COOKS AND COOKERY

The only thing that can be said against eating is that it takes away one’s appetite. True, there is a French proverb to the contrary, but that really only applies to the hors d’œuvre and the soup. We all eat three meals a day, some four, and a few even five, if one may reckon afternoon tea as a meal. Yet the art of eating—that is to say, how to eat, what to eat, and when to eat it—is studiously neglected by those who deem they have souls superior to the daily stoking of the human engine.

Whosoever simply wants to eat certainly does not require to know how to cook. But whosoever desires to criticize a dinner and the dishes that compose it—and enjoyment without judgment is unsatisfactory—need not be a cook, but must understand what cooking implies; he must have grasped the spirit of the art of cookery.

Cooks themselves almost always judge a dinner too partially, and from the wrong point of view; they are, almost without exception, obstinately of the opinion that everything they cook must taste equally good to everybody. This is obviously absurd (but so like a cook), for allowance must be made for the personal equation. Nothing tastes so good as what one eats oneself, so it is not to be expected that one and the same dish will please even the most fastidious octette. Still there have been occasional instances.

The late Sir Henry Thompson once had a new cook, and, in an interview with her after the first dinner-party, she expressed herself as being delighted that everything had been so satisfactory. “But how do you know it was?” asked Sir Henry. “I’ve not given you my opinion yet.” “No, Sir Henry,” said the cook, “but I know it was all right, because none of the salt-cellars were touched.”

It is a mistaken idea that a man-cook can be a cordon-bleu. That title of high distinction is reserved for the feminine sex. According to Lady Morgan (Sidney Owenson, 1841), in her “Book without a Name,” a cordon-bleu is defined as an honorary distinction conferred on the first class of female cooks in Paris, either in allusion to their blue aprons, or to the order whose blue ribbon was so long considered as the adequate recompense of all the highest merit in the highest classes.

The Fermier Général who built the palace of the Elysée became not more celebrated for his exquisite dinners than for the moral courage with which he attributed their excellence to his female cook, Marie, when such a chef was hardly known in a French kitchen; for when Marie served up un petit diner délirant she was called for like other prime donne, and her health drunk by the style of Le Cordon Bleu.

One of the most famous of the bearers of the title was undoubtedly that wonderful Sophie who is so charmingly described in La Salle-à-manger du Docteur Véron. She was cook and politician too, and even Alexandre Dumas père did not disdain to dine with her at a dinner of her own cooking; and moreover eminent statesmen of the period consulted her about politics, her clear-headed simplicity and wide experience of popular sentiment rendering her opinions of considerable value. The editor adds that her name was not Sophie, but that her many friends will nevertheless easily recognize her.

The value of a good chef in a well-ordered household cannot be over-estimated. His tact, his experience, and his art go far to make life pleasant and easy. Moreover, a good cook is a direct aid to good health, for he uses none but the best materials, and, if he be of the highest rank of his order, knows just how to assimilate those suave and subtle suggestions and flavourings which go so far to make cookery such as the great Careme (1828) called le genre mâle et élégant. Cooks were held in the highest estimation in Venice in the sixteenth century. Here is the beginning of a letter from one Allessandro Vacchi, a Venetian citizen, to an acquaintance of his, a cook and carver by profession: “Al magnifico Signor Padron mio osservandissimo il Signor Matteo Barbini, Cuóco e Scalco celeberrimo della città di Venetia.” In our own time honour to the profession is not lacking, for a little while ago the King decorated M. Ménager, his maître-chef, with the Royal Victorian Medal.

At the same time the competition of many rich folk for the services of some of the best-known chefs has made these artists, in some cases at least, place an extortionate value upon their ministrations. A very clever chef, reliable in everything except his sauces, in which he is slightly heterodox, was recently engaged by a nouveau riche at a salary far exceeding that which he paid to his private secretary.

In one of Matthew Bramble’s letters from Bath (“Humphry Clinker”) he refers to such a one as “a mushroom of opulence, who pays a cook seventy guineas a week for furnishing him with one meal a day.” Mushroom of opulence is good. That species of fungus is always with us. Dr. Kitchiner in his “Housekeeper’s Oracle” (1829) quotes from “The Plebeian Polished, or Rules for Persons who have unaccountably plunged themselves into Wealth.” A work of this nature, if published nowadays, should surely command a large sale, for the number of people who have “unaccountably plunged themselves into Wealth” seems to be multiplying rapidly. Most of them know how to feed. Few of them seem to have mastered the mystery of how to dine. “Man ist was man isst” says the German proverb, and there is no valid reason for spending fabulous sums on a dinner of out-of-the-season delicacies, when the good reasonable and seasonable things of this earth are ready and ripe for consumption.

At the same time, meanness has nothing to recommend it. There is no credit in starving yourself or your guests. The difference between mere parsimony and economy has never been more deftly illustrated than in those pregnant sentences from Edmund Burke: “Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential article in home economy. Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists, not in saving, but selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct, and that not an instinct of the noblest kind, may produce this false economy in perfection.”

This is very solid wisdom, because it bears in mind the great element of perspective in expense, which is so often forgotten or overlooked.

