COOKERY

We in America have the raw material of provision in greater

abundance than any other nation. There is no country where an ample,

well-furnished table is more easily spread, and for that reason,

perhaps, none where the bounties of Providence are more generally

neglected. I do not mean to say that the traveler through the length

and breadth of our land could not, on the whole, find an average of

comfortable subsistence; yet, considering that our resources are

greater than those of any other civilized people, our results are

comparatively poorer.

It is said that, a list of the summer vegetables which are exhibited

on New York hotel tables being shown to a French _artiste_, he

declared that to serve such a dinner properly would take till

midnight. I recollect how I was once struck with our national

plenteousness on returning from a Continental tour, and going directly

from the ship to a New York hotel, in the bounteous season of autumn.

For months I had been habituated to my neat little bits of chop or

poultry garnished with the inevitable cauliflower or potato, which

seemed to be the sole possibility after the reign of green peas was

over. Now I sat down all at once to a carnival of vegetables,--ripe,

juicy tomatoes, raw or cooked; cucumbers in brittle slices; rich,

yellow sweet potatoes; broad Lima-beans, and beans of other and

various names; tempting ears of Indian corn steaming in enormous

piles, and great smoking tureens of the savory succotash, an Indian

gift to the table for which civilization need not blush; sliced

egg-plant in delicate fritters; and marrow squashes, of creamy pulp

and sweetness: a rich variety, embarrassing to the appetite, and

perplexing to the choice. Verily, the thought has often impressed

itself on my mind that the vegetarian doctrine preached in America

left a man quite as much as he had capacity to eat or enjoy, and that

in the midst of such tantalizing abundance he really lost the apology

which elsewhere bears him out in preying upon his less gifted and

accomplished animal neighbors.

But with all this, the American table, taken as a whole, is inferior

to that of England or France. It presents a fine abundance of

material, carelessly and poorly treated. The management of food is

nowhere in the world, perhaps, more slovenly and wasteful. Everything

betokens that want of care that waits on abundance; there are great

capabilities and poor execution. A tourist through England can seldom

fail, at the quietest country inn, of finding himself served with the

essentials of English table comfort,--his mutton-chop done to a turn,

his steaming little private apparatus for concocting his own tea, his

choice pot of marmalade or slice of cold ham, and his delicate rolls

and creamy butter, all served with care and neatness. In France, one

never asks in vain for delicious _cafe-au-lait_, good bread and

butter, a nice omelet, or some savory little portion of meat with a

French name. But to a tourist taking like chance in American country

fare, what is the prospect? What is the coffee? what the tea? and the

meat? and, above all, the butter?

In lecturing on cookery, as on housebuilding, I divide the subject

into, not four, but five grand elements: first, Bread; second, Butter;

third, Meat; fourth, Vegetables; and fifth, Tea,--by which I mean,

generically, all sorts of warm, comfortable drinks served out in

teacups, whether they be called tea, coffee, chocolate, broma, or what

not.

I affirm that, if these five departments are all perfect, the great

ends of domestic cookery are answered, so far as the comfort and

well-being of life are concerned. I am aware that there exists another

department, which is often regarded by culinary amateurs and young

aspirants as the higher branch and very collegiate course of practical

cookery; to wit, confectionery, by which I mean to designate all

pleasing and complicated compounds of sweets and spices, devised not

for health and nourishment, and strongly suspected of interfering with

both,--mere tolerated gratifications of the palate, which we eat, not

with the expectation of being benefited, but only with the hope of not

being injured by them. In this large department rank all sorts of

cakes, pies, preserves, ices, etc. I shall have a word or two to say

under this head before I have done. I only remark now that, in my

tours about the country, I have often had a virulent ill-will excited

towards these works of culinary supererogation, because I thought

their excellence was attained by treading under foot and disregarding

the five grand essentials. I have sat at many a table garnished with

three or four kinds of well-made cake, compounded with citron and

spices and all imaginable good things, where the meat was tough and

greasy, the bread some hot preparation of flour, lard, saleratus, and

acid, and the butter unutterably detestable. At such tables I have

thought that, if the mistress of the feast had given the care, time,

and labor to preparing the simple items of bread, butter, and meat

that she evidently had given to the preparation of these extras, the

lot of a traveler might be much more comfortable. Evidently she never

had thought of these common articles as constituting a good table. So

long as she had puff pastry, rich black cake, clear jelly, and

preserves, she seemed to consider that such unimportant matters as

bread, butter, and meat could take care of themselves. It is the same

inattention to common things as that which leads people to build

houses with stone fronts and window-caps and expensive front-door

trimmings, without bathing-rooms or fireplaces or ventilators.

