A cook can be genuinely creative, inventing new sauces, new flavors, new combinations, new dishes, with appropriate names for them, thus acquiring universal fame, as did Carême and many others, among them Béchamel, whose name has become a household word the world over, not because he was a marquis but because he invented a new sauce.
From a moral point of view, cooking is one of the noblest of the arts. The old adage that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach is often sneered at as being materialistic if not coarse. It is no such thing; it simply hints at the truth that it is extremely difficult for a man to be amiable and loving when he suffers the pangs of dyspepsia. On this subject one of the 30,000 persons who wrote to the London "Telegraph" in answer to the question, "Is Marriage A Failure?" made some remarks which every young woman who is, or expects to be, a wife should ponder deeply:
Where the husband is an intellectual man, and engaged in intellectual pursuits, good cookery assumes a tenfold importance, as the want of physical exercise entailed by most intellectual occupations renders it imperative that all food eaten shall be of first-class quality and cooked to perfection. The most intellectual man in existence ceases to be intellectual while he has a couple of pounds or so of bad food slowly decaying in his stomach instead of digesting. Is "A Young Girl's" ideal of married life to have the man she loves always bright and cheerful, always intellectual, and generally at his best, and to have as strong and healthy, and even brighter and better company, at sixty and seventy than at twenty-four? I am sure it is. Then let her give him a chance of realizing that ideal by giving the utmost attention to his dinners, so that the food he eats is on his stomach and brain like feathers, and not like lead. If she wishes him to degenerate into an ill-tempered, exacting grumbler before forty, or to prefer dining anywhere rather than at home, then let her devote herself wholly to the drawing-room department of the house, and leave the kitchen and the dining-room to hired servants. Good cooks quickly become bad ones where the mistress neglects personal superintendence, and just so long as ladies have a soul above cookery will ill-temper and dyspepsia, with all their consequent train of ills and discomforts, be the rule, and not the exception, in middle-class English homes.
THE SOCIAL CASTE OF COOKS.
One of the most amazing phenomena in the United States is the great number of girls of all classes who consider kitchen work beneath them and not worthy of serious attention.
Girls of the working classes are not in the least ashamed to confess their absolute ignorance of the art of cooking, though they know that after marriage they must cook for their families. Then they bewail their fate if their husbands, tormented by dyspepsia, seek relief in strong drink. France, it has often been said, is on the whole a sober nation because it is a nation of good cooks.
American girls should remember that, as a Chicago expert has testified, "few men abandon or get a divorce from a woman who is a good cook."
The most amazing of our young women are the factory workers and shop-girls who imagine they are of a higher social caste than cooks, and look down on them.
What makes this attitude the more ridiculous is that the mothers of all these girls were cooks (mostly very bad ones!) and that all of these girls themselves, when they marry, must spend much of their time in the kitchen.