The traditions of classic cookery may be said to be nearly effaced; but sufficient remains recorded to afford grounds for comparison, and he must be prejudiced who hesitates for an instant to award the palm to the moderns. An impartial person need but to glance over the ten books left us under the name of Apicius,[1] to come to the conclusion of the ingenious Jean le Clerc, who says that “the work contains receipts for extraordinary dishes and strange ragouts, which would ruin the stomach, and burn up the blood.” One of the most nauseous of the condiments which entered into the Roman ragouts was the garum, by some supposed to be the expressed brine of the anchovy: while others contend it was an acrid decoction of the mackerel. This abominable sauce has now been banished Christendom, yet has found a refuge in the congenial cookery of “our most ancient ally,” the Turk. Travellers who have visited Turkey and Constantinople, will recur, as I do, with no pleasurable sensations to the pilau seasoned with this acrid and ill-savoured preparation.
Though the feast of Trimalchio, so graphically told in the pages of Petronius, is somewhat overcharged, and too Asiatic in style and taste to be true to the letter, yet it gives an idea of the domestic economy of the Romans, and supports the opinion as to the superiority of modern cookery; but if more positive evidence were wanting in support of these views, it might be found in a passage of Macrobius, the description of a supper given by Lentulus. For the first course, says the officer of the household of Theodosius, there were sea hedge hogs, raw oysters, and asparagus; for the second, a fat fowl, with another plate of oysters and shell fish, several species of dates, fig-peckers, roebuck, and wild boar, fowls encrusted with paste, and the purple shell fish, then esteemed so great a delicacy. The third course was composed of a wild boar’s head, of ducks, of a compôte of river birds, of leverets, roast fowl, and Ancona cakes, called panes picences, which must have somewhat resembled Yorkshire pudding. There is one secret, however, which we may well desire to learn from the Romans, namely, the manner of preserving oysters alive, in any journey however long or however distant. The possession of this secret is the more extraordinary, as it is well known that a shower of rain will kill oysters subjected to its influence, or the smallest grain of quick lime destroy their vitality.[2] It will be seen from what I have stated, that epicurism is an ancient vice; but all the French authorities, nevertheless, agree in thinking that the Greeks and Romans, notwithstanding their luxury and civilization, were mere children in the preparation of their viands. The reason of this, says Carème, is, that they sacrificed too much to sugars, fruits and flowers, and that they had not the colonial spices and learned sauces of mediæval and modern cookery. It is true that the “officers of the mouth” of Lucullus and Pompey were possessed of secrets to stimulate the jaded appetite, and give tone to the debilitated stomach: but notwithstanding all their profusion, I am inclined to think that Carème and the corps of French cooks are right in their disparaging observations touching ancient cookery.
Cookery is eminently an experimental and a practical art. Each day, while it adds to our experience, increases also our knowledge, and as we have come long after the Romans, and have had the benefit of their experience, it is no marvel that we should have greatly surpassed them. The characteristic of ancient cookery was profusion; the characteristic of modern is delicacy and refinement. In the fifth century all trace of the Roman cookery had already disappeared. The barbarians from afar had savoured the scent of the Roman ragouts. The eternal city was invested, and her kitchen destroyed. The consecutive incursions of hordes of barbarous tribes and nations had put out at once the light of science and the fire of cookery. Darkness was now abroad, and the “glory” of the culinary art was, for a time, “extinguished,” but, happily, not for ever. “Lorsque il n’y a plus de cuisine dans le monde, il n’y a plus de lettres, il n’y a plus d’unité sociale,” says the enlightened and ingenious Carème.
But the darkness of the world was not of long duration. The monks—the much-abused and much mistaken monks—fanned the embers of a nascent literature, and cherished the flame of a new cookery. The free cities of Italy, Genoa, Venice, Pisa, Florence, the common mothers of poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture, contemporaneously revived the gastronomic taste. The Mediterranean and the Adriatic offered their fish, and the taste for table luxuries extended itself to the maritime towns and other cities of the Peninsula, to Cadiz, to Barcelona, to St. Sebastian, and to Seville.
