Having now gone through the principal cookery books of England and France, I may be indulged in a few remarks on the cuisine of both countries. The cookery of England is, with the greater part of the nation, an object, not of luxurious desire or morning meditation, but of plain necessity and solid and substantial comfort.
“Due nourishment we seek, not gluttonous delight,”
to use the words of Milton. Men dine to satisfy hunger in England, and to sustain and strengthen themselves for those avocations, professional, parliamentary, and commercial, into which they throw more eager energy, more properly-directed vigour, force, and intensity than any other nation under the sun, not even excepting the Americans. It may be a humiliating confession, but in England no learned treatises have been written on the art of dining or dinner giving. We are wholly without “meditations” or “contemplations gastronomiques;” we do not spend thousands of pounds in the gingerbread gilding of cafés and restaurants; nor have we “magasins de comestibles,” in the style of Chevet and Corcellet. Our inventive powers are not turned in the direction of luxury, nor do we make our bill of fare our calendar, nor measure the seasons by their dainty productions. We talk little of dining or dishes, however much the most luxurious and sensual among us may think about it. We can knead and bake, and roast and boil, and stew plain food as well, perhaps better, than our livelier neighbours; but we are not so expert in petits plats, in entrées, entremets, and ragouts, and are therefore justly obnoxious to the pert remark of Voltaire, that though we have twenty-four religions, we have but one sauce. We can compare, combine and search out causes in morals, science, and legislation, but we have given no heed to the canons or combinations of cookery. We have given birth to a Bacon, a Locke, a Shakespeare, a Milton, a Watt; but we are without a Vatel, a Bechamel, a Laguipierre, a Beauvilliers, or a Carème. We have perfected railroads, steam-boats, and canals, but we cannot make a suprème de volaille in perfection, nor arrange des petits choux en profiteroles. We have produced the best quadrants, the best sextants, the best achromatic telescopes, and the best chronometers; but the truffles we grow in Derbyshire and Hampshire are pale and flavourless, and we cannot make larks au gratin. We have built the best steam-ships, the best steam-carriages, the best vehicles of every description for draught, business, pleasure, and amusement; but we cannot fatten frogs with the science of a Simon, and we do not render our mutton tender by electricity. We have beaten the nations of the earth in fabrics of linen, woollen, and cotton; but we are ignorant of epigrams of lamb, and know nothing of salpicons à la Vénetienne. We have invented the safety-lamp, the stocking-frame, and the spinning-jenny; but we hopelessly try our hands at filets de lapereaux en turban, and ignominiously fail in salmis of partridge à la bourguinote. We have excelled in everything requiring a union of enterprise, energy, perseverance, and wealth; but we have no pâtés de foies-gras of home invention, and no terrines de Nerac. We have discovered and planted colonies which will perpetuate our name, our language, our literature, and our free institutions, to the last syllable of recorded time; but we cannot make veloutés of vegetables, nor haricots blancs à la maître d’hôtel. We have given liberty to the slave, and preached the pure word of the gospel to the nations subjected to our dominion and sway; but we still eat butter badly melted with our roast veal, and we have not invented three hundred and sixty-four ways to dress eggs. Our schoolmaster has indeed been “long abroad;” but though he has so far yielded to innovation and reform as to cast off the cauliflower wig of the time of the great Busby, yet he will not hear of chouf-leurs au gratin or au jus, but will still eat his esculent boiled hard in plain water. But a truce with comparisons, which are somewhat odious. Mankind undoubtedly owe to our neighbours many ingenious culinary processes by which the productions of nature are artfully and pleasantly disguised—many delicate combinations of sauces by which the palate is alternately stimulated and palled; but though we are indebted to the French for these nick-nackeries—though we owe to them hats and hair-powder, bon-bons and busks, caps and crinolines, stays and swaddling-clothes, sabots, wigs, and waistcoats, filigrams and foulardes, gold thread, gloves, and the guillotine—yet the world is but little their debtor in any invention which does not turn on vanity, epicurism, or sensuality. They are a people who, according to their own historian, De Thou, discovered how to make tapestry before they had learned how to make broad cloth.
The metropolis of England exceeds that of France in extent and population; it commands a greater supply of all articles of consumption, and contains a greater number and variety of markets, which are better supplied. There are also some articles of meat and some articles of cookery in which England exceeds France. Though we are also undoubtedly inferior to the Gauls in the articles of veal and fowl, yet we greatly surpass them in mutton, produce better beef, lamb, and pork, and are immeasurably superior both in the quantity and quality of our fish, our venison, and our game.
This was admitted by St. Evremond nearly two hundred years ago in some stanzas, entitled “Les Avantages de l’Angleterre,” wherein he says—
“Roche-guyon, Bene, verfine,
Ne vantez plus votre lapin;
Windsor en fournit la cuisine
D’un fumet encore plus fin.”
In the same poem he alludes to the profuse supply of woodcocks, snipe, pheasant, and larks, and to the fine flavour and colour of the Bath mutton. It is in fish, however, that we have been always most pre-eminent.