In the eighteenth century women themselves, following Hannah Wolley, began cook-book compiling. So great was their success that we find Mrs. Elizabeth Moxon’s “English Housewifry” going into its ninth edition in the London market of 1764. All through history there have been surprises coming to prejudiced minds out of the despised and Nazarene. It was so about this matter of cook-books—small in itself, great in its far-reaching results to the health and development of the human race.
Women had been taught the alphabet. But the dogmatism of Dr. Johnson voiced the judgment of many of our forebears: a dominant power is always hard in its estimate of the capacities it controls. “Women can spin very well,” said the great Cham, “but they can not make a good book of cookery.” He was talking to “the swan of Lichfield,” little Anna Seward, when he said this, and also to a London publisher. The book they were speaking of had been put forth by the now famous Mrs. Hannah Glasse, said to be the wife of a London attorney.
The doctor—possibly with an eye to business, a publisher being present—was describing a volume he had in mind to make, “a book upon philosophical principles,” “a better book of cookery than has ever yet been written.” “Then,” wisely said the dogmatic doctor, “as you can not make bad meat good, I would tell what is the best butcher’s meat, the best beef, the best pieces; how to choose young fowls; the proper seasons of different vegetables; and then how to roast and boil and compound.” This was the plan of a poet, essayist, lexicographer, and the leading man of letters of his day. His cook-book was never written.
But good Mrs. Glasse had also with large spirit aimed at teaching the ignorant, possibly those of a kind least often thought of by instructors in her art. She had, forsooth, caught her hare outside her book, even if she never found him in its page. “If I have not wrote in the high polite style,” she says, with a heart helpful toward the misunderstood and oppressed, and possibly with the pages of some pretentious chef in mind, “I hope I shall be forgiven; for my intention is to instruct the lower sort, and therefore must treat them in their own way. For example, when I bid them lard a fowl, if I should bid them lard with large lardoons, they would not know what I meant; but when I say they must lard with little pieces of bacon, they know what I mean. So in many other things in Cookery the great cooks have such a high way of expressing themselves, that the poor girls are at a loss to know what they mean.”
Mrs. Glasse’s book was published in 1747—while Dr. Johnson had still thirty-seven years in which to “boast of the niceness of his palate,” and spill his food upon his waistcoat. “Whenever,” says Macaulay, “he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins swelled and the moisture broke out on his forehead.” But within forty-eight years of the December his poor body was borne from the house behind Fleet Street to its resting-place in Westminster Abbey, a thin volume, “The Frugal Housewife,” written by our American Lydia Maria Child, had passed to its ninth London edition, in that day sales being more often than in our own a testimony of merit. This prevailing of justice over prejudice is “too good for any but very honest people,” as Izaak Walton said of roast pike. Dogmatism is always eating its own words.
Since the master in literature, Dr. Johnson, planned his cook-book many cooking men have dipped ink in behalf of instruction in their art. Such names as Farley, Carême, and Soyer have been written, if not in marble or bronze, at least in sugar of the last caramel degree—unappreciated excellencies mainly because of the inattention of the public to what nourishes it, and lack of the knowledge that the one who introduces an inexpensive, palatable, and digestible dish benefits his fellow-men.
The names of these club cooks and royal cooks are not so often referred to as that of the large and human-hearted Mrs. Glasse. A key to their impulse toward book-making must, however, have been that offered by Master Farley, chief cook at the London Tavern, who wrote in 1791, a hundred and fourteen years ago: “Cookery, like every other Art, has been moving forward to perfection by slow Degrees.... And although there are so many Books of this Kind already published, that one would hardly think there could be Occasion for another, yet we flatter ourselves, that the Readers of this Work will find, from a candid Perusal, and an impartial Comparison, that our Pretensions to the Favour of the Public are not ill-founded.”
Such considerations as those of Master Farley seem to lead to the present great output. But nowadays our social conditions and our intricate and involved household arrangements demand a specialization of duties. The average old cook-book has become insufficient. It has evolved into household-directing as well as cook-directing books, comprehending the whole subject of esoteric economies. This is a curious enlargement; and one cause, and result, of it is that the men and women of our domestic corps are better trained, better equipped with a logical, systematized, scientific knowledge, that they are in a degree specialists—in a measure as the engineer of an ocean greyhound is a specialist, or the professor of mathematics, or the writer of novels is a specialist. And specialists should have the dignity of special treatment. In this movement, it is to be hoped, is the wiping out of the social stigma under which domestic service has so long lain in our country, and a beginning of the independence of the domestic laborer—that he or she shall possess himself or herself equally with others—as other free-born people possess themselves, that is.
And closely allied with this specialization another notable thing has come about. Science with its microscope has finally taught what religion with its manifold precepts of humility and humanity has failed for centuries to accomplish, thus evidencing that true science and true religion reach one and the same end. There are no menial duties, science clearly enunciates: the so-called drudgery is often the most important of work, especially when the worker brings to his task a large knowledge of its worth in preserving and sweetening human life, and perfectness as the sole and satisfactory aim. Only the careless, thriftless workers, the inefficient and possessed with no zeal for perfection of execution, only these are the menials according to the genuine teachings of our day—and the ignorant, unlifted worker’s work is menial (using the word again in its modern English and not its old Norman-French usage) whatever his employment.
In verse this was said long ago, as the imagination is always forestalling practical knowledge, and George Herbert, of the seventeenth century, foreran our science in his “Elixir:”