No one who has read the last chapter, and Chapter II can fail to be
convinced that cooking is not only a science, but the most important
of all sciences--the science on which our health depends more than on
any other; a science concerning which Sir Henry Thompson has truly said
that an adequate recognition of its value in prolonging healthy life
and in promoting cheerful temper, prevalent good nature, and improved
moral tone, "would achieve almost a revolution in the habits of a large
part of the community."
Nor is cookery merely a science, it is also an art. It can and will be
classed in the future as one of the fine arts.
A famous French lawyer once declared that he would not believe in the
advent of real civilization until a chef had been elected a member of
the Institute of Arts and Sciences.
The details given in the preceding chapter show how a good cook can
vary the Flavors of food as a composer varies his orchestral colors;
and if she does her work with intelligence and _con amore_ she can get
genuine artistic delight therefrom. At the same time she will have the
moral satisfaction of knowing that she is giving gastronomic pleasure
to those who benefit by her art.
A cook can be genuinely creative, inventing new sauces, new flavors,
new combinations, new dishes, with appropriate names for them, thus
acquiring universal fame, as did Carême and many others, among them
Béchamel, whose name has become a household word the world over, not
because he was a marquis but because he invented a new sauce.
From a moral point of view, cooking is one of the noblest of the arts.
The old adage that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach is
often sneered at as being materialistic if not coarse. It is no such
thing; it simply hints at the truth that it is extremely difficult for
a man to be amiable and loving when he suffers the pangs of dyspepsia.
On this subject one of the 30,000 persons who wrote to the London
"Telegraph" in answer to the question, "Is Marriage A Failure?" made
some remarks which every young woman who is, or expects to be, a wife
should ponder deeply:
Where the husband is an intellectual man, and engaged in
intellectual pursuits, good cookery assumes a tenfold
importance, as the want of physical exercise entailed by
most intellectual occupations renders it imperative that all
food eaten shall be of first-class quality and cooked to
perfection. The most intellectual man in existence ceases to
be intellectual while he has a couple of pounds or so of bad
food slowly decaying in his stomach instead of digesting. Is
"A Young Girl's" ideal of married life to have the man she
loves always bright and cheerful, always intellectual, and
generally at his best, and to have as strong and healthy,
and even brighter and better company, at sixty and seventy
than at twenty-four? I am sure it is. Then let her give him a
chance of realizing that ideal by giving the utmost attention
to his dinners, so that the food he eats is on his stomach
and brain like feathers, and not like lead. If she wishes
him to degenerate into an ill-tempered, exacting grumbler
before forty, or to prefer dining anywhere rather than at
home, then let her devote herself wholly to the drawing-room
department of the house, and leave the kitchen and the
dining-room to hired servants. Good cooks quickly become bad
ones where the mistress neglects personal superintendence,
and just so long as ladies have a soul above cookery will
ill-temper and dyspepsia, with all their consequent train of
ills and discomforts, be the rule, and not the exception, in
middle-class English homes.