The reader may rest assured, that whether he consults this book to diminish the expense or increase the pleasures of hospitality, he will find all the information that was to be obtained up to 1826, communicated in the most unreserved and intelligible manner.
A great deal of the elegance of cookery depends upon the accompaniments to each dish being appropriate and well adapted to it.
We can assure our readers, no attention has been wanting on our part to render this department of the work worthy of their perusal; each receipt is the faithful narrative of actual and repeated experiments, and has received the most deliberate consideration before it was here presented to them. It is given in the most circumstantial manner, and not in the technical and mysterious language former writers on these subjects seem to have preferred; by which their directions are useless and unintelligible to all who have not regularly served an apprenticeship at the stove.
Thus, instead of accurately enumerating the quantities, and explaining the process of each composition, they order a ladleful of stock, a pint of consommé, and a spoonful of cullis; as if a private-family cook had always at hand a soup-kettle full of stock, a store of consommé, and the larder of Albion house, and the spoons and pennyworths were the same in all ages.
It will be to very little purpose that I have taken so much pains to teach how to manage roasts and boils, if a cook cannot or will not make the several sauces that are usually sent up with them.
The most homely fare may be made relishing, and the most excellent and independent improved by a well-made sauce;[102-*] as the most perfect picture may, by being well varnished.
We have, therefore, endeavoured to give the plainest directions how to produce, with the least trouble and expense[102-†] possible, all the various compositions the English kitchen affords; and hope to present such a wholesome and palatable variety as will suit all tastes and all pockets, so that a cook may give satisfaction in all families. The more combinations of this sort she is acquainted with, the better she will comprehend the management of every one of them.
We have rejected some outlandish farragoes, from a conviction that they were by no means adapted to an English palate. If they have been received into some English books, for the sake of swelling the volume, we believe they will never be received by an Englishman’s stomach, unless for the reason they were admitted into the cookery book, i. e. because he has nothing else to put into it.
However “les pompeuses bagatelles de la Cuisine Masquée” may tickle the fancy of demi-connoisseurs, who, leaving the substance to pursue the shadow, prefer wonderful and whimsical metamorphoses, and things extravagantly expensive to those which are intrinsically excellent; in whose mouth mutton can hardly hope for a welcome, unless accompanied by venison sauce; or a rabbit, any chance for a race down the red lane, without assuming the form of a frog or a spider; or pork, without being either “goosified” or “lambified” (see [No. 51]); and game and poultry in the shape of crawfish or hedgehogs; these travesties rather show the patience than the science of the cook, and the bad taste of those who prefer such baby-tricks to nourishing and substantial plain cookery.
I could have made this the biggest book with half the trouble it has taken me to make it the best: concentration and perspicuity have been my aim.