Those who go into the country looking for summer board in farmhouses

know perfectly well that a table where the butter is always fresh, the

tea and coffee of the best kinds and well made, and the meats properly

kept, dressed, and served, is the one table of a hundred, the fabulous

enchanted island. It seems impossible to get the idea into the minds

of people that what is called common food, carefully prepared,

becomes, in virtue of that very care and attention, a delicacy,

superseding the necessity of artificially compounded dainties.

To begin, then, with the very foundation of a good table,--_Bread_:

What ought it to be? It should be light, sweet, and tender.

This matter of lightness is the distinctive line between savage and

civilized bread. The savage mixes simple flour and water into balls of

paste, which he throws into boiling water, and which come out solid,

glutinous masses, of which his common saying is, "Man eat dis, he no

die,"--which a facetious traveler who was obliged to subsist on it

interpreted to mean, "Dis no kill you, nothing will." In short, it

requires the stomach of a wild animal or of a savage to digest this

primitive form of bread, and of course more or less attention in all

civilized modes of bread making is given to producing lightness. By

lightness is meant simply that the particles are to be separated from

each other by little holes or air-cells; and all the different methods

of making light bread are neither more nor less than the formation in

bread of these air-cells.

So far as we know, there are four practicable methods of aerating

bread, namely, by fermentation; by effervescence of an acid and an

alkali; by aerated egg, or egg which has been filled with air by the

process of beating; and, lastly, by pressure of some gaseous substance

into the paste, by a process much resembling the impregnation of water

in a soda fountain. All these have one and the same object,--to give

us the cooked particles of our flour separated by such permanent

air-cells as will enable the stomach more readily to digest them.

A very common mode of aerating bread in America is by the effervescence

of an acid and an alkali in the flour. The carbonic acid gas thus formed

produces minute air-cells in the bread, or, as the cook says, makes it

light. When this process is performed with exact attention to

chemical laws, so that the acid and alkali completely neutralize each

other, leaving no overplus of either, the result is often very

palatable. The difficulty is, that this is a happy conjunction of

circumstances which seldom occurs. The acid most commonly employed is

that of sour milk, and, as milk has many degrees of sourness, the rule

of a certain quantity of alkali to the pint must necessarily produce

very different results at different times. As an actual fact, where

this mode of making bread prevails, as we lament to say it does to a

great extent in this country, one finds five cases of failure to one

of success. It is a woful thing that the daughters of New England have

abandoned the old respectable mode of yeast brewing and bread raising

for this specious substitute, so easily made, and so seldom well

made. The green, clammy, acrid substance called biscuit, which many

of our worthy republicans are obliged to eat in these days, is

wholly unworthy of the men and women of the Republic. Good patriots

ought not to be put off in that way,--they deserve better fare.

As an occasional variety, as a household convenience for obtaining

bread or biscuit at a moment's notice, the process of effervescence

may be retained; but we earnestly entreat American housekeepers, in

Scriptural language, to stand in the way and ask for the old paths,

and return to the good yeast-bread of their sainted grandmothers.

If acid and alkali must be used, by all means let them be mixed in due

proportions. No cook should be left to guess and judge for herself

about this matter. There is an article, called "Preston's Infallible

Yeast Powder," which is made by chemical rule, and produces very

perfect results. The use of this obviates the worst dangers in making

bread by effervescence.

Of all processes of aeration in bread-making, the oldest and most

time-honored is by fermentation. That this was known in the days of

our Saviour is evident from the forcible simile in which he compares

the silent permeating force of truth in human society to the very

familiar household process of raising bread by a little yeast.

There is, however, one species of yeast, much used in some parts of

the country, against which I have to enter my protest. It is called

salt-risings, or milk-risings, and is made by mixing flour, milk, and

a little salt together and leaving them to ferment. The bread thus

produced is often very attractive, when new and made with great care.

It is white and delicate, with fine, even air-cells. It has, however,

when kept, some characteristics which remind us of the terms in which

our old English Bible describes the effect of keeping the manna of the

ancient Israelites, which we are informed, in words more explicit than

agreeable, "stank, and bred worms." If salt-rising bread does not

fulfill the whole of this unpleasant description, it certainly does

emphatically a part of it. The smell which it has in baking, and when

more than a day old, suggests the inquiry whether it is the saccharine

or the putrid fermentation with which it is raised. Whoever breaks a

piece of it after a day or two will often see minute filaments or

clammy strings drawing out from the fragments, which, with the

unmistakable smell, will cause him to pause before consummating a

nearer acquaintance.

