It is extremely probable that, could it be arranged to feed our starving poor, beneath the public gaze, on sôles Normandes, côtelettes à la Reform, and salmi de gibier truffé; to feast our workhouse children on bisque d’écrévisses and Ananas à la Créole, the upper classes of Great Britain would soon revert to plain roast and boiled.
But after all it is the English caterer who is chiefly to blame for his own undoing. How is it that in what may be called the “food streets” of the metropolis the foreign food-supplier should outnumber the purveyor of the Roast Beef of Old England in the proportion of fifty to one? Simply because the Roast Beef of Old England has become almost as extinct as the Dodo. There are but few English kitchens, at this end of the nineteenth century, in the which meat is roasted in front of the fire.
In order to save the cost of fuel, most English (save the mark!) cooking is now performed by gas or steam; and at many large establishments the food, whether fish, flesh, fowl, vegetables or pastry, all goes, in a raw state, into a species of chest of drawers made of block-tin, in which receptacle the daily luncheons, dinners, and suppers are steamed and robbed of all flavour, save that of hot tin. The pity of it! Better, far better for mankind the à la system than to be gradually “steamed” into the tomb!
It is alleged that as good results in the way of roasting can be got from an oven as from the spit. But that oven must be ventilated—with both an inlet and an outlet ventilator, for one will not act without the other. It is also advisable that said oven should be cleaned out occasionally; for a hot oven with no joint therein will emit odours anything but agreeable, if not attended to; and it is not too sweeping a statement to say that the majority of ovens in busy kitchens are foul. The system of steaming food (the alleged “roasts” being subsequently browned in an oven) is of comparatively recent date; but the oven as a roaster was the invention of one Count Rumford, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In one of his lectures on oven-roasting, this nobleman remarked that he despaired of getting any Englishman to believe his words; so that he was evidently confronted with plenty of prejudice, which it is devoutly to be prayed still exists in English homes. For I do vow and protest that the oven odours which pervade the neighbourhood of the Strand, London, at midday, are by no means calculated to whet the appetite of the would-be luncher or diner. This is what such an authority as Mr. Buckmaster wrote on the subject of the spit versus the oven:
“I believe I am regarded as a sort of heretic on the question of roasting meat. My opinion is that the essential condition of good roasting is constant basting, and this the meat is not likely to have when shut up in an iron box; and what is not easily done is easily neglected.”
In this connection there are more heretics than Mr. Buckmaster. But if during my lifetime the days of burning heretics should be revived, I shall certainly move the Court of Criminal Appeal in favour of being roasted or grilled before, or over, the fire, instead of being deprived of my natural juices in an iron box.
Some few “roast” houses are still in existence in London, but they be few and far between; and since Mr. Cooper gave up the “Albion,” nearly opposite the stage-door of Drury Lane Theatre, the lover of good, wholesome, English food has lost one old-fashioned tavern in the which he was certain of enjoying such food.
It has been repeatedly urged in favour of French cookery that it is so economical. But economy in the preparation of food is by no means an unmixed blessing. I do not believe that much sole-leather is used up in the ordinary ragoût, or salmi; but many of us who can afford more expensive joints have a prejudice against “scrags”; whilst the tails of mutton chops frequently have a tainted flavour, and the drumsticks and backs of fowls are only fit to grill, or boil down into gravy. And it is not only the alien who is economical in his preparation of the banquet. Many of the dwellers in the highways and bye-ways of our great metropolis will boil down the outer skin of a ham, and place a portion thereof, together with such scraps as may also be purchased, at a penny or twopence the plateful, at the ham and beef emporium, with maybe a “block ornament” or two from the butcher’s, in a pie dish, with a superstructure of potatoes, and have the “scrap pie” cooked at the baker’s for the Sunday dinner. Poor wretches! Not much “waste” goes on in such households. But I have known the “gal” who tortured the food in a cheap lodging-house throw away the water in which a joint had just been boiled, but whether this was from sheer ignorance, or “cussedness,” or the desire to save herself any future labour in the concoction of soup, deponent sayeth not. By the way, it is in the matter of soup that the tastes of the British and French peasantry differ so materially. Unless he or she be absolutely starving, it is next to impossible to get one of the groundlings of old England to attempt a basin of soup. And when they do attempt the same, it has been already made for them. The Scotch, who are born cooks, know much better than this; but do not, O reader, if at all thin of skin, or refined of ear, listen too attentively to the thanks which a denizen of the “disthressful counthry” will bestow upon you for a “dhirty bowl o’ bone-juice.”
How many modern diners, we wonder, know the original object of placing frills around the shank of a leg or shoulder of mutton, a ham, the shins of a fowl, or the bone of a cutlet? Fingers were made before—and a long time before—forks. In the seventeenth century—prior to which epoch not much nicety was observed in carving, or eating—we read that “English gentlewomen were instructed by schoolmistresses and professors of etiquette as to the ways in which it behoved them to carve joints. That she might be able to grasp a roasted chicken without greasing her left hand, the gentle housewife was careful to trim its foot and the lower part of its legs with cut paper. The paper frill which may still be seen round the bony point and small end of a leg of mutton, is a memorial of the fashion in which joints were dressed for the dainty hands of lady-carvers, in time prior to the introduction of the carving-fork, an implement that was not in universal use so late as the Commonwealth.”