The ordinary domestic cook is a tireless enemy of the Chafing Dish. She calls it “fiddle-faddle.” Maybe. But inasmuch as it is clean, economical, speedy and rather simple, it would naturally not appeal to her peculiar sense of the culinary art.
To bachelors, male and female, in chambers, lodgings, diggings, and the like, in fact to all who “batch”; to young couples with a taste for theatres, concerts, and homely late suppers; to yachtsmen, shooting-parties, and picnickers; to inventive artists who yearn for fame in the evolution of a new entrée; to invalids, night workers, actors and stockbrokers, the Chafing Dish is a welcome friend and companion.
It has its limitations, of course, but they are few and immaterial, and its obvious advantages and conveniences far outweigh its trivial drawbacks. At the same time it must be remembered that it is a serious cooking apparatus, and by no means a mere toy.
It is quite erroneous to imagine that the Chafing Dish is an American invention. Nothing of the sort. The earliest trace of it is more than a quarter of a thousand years old. “Le Cuisinier Français,” by Sieur François Pierre de la Varenne, Escuyer de Cuisine de Monsieur le Marquis d’Uxelles, published in Paris in 1652, contains a recipe for Champignons à l’Olivier, in which the use of a Réchaut is recommended. A translation of this work, termed “The French Cook,” was published in London in 1653, and the selfsame recipe of Mushrooms after the Oliver contains the injunction to use a Chafing Dish; moreover, the frontispiece, a charmingly executed drawing, shows a man-cook in his kitchen, surrounded by the implements of his art; and on the table a Chafing Dish, much akin to our latter-day variety, is burning merrily. This was in 1653. The Mayflower sailed in 1620.
So much for the antiquity of the Chafing Dish. At the same time our mitigated thanks are due to America for its comparatively recent reintroduction, for until quite lately, in Great Britain, its use was practically limited to the cooking of cheese on the table. The Chafing Dish is much esteemed across the Atlantic, although one is forced to admit that it is sometimes put to base uses in the concoction of unholy stews, which have not the natural flavour of fish, flesh or fowl, or even good red herring. Still, if the Americans are vague in their French nomenclature, unorthodox in their sauces, eclectic in their flavourings, and over-lavish in their condiments, yet they have at any rate brought parlour cooking to a point where it may gracefully be accepted as an added pleasure to life.
When two or three are gathered together, and one mentions the magic word “Chafing Dish,” the second invariably chimes in with “Welsh Rabbit.” This is an error of taste, but excusable in the circumstances. Chafing Dishes were not created for the exclusive canonisation of Welsh Rabbits, although a deft hand may occasionally play with one in a lightsome mood. There are other and better uses. All the same, a fragrant and delicate Rabbit is not to be despised, although it must not be made conceited by too great an elevation into the realms of high cookery.
My Chaffinda has at least seventeen hundred and four different charms, therein somewhat exceeding the average number appertaining to her sex, but it would require volumes to mention them separately, and it must suffice to indicate roughly a few of the more prominent.
I suppose that every nation has the cooks that it deserves, and, if this be accepted as an axiom, the general degeneration of the Plain Cook of the middle classes amply accounts for the growing cult of the Chafing Dish. The British school of cookery, in its mediocre form, is monotony exemplified. Too many broths spoil the cook; and hence we derive our dull sameness of roast and boiled.
Sweet are the juices of diversity, and whilst there is no reason for the Chafer to elaborate a sauce of thirteen ingredients, the cunning manipulation of three or four common articles of the domestic store-cupboard will often give (intentionally or otherwise) surprising results. This I shall hope to explain more fully later on.
Imagination and a due sense of proportion are as necessary in cooking as in any other art—more so than in some, for Impressionism in the kitchen simply means indigestion. Digestion is the business of the human interior, indigestion that of the doctor. It is so easy to cook indigestible things that a savoury cunningly concocted of Bismuth and Pepsine would seem an almost necessary adjunct to the menu (or Carte Dinatoire, as the French Revolutionists called it) of the budding Chafist.