Sleeps on Olympus, sad and supperless.
As for my potions, he who deeply drinks,
Gulps with the draught the gift of endless youth.”
Finally, after inventing the above names unpronounceable of sauces that do not exist, the boaster adds, that his fee is a crown, provided he is not overlooked; but that if there be supervision to check him in his perquisites, he is not to be hired under a mina:—
“Si credis, nummos; si non, ne mina quidem!”
I do not know if cooks more especially used different fingers in mingling their sauces, according as they were employed on wedding banquets, martial feasts, senatorial entertainments, al-fresco déjeuners, or commercial suppers; but certain it is, that the fingers were sacred to diverse deities. The thumb was devoted to Venus, the index finger to Mars, the longest finger to Saturn, the next to the Sun, and the little finger to Mercury.
I conclude with a remark that I hope will be gratifying to all culinary artists who respect themselves and their calling, and who are anxious to prove that their vocation is of ancient and honourable descent. Cadmus, who introduced letters into Greece, had formerly been cook to the King of Sidon. Thus learning ascended to us from the kitchen; and to the ex-cook of the King of Sidon we perhaps owe all the epics that have ever been written. By this genealogy, even “Paradise Lost” may be traced to the patties of Cadmus. But cooks in England may boast of a noblesse de cuisine, which dates from the Norman Conquest. When William, who wooed his wife Matilda by knocking her down, had established himself in England, he gave a banquet, at which his cook, Tezelin, served a new white soup of such exquisite flavour, that William sent for the artist, and inquired its name. “I call it Dillegrout,” said Tezelin. “A scurvy name for so good a soup,” said the Conqueror; “but let that pass. We make you Lord of the Manor of Addington!” Thus modern cooks may boast of a descent from the landed aristocracy of the Conquest! Some of their masters cannot do as much; and this, perhaps, accounts for the pride of the one, and the simplicity of the other.
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.