The fermentation of flour by means of brewer's or distiller's yeast

produces, if rightly managed, results far more palatable and

wholesome. The only requisites for success in it are, first, good

materials, and, second, great care in a few small things. There are

certain low-priced or damaged kinds of flour which can never by any

kind of domestic chemistry be made into good bread; and to those

persons whose stomachs forbid them to eat gummy, glutinous paste,

under the name of bread, there is no economy in buying these poor

brands, even at half the price of good flour.

But good flour and good yeast being supposed, with a temperature

favorable to the development of fermentation, the whole success of the

process depends on the thorough diffusion of the proper proportion

of yeast through the whole mass, and on stopping the subsequent

fermentation at the precise and fortunate point. The true housewife

makes her bread the sovereign of her kitchen,--its behests must be

attended to in all critical points and moments, no matter what else

be postponed. She who attends to her bread when she has done this,

and arranged that, and performed the other, very often finds that the

forces of nature will not wait for her. The snowy mass, perfectly

mixed, kneaded with care and strength, rises in its beautiful

perfection till the moment comes for fixing the air-cells by

baking. A few minutes now, and the acetous fermentation will begin,

and the whole result be spoiled. Many bread-makers pass in utter

carelessness over this sacred and mysterious boundary. Their oven has

cake in it, or they are skimming jelly, or attending to some other

of the so-called higher branches of cookery, while the bread is

quickly passing into the acetous stage. At last, when they are ready

to attend to it, they find that it has been going its own way,--it is

so sour that the pungent smell is plainly perceptible. Now the

saleratus-bottle is handed down, and a quantity of the dissolved

alkali mixed with the paste,--an expedient sometimes making itself

too manifest by greenish streaks or small acrid spots in the bread. As

the result, we have a beautiful article spoiled,--bread without

sweetness, if not absolutely sour.

In the view of many, lightness is the only property required in this

article. The delicate, refined sweetness which exists in carefully

kneaded bread, baked just before it passes to the extreme point of

fermentation, is something of which they have no conception; and thus

they will even regard this process of spoiling the paste by the

acetous fermentation, and then rectifying that acid by effervescence

with an alkali, as something positively meritorious. How else can they

value and relish baker's loaves, such as some are, drugged with

ammonia and other disagreeable things, light indeed, so light that

they seem to have neither weight nor substance, but with no more

sweetness or taste than so much white cotton?

Some persons prepare bread for the oven by simply mixing it in the

mass, without kneading, pouring it into pans, and suffering it to rise

there. The air-cells in bread thus prepared are coarse and uneven; the

bread is as inferior in delicacy and nicety to that which is well

kneaded as a raw Irish servant to a perfectly educated and refined

lady. The process of kneading seems to impart an evenness to the

minute air-cells, a fineness of texture, and a tenderness and

pliability to the whole substance, that can be gained in no other

way.

The divine principle of beauty has its reign over bread as well as

over all other things; it has its laws of aesthetics; and that bread

which is so prepared that it can be formed into separate and

well-proportioned loaves, each one carefully worked and moulded,

will develop the most beautiful results. After being moulded, the

loaves should stand a little while, just long enough to allow the

fermentation going on in them to expand each little air-cell to

the point at which it stood before it was worked down, and then

they should be immediately put into the oven.

Many a good thing, however, is spoiled in the oven. We cannot but

regret, for the sake of bread, that our old steady brick ovens

have been almost universally superseded by those of ranges and

cooking-stoves, which are infinite in their caprices, and forbid all

general rules. One thing, however, may be borne in mind as a

principle,--that the excellence of bread in all its varieties,

plain or sweetened, depends on the perfection of its air-cells,

whether produced by yeast, egg, or effervescence; that one of the

objects of baking is to fix these air-cells, and that the quicker this

can be done through the whole mass, the better will the result be.

When cake or bread is made heavy by baking too quickly, it is

because the immediate formation of the top crust hinders the

exhaling of the moisture in the centre, and prevents the air-cells

from cooking. The weight also of the crust pressing down on the

doughy air-cells below destroys them, producing that horror of good

cooks, a heavy streak. The problem in baking, then, is the quick

application of heat rather below than above the loaf, and its steady

continuance till all the air-cells are thoroughly dried into

permanent consistency. Every housewife must watch her own oven to

know how this can be best accomplished.

Bread-making can be cultivated to any extent as a fine art; and the

various kinds of biscuit, tea-rusks, twists, rolls, into which bread

may be made, are much better worth a housekeeper's ambition than the

getting up of rich and expensive cake or confections. There are also

varieties of material which are rich in good effects. Unbolted flour,

altogether more wholesome than the fine wheat, and when properly

prepared more palatable, rye-flour and corn-meal, each affording a

thousand attractive possibilities,--each and all of these come under

the general laws of breadstuffs, and are worth a careful attention.