Spain had the high honour of having furnished the first cookery book in any modern tongue. It is entitled—“Libro de Cozina, compuesto por Ruberto de Nola.” I also possess an edition of the “Arte de Cocina compuesto por Francisco Martinez Montiño,” printed in Madrid in 1623, and presented by His Royal Highness the late Duke of Sussex to Lady Augusta Murray. This work is exceedingly rare. The cookery professed at this epoch was no longer an imitation of the Greek or Roman kitchen, or of the insipid dishes and thick sauces of the Byzantine cooks. It was a new and improved and extended science. It recognised the palate, stomach, and digestion of man. The opulent nobles of Italy, the rich merchant princes, charged with the affairs and commissions of Europe and Asia, the heads of the church—bishops, cardinals, and popes, now cultivated and encouraged the culinary art. Arts, letters, and cookery revived together, and among the gourmands of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, some of the most celebrated pontiffs and artists of the time may be named, as Leo X., Raphael, Guido, Baccio Bandinelli, and John of Bologna. Raphael, the divine Raphael, did not think it beneath him to design plates and dishes for his great patron the most holy father. While Italy had made this progress, France, the nurse of modern, if not the mother of mediæval cooks, was in a state of barbarism, from which she was raised by the Italian wars under Charles VIII. and Louis XII. The Gauls learned a more refined cookery at the siege of Naples, as the Cossacks did some hundreds of years later in the Champs Elysées of Paris. Here ends the parallel, however; for while the people of France, like most apt pupils, surpassed their masters, we have yet to wait for the least glimmering of culinary art at Moscow, Kieff or Novogorod, or even at that fag end of Finland (which is not Russia) called St. Petersburgh. An attempt was made a couple of years ago by Mr. Money to get up a sensation in favour of Russian cookery, but the attempt was a failure.
It was under Henry III., about 1580, that the delicacies of the Italian tables were introduced at Paris. The sister arts of design and drawing were now called into requisition to decorate dishes and dinner-tables. How great was the progress in the short space of 150 years, may be inferred from an edict of Charles VI., which forbad to his liege subjects a dinner consisting of more than two dishes with the soup: “Nemo audeat dare præter duo fercula cum potagio.” At this period the dinner hour was ten o’clock in the morning, while the supper was served at four. The social, friendly, and agreeable humour of Henry IV., in a succeeding reign, contributed to the spread of a more kindly spirit, and a better cookery. This monarch was eminently of a frank and cordial nature, and his personal qualities contributed to the security of his throne, to his successes both in negotiation and war, and to the social comforts and material prosperity of his subjects. His benevolent wish that every peasant in his dominions might have a fowl in the pot for his Sunday dinner, discloses a warm and affectionate heart, and was not lost on a nation combining the greatest share of intellect with sensuality. The cabaret then was what the café is now, and was the rendezvous of marquis and chevalier, and people of condition. Men learned to pursue the pleasures and enjoyments of life in the cabaret, and their wants become multiplied, and their desires extended. It was Henry IV. who first permitted the traiteurs to form a community, with the title of “Maître queux cuisiniers porte-chapes,” in 1599.
