As man differs from the inferior animals in the variety of articles he
feeds upon, so he differs from them no less in the preparation of these
substances. Some animals, besides man, prepare their food in a
particular manner. The racoon (_ursus lutor_) is said to wash his roots
before he eats them; and the beaver stores his green boughs under water
that their bark and young twigs may remain juicy and palatable.
The action of fire, however, has never been applied to use by any animal
except man; not even monkies, with all their knacks of imitation, and
all their fondness for the comforts of a fire, have ever been observed
to put on a single billet of wood to keep up the fuel.
Domesticated animals, indeed, are brought to eat, and even to relish,
food which has been cooked by the action of heat.
The variety of productions introduced by our different modes of
preparing and preserving food is almost endless; and it appears
particularly so when we compare the usages, in this respect, of various
countries.
The savage of New South Wales is scarcely more knowing in the
preparation of food, by means of fire, than his neighbour, the kangaroo,
if the anecdote told by Turnbull be true, that one of these savages
plunged his hand into boiling water to take out a fish.
Some writers have humorously designated man to be “_a cooking animal_,”
and he really is so. It is one of the leading distinctions which
Providence has seen meet for wise purposes to establish, when it was
said that he might eat of the fruit of every tree, and the flesh of
every clean beast.
When we contemplate the aliments used by men in a civilized state of
existence, we soon become convinced that only a small part of our daily
food can be eaten in its natural state. Many of the substances used as
aliments, are disagreeable, and some even poisonous until they have been
cooked. Few of them are to be had at all seasons, although produced at
others in greater abundance than can be consumed.
The importance of a proper and competent knowledge of the true and
rational principles of cookery, must be obvious, when it is considered
that there is scarcely an individual, young or old, in any civilized
country, who has not some time or other suffered severely from errors
committed in the practice of this art.
“A skilful and well directed cookery abounds in chemical preparations
highly salutary. There exists a salubrity of aliments suited to every
age. Infancy, youth, maturity, and old age, each has its peculiar
adapted food, and that not merely applicable to the powers in full
vigour, but to stomachs feeble by nature, and to those debilitated by
excess.”[11]
[11] Ude’s Cookery, p. 25.--Ibid, 23.
Without abetting the unnatural and injurious appetites of the epicure,
or the blameable indulgences of the glutton, we shall not perhaps be far
out in our reckoning, if we assert, that almost every person is an
epicure in his own way.
There are amateurs in boiling potatoes, as particular in the details, as
others in dressing beaf-stakes to the utmost nicety of a single turn.
Lord Blainey, still more nice, informs us, that hams are not fit to be
eaten unless boiled in Champaign. _Helluos_ are not confined to salmon’s
bellies, but are to be found among the rudest peasants who love porridge
or frumenty--
A salmon’s belly, _Helluo_, was thy fate;
The doctor call’d, declares all help too late;
“Mercy!” cries _Helluo_, “mercy, on my soul!
Is there no hope?--Alas! then bring the jowl.”
_Pope’s Moral Essays._
Precision in mixing ingredients is as often and as closely laid down for
the coarsest dish of the peasant as for the most guarded receipe of the
Lady Bountiful of the village. The pleasures of the table have always
been highly appreciated and sedulously cultivated among civilized
people of every age and nation; and, in spite of the Stoic, it must be
admitted, that they are the first which we enjoy, the last we abandon,
and those of which we most frequently partake.
“Cookery is the soul of every pleasure, at all times and to all ages.
How many marriages have been the consequence of a meeting at dinner; how
much good fortune has been the result of a good supper, at what moment
of our existence are we happier than at table? there hatred and
animosity are lulled to sleep, and pleasure alone reigns.”
Pythagoras, in his golden verses, gives complete proof, that he was
particularly nice in the choice of food, and carefully points out what
will occasion indigestion and flatulency. He is precise in commanding
his disciples to “_abstain from beans_.” Apicius, declares that he
never knew a philosopher who refused to partake of a feast.