A peculiarity of our American table, particularly in the Southern and

Western States, is the constant exhibition of various preparations of

hot bread. In many families of the South and West, bread in loaves to

be eaten cold is an article quite unknown. The effect of this kind of

diet upon the health has formed a frequent subject of remark among

travelers; but only those know the full mischiefs of it who have been

compelled to sojourn for a length of time in families where it is

maintained. The unknown horrors of dyspepsia from bad bread are a

topic over which we willingly draw a veil.

* * * * *

Next to bread comes _butter_,--on which we have to say that, when we

remember what butter is in civilized Europe, and compare it with what

it is in America, we wonder at the forbearance and lenity of travelers

in their strictures on our national commissariat.

Butter in England, France, and Italy is simply solidified cream, with

all the sweetness of the cream in its taste, freshly churned each day,

and unadulterated by salt. At the present moment, when salt is five

cents a pound and butter fifty, we Americans are paying, I should

judge from the taste, for about one pound of salt to every ten of

butter, and those of us who have eaten the butter of France and

England do this with rueful recollections.

There is, it is true, an article of butter made in the American style

with salt, which, in its own kind and way, has a merit not inferior to

that of England and France. Many prefer it, and it certainly takes a

rank equally respectable with the other. It is yellow, hard, and

worked so perfectly free from every particle of buttermilk that it

might make the voyage of the world without spoiling. It is salted, but

salted with care and delicacy, so that it may be a question whether

even a fastidious Englishman might not prefer its golden solidity to

the white, creamy freshness of his own. Now I am not for universal

imitation of foreign customs, and where I find this butter made

perfectly I call it our American style, and am not ashamed of it. I

only regret that this article is the exception, and not the rule, on

our tables. When I reflect on the possibilities which beset the

delicate stomach in this line, I do not wonder that my venerated

friend Dr. Mussey used to close his counsels to invalids with the

direction, "And don't eat grease on your bread."

America must, I think, have the credit of manufacturing and putting

into market more bad butter than all that is made in all the rest of

the world together. The varieties of bad tastes and smells which

prevail in it are quite a study. This has a cheesy taste, that a

mouldy,--this is flavored with cabbage, and that again with turnip;

and another has the strong, sharp savor of rancid animal fat. These

varieties, I presume, come from the practice of churning only at long

intervals, and keeping the cream meanwhile in unventilated cellars or

dairies, the air of which is loaded with the effluvia of vegetable

substances. No domestic articles are so sympathetic as those of the

milk tribe: they readily take on the smell and taste of any

neighboring substance, and hence the infinite variety of flavors on

which one mournfully muses who has late in autumn to taste twenty

firkins of butter in hopes of finding one which will simply not be

intolerable on his winter table.

A matter for despair as regards bad butter is that, at the tables

where it is used, it stands sentinel at the door to bar your way to

every other kind of food. You turn from your dreadful half-slice of

bread, which fills your mouth with bitterness, to your beefsteak,

which proves virulent with the same poison; you think to take refuge

in vegetable diet, and find the butter in the string-beans, and

polluting the innocence of early peas; it is in the corn, in the

succotash, in the squash; the beets swim in it, the onions have it

poured over them. Hungry and miserable, you think to solace yourself

at the dessert; but the pastry is cursed, the cake is acrid with the

same plague. You are ready to howl with despair, and your misery is

great upon you, especially if this is a table where you have taken

board for three months with your delicate wife and four small

children. Your case is dreadful,--and it is hopeless, because long

usage and habit have rendered your host perfectly incapable of

discovering what is the matter. "Don't like the butter, sir? I assure

you I paid an extra price for it, and it's the very best in the

market. I looked over as many as a hundred tubs, and picked out this

one." You are dumb, but not less despairing.

Yet the process of making good butter is a very simple one. To keep

the cream in a perfectly pure, cool atmosphere, to churn while it is

yet sweet, to work out the buttermilk thoroughly, and to add salt with

such discretion as not to ruin the fine, delicate flavor of the fresh

cream,--all this is quite simple, so simple that one wonders at

thousands and millions of pounds of butter yearly manufactured which

are merely a hobgoblin-bewitchment of cream into foul and loathsome

poisons.

* * * * *

The third head of my discourse is that of _Meat_, of which America

furnishes, in the gross material, enough to spread our tables royally,

were it well cared for and served.

The faults in the meat generally furnished to us are, first, that it

is too new. A beefsteak, which three or four days of keeping might

render practicable, is served up to us palpitating with freshness,

with all the toughness of animal muscle yet warm. In the Western

country, the traveler, on approaching an hotel, is often saluted by

the last shrieks of the chickens which half an hour afterward are

presented to him a la spread-eagle for his dinner. The example of the

Father of the Faithful, most wholesome to be followed in so many

respects, is imitated only in the celerity with which the young calf,

tender and good, was transformed into an edible dish for hospitable

purposes. But what might be good housekeeping in a nomadic Emir, in

days when refrigerators were yet in the future, ought not to be so

closely imitated as it often is in our own land.

