The organ of taste is more rarely found in perfection, and is sooner spoiled by the operations of time, excessive use, &c. than either of our other senses.
There are as various degrees of sensibility of palate as there are of gradations of perfection in the eyes and ears of painters and musicians. After all the pains which the editor has taken to explain the harmony of subtle relishes, unless nature has given the organ of taste in a due degree, this book will, alas! no more make an Osborne,[52-*] than it can a Reynolds, or an Arne, or a Shield.
Where nature has been most bountiful of this faculty, its sensibility is so easily blunted by a variety of unavoidable circumstances, that the tongue is very seldom in the highest condition for appreciating delicate flavours, or accurately estimating the relative force of the various materials the cook employs in the composition of an harmonious relish. Cooks express this refinement of combination by saying, a well-finished ragoût “tastes of every thing, and tastes of nothing:” (this is “kitchen gibberish” for a sauce in which the component parts are well proportioned.)
However delicately sensitive nature may have formed the organs of taste, it is only during those few happy moments that they are perfectly awake, and in perfect good humour, (alas! how very seldom they are,) that the most accomplished and experienced cook has a chance of working with any degree of certainty without the auxiliary tests of the balance and the measure: by the help of these, when you are once right, it is your own fault if you are ever otherwise.
The sense of taste depends much on the health of the individual, and is hardly ever for a single hour in the same state: such is the extremely intimate sympathy between the stomach and the tongue, that in proportion as the former is empty, the latter is acute and sensitive. This is the cause that “good appetite is the best sauce,” and that the dish we find savoury at luncheon, is insipid at dinner, and at supper quite tasteless.
To taste any thing in perfection, the tongue must be moistened, or the substance applied to it contain moisture; the nervous papillæ which constitute this sense are roused to still more lively sensibility by salt, sugar, aromatics, &c.
If the palate becomes dull by repeated tasting, one of the best ways of refreshing it, is to masticate an apple, or to wash your mouth well with milk.
The incessant exercise of tasting, which a cook is obliged to submit to during the education of her tongue, frequently impairs the very faculty she is trying to improve. “’Tis true ’tis pity and pity ’tis,” (says a grand gourmand) “’tis true, her too anxious perseverance to penetrate the mysteries of palatics may diminish the tact, exhaust the power, and destroy the index, without which all her labour is in vain.”
Therefore, a sagacious cook, instead of idly and wantonly wasting the excitability of her palate, on the sensibility of which her reputation and fortune depends, when she has ascertained the relative strength of the flavour of the various ingredients she employs, will call in the balance and the measure to do the ordinary business, and endeavour to preserve her organ of taste with the utmost care, that it may be a faithful oracle to refer to on grand occasions, and new compositions.[53-*] Of these an ingenious cook may form as endless a variety, as a musician with his seven notes, or a painter with his colours: read chapters [7] and [8] of the Rudiments of Cookery.
Receive as the highest testimonies of your employers’ regard whatever observations they may make on your work: such admonitions are the most unequivocal proofs of their desire to make you thoroughly understand their taste, and their wish to retain you in their service, or they would not take the trouble to teach you.