and brain like feathers, and not like lead. If she wishes him to degenerate into an ill-tempered, exacting grumbler before forty, or to prefer dining anywhere rather than at home, then let her devote herself wholly to the drawing-room department of the house, and leave the kitchen and the dining-room to hired servants. Good cooks quickly become bad ones where the mistress neglects personal superintendence, and just so long as ladies have a soul above cookery will ill-temper and dyspepsia, with all their consequent train of ills and discomforts, be the rule, and not the exception, in middle-class English homes.