In later times, Dr. Johnson is well known to have been exceedingly fond
of good dinners, considering them as the highest enjoyment of human
life. The sentiments of our great moralist are a good answer to those
who think the pleasures of the table incompatible with intellectual
pursuits or mental superiority. “Some people,” says the Doctor, “have a
foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat;
for my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully, and I
look upon it that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind any
thing else.” Boswell, his biographer, says of him, “I never knew a man
who relished good eating more than he did: and when at table, he was
wholly absorbed in the business of the moment.” It was one of the
objects which displeased him so much in his Northern tour, that the
Scots were rather ignorant of the more refined arts of cookery. A lady
in the Isle of Mull, anxious to gratify him for once in a dinner, had an
excellent plum-pudding prepared, at some expense, and with the utmost
care; but, to her great mortification, the doctor would not taste it,
because, he said, “it is totally impossible to make a plum-pudding at
all fit to eat in the Isle of Mull.”
Another instance of this philosopher’s illiberal prejudice against
Scotch cookery, may also be mentioned. A lady, at whose table the Doctor
was dining, enquired how he liked their national dish, the _hotch
potch_, of which he was then partaking. “_Good enough for hogs_,” said
the surly philosopher. “Shall I help _you_ to a little more of it?”
retorted the lady. To Dr. Johnson we can add the names of two
distinguished physicians, Darwin, and Beddoes, both of whom were most
outrageous in their published works against the pleasures of good
living; they followed however a very different practice, from what they
prescribed to others, as none were more fond of good dinners than these
guardians of health.
Cardinal Wolsey, we should have thought, would have had something else
to mind than cooking and good eating. But no person was more anxious
than he, even in the whirl of the immense public business which he had
to transact, to have the most skilful cooks; for all Europe was
ransacked, and no expense spared, to procure culinary operators,
thoroughly acquainted with the multifarious operations of the spit, the
stew-pan, and the rolling-pin.
Sir Walter Scott, has been most happy in the illustration of our ancient
manners with respect to good eating, in the character of Athelstan, in
the Romance of Ivanhoe.
Count Rumford has not considered the pleasure of eating, and the means
that may be employed for increasing it, as unworthy the attention of a
philosopher, for he says, “the enjoyments which fall to the bulk of
mankind, are not so numerous as to render an attempt to increase them
superfluous. And even in regard to those who have it in their power to
gratify their appetites to the utmost extent of their wishes, it is
surely rendering them a very important service to shew them how they may
increase their pleasures without destroying their health.”
In the olden time, every man of consequence had his _magister coquorum_,
or _master cook_, without whom he would not think of making a day’s
journey; and it was often no easy matter to procure _master cooks_ of
talent.
By a passage of Cicero[12] we are led to understand, that among other
miseries of life, which constantly attended this consular personage and
eloquent orator, he laboured under the disappointment of not having an
excellent cook of his own; for, he says, “_coquus meus, præter jus
fervens, nihil potest imitari_.” _Except hot broth, my cook can do
nothing cleverly._
[12] _Fam._ ix. 20.
The salary of the Roman cooks was nearly £1000.[13] Mark Antony,
hearing Cleopatra, whom he had invited to a splendid supper, (and who
was as great a _gormand_ as she was handsome,) loudly praise the
elegance and delicacy of the dishes, sent for the cook, and presented
him with the unexpected gift of a corporate town.--_Municipium._
[13] Tabella Cibaria, ps. 19 and 20.
Even in our own times great skill in cookery is so highly praised by
many, that a very skilful cook can often command, in this metropolis, a
higher salary than a learned and pious curate.
His Majesty’s first and second cooks are esquires, by their office, from
a period to which, in the lawyer’s phrase, the memory of man is not to
the contrary. We are told by Dr. Pegge, that when Cardinal Otto, the
Pope’s Legate, was at Oxford, in the year 1248, his brother officiated
as _magister coquinæ_, an office which has always been held as a
situation of high trust and confidence.
