In that excellent comedy from the combined pens of Émile Augier and Jules Sandeau, entitled Le Gendre de M. Poirier, we see an illustration of the solemn importance which is attached by the French cook to a well-ordered menu. M. Poirier, an aspirant for social position, has married his daughter to a ruined marquis, Gaston de Nesle, whom he soon finds to be a magnificently expensive son-in-law. One day, determined to retrench, he sends for his chef and asks what he intends to prepare for dinner that day. The chef enumerates a list of some twenty costly and exquisite dishes; to which M. Poirier replies: “You will replace all that by soup, roast meat, salad, and a fruit tart.” The cook feels like a soldier required to chop wood with the sword with which he has been accustomed to cut his way to glory, and who prefers to snap that sword in two. “I resign!” exclaims the cuisinier. “No man will cook for you!” “Then I will engage a woman,” is the economist’s base rejoinder.
To pass from fiction to fact we find a very much stronger instance of the spirit of the French cook in the famous Vatel, who was so delicate on the “point of honour” that he ran a sword through his own body because the fish which should have arrived for an important dinner he was cooking did not turn up in time. This artist was first attached to the intendant Foquet, afterwards to the Prince de Condé; and he could not endure the shame of letting the king go short of one particular course in the dinner which the prince offered him at the Castle of Chantilly.
Some of the loftiest functions of the Parisian chef can be performed by no one who is not endowed with absolute genius. Training, experience, industry, will go some distance in the French culinary art; but, according to Brillat-Savarin, in his Physiologie du Goût, they would apparently never qualify a man for the sublimer functions of roasting a joint or a fowl.
“On devient cuisinier mais on naît rotisseur,” exclaims this excellent writer, who raised the art of the kitchen to the dignity of a science, and who propounds the maxims of cooking with the same gravity, the same sincerity, the same ardour as if he were laying the bases of a grand moral philosophy. “A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with but one eye,” he declared in a neat sentence which admits of only a lumbering translation.
Why a roasting-cook should require greater talent than one of his kitchen colleagues, who, for instance, like the chef spoken of by Macaulay, could make ten different dishes out of a poppy-head, is not {373} at first sight apparent. One might imagine that the roaster required nothing but care and patience; but after the dictum of so high an authority as Brillat-Savarin, it must by the uninitiated be supposed that for the seemingly simple operation of roasting a bird or joint as it ought to be roasted, a combination of subtle qualities are requisite, just as the mere two hands of a watch need, for their due regulation, a complex system of machinery.
As roaster, or in no matter what capacity, the Paris cook had his poetic eulogist. One gastronomic versifier was wont, whilst sitting at dinner, to regard the genius who was furnishing his stomach as a divinity—
Un cuisinier, quand je aîne,
Me semble un être divin.
Another regarded his cook as a present from the sky—
Que je puisse toujours, après avoir diné,
Bénir le cuisinier que le ciel m’a donné!