To revert to the preciousness and rarity of the really good female cook, to the artist in pots and pans. It was in 1833 that the Prince de Ligne, who had just lost his second wife, came to Paris to seek consolation. He lived temporarily in the Rue Richelieu. One evening in passing the lodge he became aware of a peculiarly alluring odour of cooking. He saw the concierge, an old woman of sixty, bending eagerly over a battered stewpan on a small charcoal fire, stirring some mess which evidently was exhaling this delicious odour. The Prince was one of the affable kind. He asked the poor old lady for a taste of her dish, which he liked so much that he gave her a double louis, and asked her how it happened that with such eminent culinary genius she was reduced to the porter’s lodge. She told him that she had once been head cook to a cardinal-archbishop. She had married a bad man who had spent all her savings. Although very poor, she added with conscious pride, and no longer disposing of the full batterie of an archiepiscopal kitchen, she flattered herself she could manage with a few bits of charcoal and a méchante casserole to cook with the best of them. Next day the lodge was vacant, the old concierge being on her way to Belœil, the Prince de Ligne’s residence, near Mons, in Belgium, where she presided for fifteen years over one of the best-appointed kitchens in the world.

Less fortunate than the Prince de Ligne was a middle-aged bachelor in Paris, a few years ago, who gave away an odd lottery ticket to his cook, a worthy and unprepossessing spinster. Shortly afterwards, to his amazement, he saw that this particular ticket had drawn the gros lot. He could not afford to part with such a valuable and valued servant, so he proposed marriage, was accepted, and duly became one with his cook before the maire with as little delay as possible. Directly after the marriage he asked his wife for the lottery ticket. “Oh, I gave that away,” she said, “to Jean, the coachman, to compensate him for our broken engagement.”

It has been the ambition of many highly placed men to become cooks. According to Miss Hill’s interesting book on Juniper Hall, and its colony of refugees, M. de Jaucourt is recorded to have said: “It seems to me that I have something of a vocation for cookery. I will take up that business. Do you know what our cook said to me this morning? He had been consulting me respecting his risking the danger of a return to France. ‘But you know, monsieur,’ he said, ‘an exception is made in favour of all artists.’ ‘Very well then,’ concluded M. de Jaucourt, ‘I will be an artist-cook also.’”

A notable instance of the chef who took a pride in his art and could not understand any one referring to him as “a mere cook” is the delightful hero of Mr. H. G. Wells’s story of “A Misunderstood Artist” in his “Select Conversations with an Uncle.” “They are always trying to pull me to earth. ‘Is it wholesome?’ they say;—‘Nutritious?’ I say to them: ‘I do not know. I am an artist. I do not care. It is beautiful.’—‘You rhyme?’ said the Poet. ‘No. My work is—more plastic. I cook.’”

There was a famous cook too, Laurens by name, who was chef for a long time to George III, and who combined with his culinary skill a wonderful flair for objects of art, so that the King bought a large number of the beautiful things which are even now at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle on the advice of this same Laurens. It has been said of him that he rarely made a mistake in buying, and that he attended the principal picture and art sales on the Continent on behalf of his royal master.

Some cheerful noodles have had much to say anent the want of imagination of the modern chef. This is the most arrant blatherumskite. The chef, who is only, after all, a superior servant, paid (and well, too) to carry out the gastronomic ideas of his master, or, if he lack such ideas, to pander to his ignorance, too frequently arrogates to himself a culinary wisdom which is not justified by results. The chef need only be a thoroughly good cook. The ideas, the suggestions, the genius behind the pots and pans, come from the gastronomic student. Neither Brillat-Savarin nor Grimod de la Reynière was a cook—nor was Thomas Walker, G. A. Sala, or E. S. Dallas, but they were all notable authorities. And they inspired the culinary art of their times by their knowledge, invention, and discrimination.

As a matter of fact, our chefs are unimaginative—and a good job too; because when a chef, be he never so clever, begins to launch out on novelties of his own invention, he almost invariably comes to grief. A really good maître d’hôtel may occasionally suggest a new dish, but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is merely a slight variation of something perfectly well known and appreciated. There may be a new garnishing, a trifling alteration in the manner of serving, and there is invariably a brand-new (and usually inappropriate) name, but the dish remains practically the same, despite its new christening-robe.

A fine joint of Southdown mutton has been recently renamed Béhague, but it remains sheep, and nothing is gained by the alteration save a further insight into the ignorance of the average chef. This is only a simple example, but it might be multiplied indefinitely. I have been served at a well-known restaurant with cutlets à la Trianon, which turned out to be our old and tried friend cutlets à la Réforme under a new title. In a like manner, but at another restaurant, an ordinary and excellent mousse de jambon paraded as jambon à la Véfour; Heavens and the chef only know why; and the one won’t tell, and the other doesn’t know.

Béhague, by the way, is, so to say, chefs’ French, which has much in common with dog Latin, if one may be allowed the comparison. Béhague will not be found in a French dictionary, but it is the new nom de cuisine for fine-quality mutton (such as Southdown); it has only lately come into use, and there seems no particular reason for it. Probably it was invented in “a moment of enthusiasm,” as the barber-artist remarked when he made a wig that just fitted a hazel-nut.

