And this despite Balzac, who well understood the cuisine no less than the "Comédie Humaine,"—that "marriage must necessarily combat a monster who devours everything—daily routine"; or his other definition in the "Physiology of Marriage," a physiological study that was inspired by Savarin's "Physiology of Taste,"—"Pressurez le mariage, il n'en sortira jamais rien que du plaisir pour les garçons et de l'ennui pour les maris."
The wise woman will have many side-lights in her composition; and in the kitchen her sauces will have many shadings.
Let us toast her in a glass of sparkling St. Péray, and acknowledge that without her there were no home cuisine and consequently no home life. So closely does the art advocated by the late lamented Mrs. Glasse touch upon the fundamental happiness of mankind; and sauces which render it an art supreme still further accentuate the amenities. It has been said that it is not obligatory for lovely arms and shoulders to be acquainted with rhetoric. However this may obtain—and there are admirers both of shapely shoulders and of the graces of languages, there can be no doubt that charming women who possess a taste for gastronomy which they can put to practical use upon occasion, are an infinitely greater desideratum than whose energies may be centred strictly upon flounces or the study of metaphysics.
With the following sauces, besides the simpler forms of espagnole and velouté, much may be accomplished at home: cream béchamel, sauce piquante, sauce bordelaise, maître-d'hôtel and béarnaise, hollandaise, sauce an vin blanc, sauce au beurre noir (plain, or with shallots and parsley added), tomato sauce and its special form à la Richelieu, and, finally, Francatelli's sauce Number 65 for mutton and dark-fleshed game.[49] If, apart from those enumerated, madame be an artist in the fashioning of sauce tartare, the mayonnaise and its shadings, and a plain French salad dressing, all will be lovely sailing. What's sauce for the goose, however, is not necessarily sauce for the gander, and vice versa. Women will prefer the cream béchamel, mayonnaise, and Francatelli, and the sterner sex will like them all.
It may not prove entirely without profit if to these be added sauce à la Schönberg, which harmonises not only with halibut, flounder, sea-bass, and sole, but with chicken-breasts and white-fleshed game-birds as well, when one desires a change from the usual modes of preparation:
"Sauce à la Schönberg. Make a roux of a tablespoon of butter and flour, brown slightly, add two shallots finely minced, and a pint of chicken broth, three tablespoons of tomato sauce, a small bay-leaf, two cloves, some finely minced parsley, a teaspoon of cognac, and a little white wine. Season with salt and pepper, and strain. Then add a half can of mushrooms, slice and brown them in a little butter with a few dice of sweetbreads previously cooked, and, just before removing from the range, the yolk of an egg and a half cup of cream."
The professional chef may possibly criticise it,—mesdames the "'Compleat' Housewives" will discover in it a fragrant note of satisfaction.
Will new sauces continue to be invented? Assuredly; of culinary as well as other novelties there will always be an abundant supply, however bizarre or lacking in excellence compared with the old. But in new dishes it will be new combinations for the most part, varying but little from the classics and those already known, rather than any distinctly novel forms of superior merit, such as have been recently evolved in floriculture, for instance. For the art of cookery is of ancient time, while the evolution of the flower, especially the floral queen, the rose, is comparatively new; and where the one has still untold possibilities, the other has well-nigh attained its full tide of savour and perfection, at least in theory and understanding, if not nearly so often in practice as were to be desired.
An extended disquisition, redolent of truffles and odorous of the herb-garden, might be devoted to the subject of sauces, of which Charles Ranhofer in his recent manual, "The Epicurean," presents two hundred and forty-six. But this were invading the practical domain of the cookery books, and wandering too far from the lines of the subject under consideration—the history and province of Gastronomy.