In the next place, there is a woful lack of nicety in the butcher's

work of cutting and preparing meat. Who that remembers the neatly

trimmed mutton-chop of an English inn, or the artistic little circle

of lamb-chop fried in bread-crumbs coiled around a tempting centre of

spinach which can always be found in France, can recognize any family

resemblance to these dapper civilized preparations in those coarse,

roughly hacked strips of bone, gristle, and meat which are commonly

called mutton-chop in America? There seems to be a large dish of

something resembling meat, in which each fragment has about two or

three edible morsels, the rest being composed of dry and burnt skin,

fat, and ragged bone.

Is it not time that civilization should learn to demand somewhat

more care and nicety in the modes of preparing what is to be cooked

and eaten? Might not some of the refinement and trimness which

characterize the preparations of the European market be with

advantage introduced into our own? The housekeeper who wishes to

garnish her table with some of those nice things is stopped in the

outset by the butcher. Except in our large cities, where some

foreign travel may have created the demand, it seems impossible to

get much in this line that is properly prepared.

I am aware that, if this is urged on the score of aesthetics, the ready

reply will be, "Oh, we can't give time here in America to go into

niceties and French whim-whams!" But the French mode of doing almost

all practical things is based on that true philosophy and utilitarian

good sense which characterize that seemingly thoughtless people.

Nowhere is economy a more careful study, and their market is

artistically arranged to this end. The rule is so to cut their meats

that no portion designed to be cooked in a certain manner shall have

wasteful appendages which that mode of cooking will spoil. The French

soup kettle stands ever ready to receive the bones, the thin fibrous

flaps, the sinewy and gristly portions, which are so often included in

our roasts or broilings, which fill our plates with unsightly debris,

and finally make an amount of blank waste for which we pay our butcher

the same price that we pay for what we have eaten.

The dead waste of our clumsy, coarse way of cutting meats is immense.

For example, at the beginning of the present season, the part of a

lamb denominated leg and loin, or hind-quarter, sold for thirty cents

a pound. Now this includes, besides the thick, fleshy portions, a

quantity of bone, sinew, and thin fibrous substance, constituting

full one third of the whole weight. If we put it into the oven entire,

in the usual manner, we have the thin parts overdone, and the skinny

and fibrous parts utterly dried up, by the application of the amount

of heat necessary to cook the thick portion. Supposing the joint to

weigh six pounds, at thirty cents, and that one third of the weight is

so treated as to become perfectly useless, we throw away sixty cents.

Of a piece of beef at twenty-five cents a pound, fifty cents' worth is

often lost in bone, fat, and burnt skin.

The fact is, this way of selling and cooking meat in large, gross

portions is of English origin, and belongs to a country where all the

customs of society spring from a class who have no particular occasion

for economy. The practice of minute and delicate division comes from a

nation which acknowledges the need of economy, and has made it a

study. A quarter of lamb in this mode of division would be sold in

three nicely prepared portions. The thick part would be sold by

itself, for a neat, compact little roast; the rib-bones would be

artistically separated, and all the edible matters scraped away would

form those delicate dishes of lamb-chop which, fried in bread-crumbs

to a golden brown, are so ornamental and so palatable a side-dish; the

trimmings which remain after this division would be destined to the

soup kettle or stew pan. In a French market is a little portion for

every purse, and the far-famed and delicately flavored soups and stews

which have arisen out of French economy are a study worth a

housekeeper's attention. Not one atom of food is wasted in the French

modes of preparation; even tough animal cartilages and sinews, instead

of appearing burnt and blackened in company with the roast meat to

which they happen to be related, are treated according to their own

laws, and come out either in savory soups, or those fine, clear

meat-jellies which form a garnish no less agreeable to the eye than

palatable to the taste.

Whether this careful, economical, practical style of meat cooking

can ever to any great extent be introduced into our kitchens now is a

question. Our butchers are against it; our servants are wedded to

the old wholesale wasteful ways, which seem to them easier because

they are accustomed to them. A cook who will keep and properly tend

a soup kettle which shall receive and utilize all that the coarse

preparations of the butcher would require her to trim away, who

understands the art of making the most of all these remains, is a

treasure scarcely to be hoped for. If such things are to be done,

it must be primarily through the educated brain of cultivated women

who do not scorn to turn their culture and refinement upon domestic

problems.