There are several different kinds of bad language. That used by chefs and maîtres d’hôtel on their menus is one of the worst. They are incorrigibly ignorant—and glory in it. It is an undeniable fact that the average menu, whether at a club or restaurant, contains usually at least a brace of orthographic howlers, while at the private house, an it boast a chef who writes the dinner programmes, the average is distinctly higher. I have encountered on an otherwise quite reputable card the extraordinary item Soufflet de fromage. The kind hostess had no intention of inflicting a box on the ears to the cheese, but had mistaken soufflet for soufflé. By such obvious errors are social friendships imperilled.

But I should like to go much further than this comparatively harmless example. No less an authority than Æneas Dallas in Kettner’s “Book of the Table” says: “It is a simple fact, of which I undertake to produce overwhelming evidence, that the language of the kitchen is a language ‘not understanded of the people.’ There are scores upon scores of its terms in daily use which are little understood and not at all fixed, and there is not upon the face of this earth an occupation which is carried on with so much of unintelligible jargon and chattering of apes as that of preparing food. Not only cooks, but also the most learned men in France have given up a great part of the language of the kitchen as beyond all comprehension. We sorely want Cadmus amongst the cooks. All the world remembers that he taught the Greeks their alphabet. It is well-nigh forgotten that he was cook to the King of Sidon. I cannot help thinking that cooks would do well to combine with their cookery, like Cadmus, a little attention to the alphabet.”

It is easy, of course, to ridicule such obvious ineptitudes as a dish of “breeches in the Royal fashion with velvet sauce” (Culotte à la Royale sauce velouté) or “capons’ wings in the sun” (ailes de poularde au soleil), but these are but trifling offences compared to the egregious lapses of grammar, history, and good taste which disfigure our menus. There is no culinary merit in describing an otherwise harmless dish of salmon as saumon Liberté au Triomphe d’Amour. It is simply gross and vulgar affectation. Let the cooks do their cooking properly and all will be well. Their weirdly esoteric naming of edible food is an insult of supererogation to the intelligence of the diner.

At the same time, due credit must be given to the chef for the part he has played in the general improvement of gastronomics and the art of feeding during the past two decades. The mere multiplication of restaurants is nothing; but the general improvement of the average menu is everything. Here, for instance, is the menu of a dinner of the year 1876, recommended by no less an authority than the late Fin Bec, Blanchard Jerrold, whose Epicure’s Year Books, Cupboard Papers, and Book of Menus are by way of being classics.

MENU.

Crécy aux Croûtons.
Printannier.
Saumon bouilli, sauce homard.
Filets de soles à la Joinville.
Whitebait.
Suprême de Volaille à l’écarlate.
Côtelettes d’Agneau aux concombres.
Cailles en aspic.
Selle de Mouton.
Bacon and beans.
Caneton.
Baba au Rhum.
Pouding glacé.

This was the dinner given by the late Edmund Yates on the occasion of the publication of the World newspaper. Observe its heaviness, clumsiness, and want of delicacy. Three fish dishes are ostentatious and redundant; three entrées simply kill one another; the quails are misplaced before the saddle; the bacon and beans is, of course, a joke. Altogether it is what we should call to-day a somewhat barbarian meal. Contrast therewith the following artistically fashioned programme of a dinner given by the Réunion des Gastronomes; it is practically le dernier mot of the culinary art.

MENU.

Huîtres Royales Natives.
Tortue Claire.
Filets de Soles des Gastronomes.
Suprême de Poularde Trianon.
Noisettes d’Agneau à la Carême.
Pommes Nouvelles Suzette.
Sorbets à la Palermitaine.
Bécassines à la Broche.
Salade.
Haricots Verts Nouveaux à la Crème.
Biscuit Glacé Mireille.
Corbeille de Friandises.
Dessert.

Nothing could be lighter or more graceful. There is naught that is over-elaborate or indigestible; on the contrary, the various flavours are carefully preserved, and there is a subtle completeness about the whole dinner which is very pleasing.

It was the late lamented Joseph, of the Tour d’Argent, the Savoy, and elsewhere, who once said: “Make the good things as plain as possible. God gave a special flavour to everything. Respect it. Do not destroy it by messing.”

Joseph, who, by the way, was born in Birmingham, was a mâitre d’hôtel of genius, though even he had his little weaknesses, and merely to watch the play of his wrists whilst he was “fatiguing” a salad for an especially favoured guest was a lesson in inspired enthusiasm. His rebuke to a rich American in Paris is historic. The man of dollars had ordered an elaborate déjeuner, and whilst toying with the hors-d’œuvre carefully tucked his serviette into his collar and spread it over his waistcoat, as is the way with some careless feeders. Joseph, rightly enough, resented this want of manners, and, approaching the guest, said to him politely, “Monsieur, I understand, wished to have déjeuner, not to be shaved.” The restaurant lost that American’s custom, but gained that of a host of nice and delicate feeders.