In a later faithful chronicle I learn that a certain marquis of the days of Louis XVI. invented a musical spit which caused all the snowy-garbed cooks to move in rhythmical steps. All was melody and order. "The fish simmered in six-eight time, the ponderous roasts circled gravely, the stews blended their essences to solemn anthems. The ears were gratified as the nose was regaled; this was an idea worthy of Apecius."
So Molière, true to the spirit of his time, paid this compliment to the Marquis.
Béchamel was cook to Louis XIV., and invented a famous sauce.
Durand, who was cook to the great Napoleon, has left a curious record of his tempestuous eating. Francatelli succeeded Ude in England, was the chef at Chesterfield House, at Lord Kinnaird's, and at the Melton Club. He held the post of maître d'hôtel for a while but was dismissed by a cabal.
The gay writer from whose pages we have gathered these desultory facts winds up with an advice to all who keep French cooks. "Make your chef your friend. Take care of him. Watch over the health of this man of genius. Send for the physician when he is ill."
Imagine the descent from these poets to the good plain cook,—you can depend upon the truth of this description,—with a six weeks' reference from her last place. Imagine the greasy soups, the mutton cutlets hard as a board, the few hard green peas, the soggy potatoes. How awful the recollections of one who came in "a week on trial!" Whose trial? Those who had to eat her food. It is bad to be without a cook, but ten times worse to have a bad one.
But if Louis Eustache Ude, the cook par excellence of all this little study, lamented over the waste in great kitchens, how much more should he revolt at that wholesale destruction of food which might go to feed the hungry, nourish and sustain the sick, and perhaps save many a child's life. What should be done with the broken meats of a great household? The cook is too apt to toss all into a tub or basket, to swell her own iniquitous profits. The half-tongues, ends of ham, roast beef, chicken-legs, the real honest relics of a generous kitchen would feed four or five poor families a week. What gifts of mercy to hospitals would be the half of a form of jelly, the pudding, the blanc mange, which are thrown away by the careless!
In France the Little Sisters of the Poor go about with clean dishes and clean baskets, to collect these morsels which fall from the rich man's table. It is a worthy custom.
While studying the names of these great men like Ude and Carême, Vatel and Francatelli, what shades of dead pâtissiers, spirits of extinct confiseurs, rise around us in savoury streams and revive for us the past of gastronomic pleasure! Many a Frenchman will tell you of the iced meringues of the Palais Royal and the salades de fraises au marasquin of the Grand Seize as if they were things of the past. The French, gayer and lighter handed at the moulding of pastry, are apt to exceed all nations in this delicate, delicious entremet. The vol au vent de volaille, or chicken pie, with its delicate filling of chicken, mushroom, truffles, and its enveloping pastry, is never better than at the Grand Hôtel at Aix les Bains, where one finds the perfection of good eating. "Aix les Bains," says a resident physician, "lies half-way between Paris and Rome, with its famous curative baths to correct the good dinners of the one, and the good wines of the other." Aix adds a temptation of its own.
The French have ever been fond of the playthings of the kitchen,—the tarts, custards, the frothy nothings which are fashioned out of the evanescent union of whipped cream and spun sugar. Their politeness, their brag, their accomplishments, their love of the external, all lead to such dainties. It was observed even so long ago as 1815, when the allies were in Paris, that the fifteen thousand pâtés which Madame Felix sold daily in the Passage des Panoramas were beginning to affect the foreign bayonets; and no doubt the German invasion may have been checked by the same dulcet influence.