When meats have been properly divided--so that each portion can

receive its own appropriate style of treatment--next comes the

consideration of the modes of cooking. These may be divided into two

great general classes: those where it is desired to keep the juices

within the meat, as in baking, broiling, and frying; and those whose

object is to extract the juice and dissolve the fibre, as in the

making of soups and stews. In the first class of operations, the

process must be as rapid as may consist with the thorough cooking

of all the particles. In this branch of cookery, doing quickly is

doing well. The fire must be brisk, the attention alert. The

introduction of cooking-stoves offers to careless domestics

facilities for gradually drying up meats, and despoiling them of

all flavor and nutriment,--facilities which appear to be very

generally laid hold of. They have almost banished the genuine,

old-fashioned roast meat from our tables, and left in its stead dried

meats with their most precious and nutritive juices evaporated. How

few cooks, unassisted, are competent to the simple process of broiling

a beefsteak or mutton-chop! how very generally one has to choose

between these meats gradually dried away, or burned on the outside

and raw within! Yet in England these articles _never_ come on

table done amiss; their perfect cooking is as absolute a certainty

as the rising of the sun.

No one of these rapid processes of cooking, however, is so generally

abused as frying. The frying-pan has awful sins to answer for. What

untold horrors of dyspepsia have arisen from its smoky depths, like

the ghosts from witches' caldrons! The fizzle of frying meat is as a

warning knell on many an ear, saying, "Touch not, taste not, if you

would not burn and writhe!"

Yet those who have traveled abroad remember that some of the lightest,

most palatable, and most digestible preparations of meat have come

from this dangerous source. But we fancy quite other rites and

ceremonies inaugurated the process, and quite other hands performed

its offices, than those known to our kitchens. Probably the delicate

_cote-lettes_ of France are not flopped down into half-melted grease,

there gradually to warm and soak and fizzle, while Biddy goes in and

out on her other ministrations, till finally, when thoroughly

saturated and dinner-hour impends, she bethinks herself, and crowds

the fire below to a roaring heat, and finishes the process by a smart

burn, involving the kitchen and surrounding precincts in volumes of

Stygian gloom.

From such preparations has arisen the very current medical opinion

that fried meats are indigestible. They are indigestible if they are

greasy; but French cooks have taught us that a thing has no more need

to be greasy because emerging from grease than Venus had to be salt

because she rose from the sea.

There are two ways of frying employed by the French cook. One is, to

immerse the article to be cooked in _boiling_ fat, with an emphasis on

the present participle,--and the philosophical principle is, so

immediately to crisp every pore at the first moment or two of

immersion as effectually to seal the interior against the intrusion of

greasy particles; it can then remain as long as may be necessary

thoroughly to cook it, without imbibing any more of the boiling fluid

than if it were enclosed in an eggshell. The other method is, to rub a

perfectly smooth iron surface with just enough of some oily substance

to prevent the meat from adhering, and cook it with a quick heat, as

cakes are baked on a griddle. In both these cases there must be the

most rapid application of heat that can be made without burning, and

by the adroitness shown in working out this problem the skill of the

cook is tested. Any one whose cook attains this important secret will

find fried things quite as digestible and often more palatable than

any other.

In the second department of meat cookery, to wit, the slow and gradual

application of heat for the softening and dissolution of its fibre and

the extraction of its juices, common cooks are equally untrained.

Where is the so-called cook who understands how to prepare soups and

stews? These are precisely the articles in which a French kitchen

excels. The soup kettle, made with a double bottom to prevent burning,

is a permanent, ever-present institution, and the coarsest and most

impracticable meats distilled through that alembic come out again in

soups, jellies, or savory stews. The toughest cartilage, even the

bones, being first cracked, are here made to give forth their hidden

virtues, and to rise in delicate and appetizing forms. One great law

governs all these preparations: the application of heat must be

gradual, steady, long protracted, never reaching the point of active

boiling. Hours of quiet simmering dissolve all dissoluble parts,

soften the sternest fibre, and unlock every minute cell in which

Nature has stored away her treasures of nourishment. This careful and

protracted application of heat and the skillful use of flavors

constitute the two main points in all those nice preparations of meat

for which the French have so many names,--processes by which a

delicacy can be imparted to the coarsest and cheapest food superior to

that of the finest articles under less philosophic treatment.

French soups and stews are a study, and they would not be an

unprofitable one to any person who wishes to live with comfort and

even elegance on small means.

John Bull looks down from the sublime of ten thousand a year on French

kickshaws, as he calls them: "Give me my meat cooked so I may know

what it is!" An ox roasted whole is dear to John's soul, and his

kitchen arrangements are Titanic. What magnificent rounds and sirloins

of beef, revolving on self-regulating spits, with a rich click of

satisfaction, before grates piled with roaring fires! Let us do

justice to the royal cheer. Nowhere are the charms of pure,

unadulterated animal food set forth in more imposing style. For John

is rich, and what does he care for odds and ends and parings? Has he

not all the beasts of the forest, and the cattle on a thousand hills?

