If your mistress professes to understand cookery, your best way will be to follow her directions. If you wish to please her, let her have the praise of all that is right, and cheerfully bear the blame of any thing that is wrong; only advise that all NEW DISHES may be first tried when the family dine alone. When there is company, never attempt to dress any thing which you have not ascertained that you can do perfectly well.
Do not trust any part of your work to others without carefully overlooking them: whatever faults they commit, you will be censured for. If you have forgotten any article which is indispensable for the day’s dinner, request your employers to send one of the other servants for it. The cook must never quit her post till her work is entirely finished.
It requires the utmost skill and contrivance to have all things done as they should be, and all done together, at that critical moment when the dinner-bell sounds “to the banquet.”
“A feast must be without a fault;
And if ’t is not all right, ’t is naught.”
But
“Good nature will some failings overlook,
Forgive mischance, not errors of the cook;
As, if no salt is thrown about the dish,
Or nice crisp’d parsley scatter’d on the fish,
Shall we in passion from our dinner fly,
And hopes of pardon to the cook deny,
For things which Mrs. Glasse herself might oversee,
And all mankind commit as well as she?”
Vide King’s Art of Cookery.
Such is the endless variety of culinary preparations, that it would be as vain and fruitless a search as that for the philosopher’s stone, to expect to find a cook who is quite perfect in all the operations of the spit, the stewpan, and the rolling-pin: you will as soon find a watchmaker who can make, put together, and regulate every part of a watch.
“The universe cannot produce a cook who knows how to do every branch of cookery well, be his genius as great as possible.”—Vide the Cook’s Cookery, 8vo. page 40.
The best rule for marketing is to pay READY MONEY for every thing, and to deal with the most respectable tradesmen in your neighbourhood.
If you leave it to their integrity to supply you with a good article, at the fair market price, you will be supplied with better provisions, and at as reasonable a rate as those bargain-hunters, who trot “around, around, around about” a market, till they are trapped to buy some unchewable old poultry, tough tup-mutton, stringy cow beef, or stale fish, at a very little less than the price of prime and proper food. With savings like these they toddle home in triumph, cackling all the way, like a goose that has got ankle-deep into good luck.