We might defend the art of cookery on another principle, namely--on the
axiom recognized in the Malthusian Political Economy, that he who causes
two blades of grass to grow where only one grew before, is a benefactor
to his country and to human nature. Whether or not Malthus is quite
right in this, we are not competent to decide; we leave that to Say,
Godwin, Ricardo, and[14] Drummond. But certainly it must in many cases
be of the utmost consequence, for families in particular, when
embarrassed in circumstances, to make food go twice as far as without
the art and aid of rational cookery it could do. We would particularly
press this remark, as it is founded on numerous facts, and places the
art of cookery in a more interesting point of view than any of the other
circumstances which we have been considering.
[14] Principles of Currency, and Elements of Political
Economy--1820.
Cookery has often drawn down on itself the animadversions of both
moralists, physicians, and wits, who have made it a subject for their
vituperations and their ridicule.
So early as the time of the patriarch Isaac, the sacred historian casts
blame upon Esau for being epicurean enough to transfer his birth-right
for a mess of pottage.
Jacob is blamed for making savoury meat with a kid for his father, with
a view to rob Esau of the paternal blessing.
Diogenes, the Cynic, meeting a young man who was going to a feast, took
him up in the street and carried him home to his friends, as one who was
running into evident danger had he not prevented him. The whole tribe,
indeed, of the Stoics and Cynics, laughed at cookery, pretending, in
their vanity and pride, to be above the desire of eating niceties.
Lucian, with his inexhaustible satire, most effectually and humourously
exposed these their pretences.
In our own times, we have had writers of eminence who have attacked the
use of a variety of food as a dreadful evil. “Should we not think a man
mad,” says Addison, “who at one meal will devour fowl, flesh, and fish;
swallow oil, and vinegar, salt, wines, and spices; throw down sallads of
twenty different herbs, sauces of an hundred ingredients, confections,
and fruits of numberless sweets and flavours? What unnatural effects
must such a medley produce in the body? For my part, when I behold a
table set out in all its magnificence, I fancy, that I see gouts and
dropsies, fevers and lethargies, and other innumerable distempers, lying
in ambuscade among the dishes.”
All this, and the like is, no doubt, very plausible, and very fine, and,
like many other fine speeches of modern reformers, it is more fine than
just. It is indeed as good a theory as may be, that cookery is the
source of most, or all, of our distempers; but withal it is _a mere
theory_, and only true in a very limited degree. The truth is, that it
is not cookery which is to blame, if we surfeit ourselves with its good
dishes; but our own sensual and insatiable appetite, and gluttony, which
prompt us to seek their gratification at the expense even of our health.
Savages, whose cookery is in the rudest state, are more apt to over-eat
themselves than the veriest glutton of a luxurious and refined people;
a fact, which of itself, is sufficient to prove, that it is not cookery
which is the cause of gluttony and surfeiting. The savage, indeed,
suffers less from his gluttony than the sedentary and refined gormand;
for, after sleeping, sometimes for a whole day, after gorging himself
with food, hunger again drives him forth to the chace, in which he soon
gets rid of the ill-effects of his overloaded stomach. Surely cookery is
not to blame for the effects of gluttony, indolence, and sedentary
occupations; yet it does appear, that all its ill effects are
erroneously charged to the account of the refined art of cooking.
The defence of cookery, however, which we thus bring forward to repel
misrepresentation, applies only to the art of preparing good,
nutritious, and wholesome food.
We cannot say one word in defence of the wretched and injurious methods
but too often practised, under the name of cookery, and the highly
criminal practices of adulterating food with substances deleterious to
health. On this subject we have spoken elsewhere.[15]
[15] A treatise on adulterations of food, and culinary poisons,
exhibiting the fraudulent sophistications of bread, beer, wine,
spirituous liquors, tea, coffee, cream, confectionary, vinegar,
mustard, pepper, cheese, olive oil, pickles, and other articles
employed in domestic economy, and methods of detecting them.--Third
edition, 1821.
“A good dinner[16] is one of the greatest enjoyments of human life; but
the practice of cookery is attended with not only so many disgusting and
disagreeable circumstances, and even dangers, that we ought to have some
regard for those who encounter them for our pleasure.”
[16] The Cook’s Oracle.--Preface, p. xxxv.