What does he want of economy? But his brother Jean has not ten

thousand pounds a year,--nothing like it; but he makes up for the

slenderness of his purse by boundless fertility of invention and

delicacy of practice. John began sneering at Jean's soups and ragouts,

but all John's modern sons and daughters send to Jean for their cooks,

and the sirloins of England rise up and do obeisance to this Joseph

with a white apron who comes to rule in their kitchens.

There is no animal fibre that will not yield itself up to long-continued,

steady heat. But the difficulty with almost any of the common servants

who call themselves cooks is, that they have not the smallest notion of

the philosophy of the application of heat. Such a one will complacently

tell you, concerning certain meats, that the harder you boil them the

harder they grow,--an obvious fact, which, under her mode of treatment

by an indiscriminate galloping boil, has frequently come under her

personal observation. If you tell her that such meat must stand for six

hours in a heat just below the boiling-point, she will probably answer,

"Yes, ma'am," and go on her own way. Or she will let it stand till it

burns to the bottom of the kettle,--a most common termination of the

experiment. The only way to make sure of the matter is either to import a

French kettle, or to fit into an ordinary kettle a false bottom, such

as any tinman may make, that shall leave a space of an inch or two

between the meat and the fire. This kettle may be maintained as a

constant _habitue_ of the range, and into it the cook may be instructed

to throw all the fibrous trimmings of meat, all the gristle, tendons,

and bones, having previously broken up these last with a mallet.

Such a kettle will furnish the basis for clear, rich soups or other

palatable dishes. Clear soup consists of the dissolved juices of the

meat and gelatine of the bones, cleared from the fat and fibrous

portions by straining when cold. The grease, which rises to the top of

the fluid, may thus be easily removed. In a stew, on the contrary,

you boil down this soup till it permeates the fibre which long

exposure to heat has softened. All that remains, after the proper

preparation of the fibre and juices, is the flavoring, and it is in

this, particularly, that French soups excel those of America and

England and all the world.

English and American soups are often heavy and hot with spices. There

are appreciable tastes in them. They burn your mouth with cayenne or

clove or allspice. You can tell at once what is in them, oftentimes to

your sorrow. But a French soup has a flavor which one recognises at

once as delicious, yet not to be characterized as due to any single

condiment; it is the just blending of many things. The same remark

applies to all their stews, ragouts, and other delicate preparations.

No cook will ever study these flavors; but perhaps many cooks'

mistresses may, and thus be able to impart delicacy and comfort to

economy.

As to those things called hashes, commonly manufactured by unwatched,

untaught cooks, out of the remains of yesterday's repast, let us not

dwell too closely on their memory,--compounds of meat, gristle, skin,

fat, and burnt fibre, with a handful of pepper and salt flung at them,

dredged with lumpy flour, watered from the spout of the tea-kettle,

and left to simmer at the cook's convenience while she is otherwise

occupied. Such are the best performances a housekeeper can hope for

from an untrained cook.

But the cunningly devised minces, the artful preparations choicely

flavored, which may be made of yesterday's repast,--by these is the

true domestic artist known. No cook untaught by an educated brain ever

makes these, and yet economy is a great gainer by them.

* * * * *

As regards the department of _Vegetables_, their number and variety in

America are so great that a table might almost be furnished by these

alone. Generally speaking, their cooking is a more simple art, and

therefore more likely to be found satisfactorily performed, than that

of meats. If only they are not drenched with rancid butter, their own

native excellence makes itself known in most of the ordinary modes of

preparation.

There is, however, one exception.

Our stanch old friend the potato is to other vegetables what bread is

on the table. Like bread, it is held as a sort of _sine qua non_; like

that, it may be made invariably palatable by a little care in a few

plain particulars, through neglect of which it often becomes

intolerable. The soggy, waxy, indigestible viand that often appears in

the potato-dish is a downright sacrifice of the better nature of this

vegetable.

The potato, nutritive and harmless as it appears, belongs to a family

suspected of very dangerous traits. It is a family connection of the

deadly nightshade and other ill-reputed gentry, and sometimes shows

strange proclivities to evil,--now breaking out uproariously, as in

the noted potato rot, and now more covertly in various evil

affections. For this reason, scientific directors bid us beware of

the water in which potatoes are boiled,--into which, it appears, the

evil principle is drawn off; and they caution us not to shred them

into stews without previously suffering the slices to lie for an hour

or so in salt and water. These cautions are worth attention.

