But cooks are a trying and troublesome race, with extraordinarily perverse traditions of their own, a frequent antipathy to learn anything new, and an absolutely ridiculous partiality to “improve” old-fashioned dishes according to their own ideas. There ought to be condign punishment meted out to any cook who makes any so-called alteration or improvement to any well-known standardized dish, of which the composition, flavour, and artistic completeness have been settled once and for all, and to touch which is something akin to sacrilege.
Really good, intelligent, careful cooks get on in their profession, and often end up by opening establishments of their own. Many a restaurant proprietor has qualified as a first-class chef.
Does any one, by the way, know the origin of the word “restaurant”? You may search your encyclopædia in vain; but the matter is really as simple as shelling peas. The first public eating-house, as distinct from the rôtisseur, who cooked food “to be eaten off the premises,” was opened in Paris by a cook called Boulanger in 1750. Over his shop he displayed a sign bearing this inscription in kitchen Latin: “Venite omnes qui stomacho laboretis, et ego restaurabo vos.” This was taken up, gallicized, and passed into common parlance. Hence our modern use of the term, which, after all, is only a hundred and fifty years old.
In rereading an old book by the never-to-be-forgotten Guy de Maupassant I came across a delightful passage which so aptly describes the feelings of a true gourmet that I am tempted to transcribe it here for the benefit of all who belong to that noble fraternity. “To be wanting in the sense of taste is to have a stupid mouth, just as one may have a stupid mind. A man who cannot distinguish between a langouste and a lobster, between a herring—that admirable fish that carries within it all the savours and aromas of the sea—and a mackerel or a whiting, is comparable only to a man who could confound Balzac with Eugène Sue, and a symphony by Beethoven with a military march composed by some regimental bandmaster.”
This delicacy of taste was obviously denied to Mr. G. Bernard Shaw’s Uncle James in “Man and Superman,” of whom it is written:—
“Uncle James had a first-rate cook; he couldn’t digest anything except what she cooked. Well, the poor man was shy and hated society. But his cook was proud of her skill, and wanted to serve up dinners to princes and ambassadors. To prevent her from leaving him, that poor old man had to give a big dinner twice a month, and suffer agonies of awkwardness.”
Another writer of to-day, of quite peculiar charm and knowledge, Mr. E. H. Cooper, in his novel “A Fool’s Year,” has a delightful description of a modern London dinner-party, of the sort too often met with in the houses of those who ought to know so much better.
“Mr. Hopper’s dinner was a thing to be remembered rather than eaten. ‘The things ought to be put into a museum of curiosities,’ said St. Ives, looking round him wearily; ‘not on a decent English dinner-table. I’ve had some turtle-soup and a bit of tongue smothered in jam, and now I’m hungry. Would there be a row if I sent for some bread and cheese? Strawberries as big as peaches, and peaches as big as young footballs, may be very remarkable to look at, but I’m not going to eat them. That waiter looks kind; I’m going to ask him to bring me a piece of Stilton hidden between two biscuits. Don’t give me away, Lady Merton. I’ll do you a good turn when I find you starving at a banquet of this kind. But you know better than to come to one without eating a couple of muffins and half a pound of plum-cake first.’”
The clamour as to the inefficiency of the typical “plain cook” is incessant and fully justified. The remedies suggested are usually futile or inexpedient. Nothing is more difficult than to get a simple meal well cooked. Nothing is more easy, in London at any rate, than to get a misdescribed semi-French dinner evilly cooked. Is there no way out of this quandary? Yes. It consists in the training and apprenticing of British-born boys to the profession of cookery.
For many years past all the leading men-cooks in clubs, restaurants, and large private establishments have been, practically without exception, foreigners, whether French, Swiss, or Italian.