The first regular cookery book published in France was, I believe, printed at Rouen in 1692, the very year in which Sir George Rooke struck so signal and successful a blow against the marine of our neighbours. It was the production of the Sieur de la Varranne, esquire of the kitchen of M. d’Uxelles. It is dedicated to MM. Louis Châlon du Bled, Marquis d’Uxelles and of Cormartin. The first sentence of the dedication is a curiosity in its way, and sufficiently indicates the immense distance which feudalism then interposed between an esquire of the kitchen and a French marquis and lieutenant-general, holding the rank of governor of the citadel of Châlons-sur-Saone. “Monseigneur,” says the book, “bien que ma condition ne me rende pas capable d’un cœur heroïque, elle me donne cependant assez de ressentiment pour ne pas oublier mon devoir. J’ai trouvé dans votre maison, par un emploi de dix ans entiers, le secret d’apprester delicatement les viandes.” The preface is not less curious than the dedication. The author begins by stating that, as it is the first book of the kind which has been published, he hopes it will not be found altogether useless. A number of books, says he, have been published containing remedies and cures at small cost; but no book has yet been printed with a view of preserving and maintaining the health in a good state, and a perfect disposition, teaching how to separate the ill quantity of viands by good and diversified seasonings, which tend only to give substantial nourishment, being well dressed. These are things conformable to the appetite, which regulate corpulency, and ought to be no less considered, &c. He expatiates on the thousand-and-one vegetables and other “victual,” which people know not how to dress with honour and contentment (“avec honneur et contentement”), and then exclaims that, as France has borne off the bell from all other nations in courtesy and bienséance, it is only right and proper that she should be no less esteemed for her polite and delicate manner of living (“pour la façon de vivre honneste et delicate”). Many of the receipts are curious, and some of them useful. The frequency with which he introduces capers into his cookery, an article for which we are indebted to Barbary, and rarely introduced into the cookery of modern France, except in sauces for turbot and salmon, and in a few entrées, liaisons, and ragouts, is extraordinary.
La Varranne, after having given hundreds of other receipts, consoles himself, at the conclusion of his labours, with the reflection, “That as all other books, as well ancient as modern, were composed for the aliment of the mind, it was but just that the body should be a little considered,” and therefore it was, says he, that I meddled with a subject so necessary to its conservation. Enjoy, then, my receipts, dear reader, he exclaims, “Jouissez en, cher lecteur, pendant que je m’étudierai à vous exposer en vente quelque chose qui méritera vos emplois plus relevez et plus solides.”
The first edition of that remarkable cookery book, the “Dons de Comus,” appeared about 1740, and is in every respect a superior work to the droll production just mentioned. It was composed by M. Marin, cook of the Duchesse de Chaulnes. The very learned and ingenious preface, signed de Querlon, is by Father Brumoy, the Jesuit, the translator of the “Théâtre des Grecs.” An Italian author calls a preface the sauce of a book, “La Salsa del Libro;” and certainly never was there a more piquant and spicy sauce than that of the erudite Father. He has brought ancient and modern literature to bear on the matter in hand. Not content with citing orators, poets and historians, he has also summoned the doctors, in the persons of the Frenchman Hecquet and the Englishman Cheyne. His comparison between ancient and modern cookery is ingenious.
“Modern cookery,” says he, “established on the foundations of the ancient, possesses more variety, simplicity and cleanliness, with infinitely less of labour and elaboration, and it is withal more sçavante. The ancient cuisine was complicated and full of details. But the modern cuisine is a perfect system of chemistry. The science of the cook consists in decomposing, in rendering easy of digestion, in quintessencing (so to speak) the viands, in extracting from them light and nourishing juices, and in so mixing them together, that no one flavour shall predominate, but that all shall be harmonised and blended. This is the high aim and great effort of art. The harmony which strikes the eye in a picture should in a sauce cause in the palate as agreeable a sensation.” There is nothing new under the sun. A friend has recently lent me a copy of St. Augustine, in which is the very same thought, “Omina pulchritudinis formæ unitas est,” says the learned father. The following is Father Brumoy’s idea of a perfect cook: “A perfect cook should exactly understand the properties of the substances he employs, that he may correct or render more perfect (corriger ou perfectionner) such aliments as nature presents in a raw state. He should have a sound head (la tête saine), a sure taste, and a delicate palate, that he may cleverly combine the ingredients. Seasoning is the rock of indifferent cooks (l’écueil des médiocres ouvriers). A cook should have a ready hand to operate promptly and should assiduously study the palate of his master, wholly conforming his own thereto.”[3] All this is excellent in its way. It is rare to find history, metaphysics and chemistry, the tone of a man of the world, the taste of an erudite classic, and the talent of a really good cook, so happily blended. Father Brumoy is the very opposite of that Greek cook, of whom Pausanias makes mention, whom all the world praised for his running, but whom no one praised for his ragouts: for in the three volumes now before me there are a variety of admirable receipts, which have made the stock in trade of many cookery books more vaunted and better known than Father Brumoy’s.