The most usual modes of preparing the potato for the table are by

roasting or boiling. These processes are so simple that it is commonly

supposed every cook understands them without special directions, and

yet there is scarcely an uninstructed cook who can boil or roast a

potato.

A good roasted potato is a delicacy worth a dozen compositions of the

cook-book; yet when we ask for it, what burnt, shriveled abortions are

presented to us! Biddy rushes to her potato-basket and pours out two

dozen of different sizes, some having in them three times the amount

of matter of others. These being washed, she tumbles them into her

oven at a leisure interval, and there lets them lie till it is time to

serve breakfast, whenever that may be. As a result, if the largest are

cooked, the smallest are presented in cinders, and the intermediate

sizes are withered and watery. Nothing is so utterly ruined by a few

moments of overdoing. That which at the right moment was plump with

mealy richness, a quarter of an hour later shrivels and becomes

watery,--and it is in this state that roast potatoes are most

frequently served.

In the same manner we have seen boiled potatoes from an untaught cook

coming upon the table like lumps of yellow wax,--and the same article,

the day after, under the directions of a skillful mistress, appearing

in snowy balls of powdery lightness. In the one case, they were thrown

in their skins into water and suffered to soak or boil, as the case

might be, at the cook's leisure, and, after they were boiled, to stand

in the water till she was ready to peel them. In the other case, the

potatoes being first peeled were boiled as quickly as possible in

salted water, which, the moment they were done, was drained off, and

then they were gently shaken for a minute or two over the fire to dry

them still more thoroughly. We have never yet seen the potato so

depraved and given over to evil that could not be reclaimed by this

mode of treatment.

As to fried potatoes, who that remembers the crisp, golden slices of

the French restaurant, thin as wafers and light as snowflakes, does

not speak respectfully of them? What cousinship with these have those

coarse, greasy masses of sliced potato, wholly soggy and partly burnt,

to which we are treated under the name of fried potatoes a la America?

In our cities the restaurants are introducing the French article to

great acceptance, and to the vindication of the fair fame of this

queen of vegetables.

* * * * *

Finally, I arrive at the last great head of my subject, to wit,

_Tea_,--meaning thereby, as before observed, what our Hibernian friend

did in the inquiry, "Will y'r Honor take 'tay tay' or 'coffee tay'?"

I am not about to enter into the merits of the great tea and coffee

controversy, or say whether these substances are or are not wholesome.

I treat of them as actual existences, and speak only of the modes of

making the most of them.

The French coffee is reputed the best in the world; and a thousand

voices have asked, What is it about the French coffee? In the first

place, then, the French coffee is coffee, and not chicory, or rye, or

beans, or peas. In the second place, it is freshly roasted, whenever

made,--roasted with great care and evenness in a little revolving

cylinder which makes part of the furniture of every kitchen, and which

keeps in the aroma of the berry. It is never overdone, so as to

destroy the coffee flavor, which is in nine cases out of ten the fault

of the coffee we meet with. Then it is ground, and placed in a

coffee-pot with a filter, through which it percolates in clear

drops--the coffee-pot standing on a heated stove to maintain the

temperature. The nose of the coffee-pot is stopped up to prevent the

escape of the aroma during this process. The extract thus obtained is

a perfectly clear, dark fluid, know as _cafe noir_, or black coffee.

It is black only because of its strength, being in fact almost the

very essential oil of coffee. A tablespoonful of this in boiled milk

would make what is ordinarily called a strong cup of coffee. The

boiled milk is prepared with no less care. It must be fresh and new,

not merely warmed or even brought to the boiling point, but slowly

simmered till it attains a thick, creamy richness. The coffee mixed

with this, and sweetened with that sparkling beet-root sugar which

ornaments a French table, is the celebrated _cafe-au-lait_, the name

of which has gone round the world.

As we look to France for the best coffee, so we must look to England

for the perfection of tea. The tea-kettle is as much an English

institution as aristocracy or the Prayer Book; and when one wants to

know exactly how tea should be made, one has only to ask how a fine

old English housekeeper makes it.

The first article of her faith is, that the water must not merely be

hot, not merely _have boiled_ a few moments since, but be actually

_boiling_ at the moment it touches the tea. Hence, though servants

in England are vastly better trained than with us, this delicate

mystery is seldom left to their hands. Tea making belongs to the

drawing-room, and high-born ladies preside at "the bubbling and

loud-hissing urn," and see that all due rites and solemnities are

properly performed,--that the cups are hot, and that the infused tea

waits the exact time before the libations commence. Oh, ye dear

old English tea-tables, resorts of the kindest-hearted hospitality

in the world! we still cherish your memory, even though you do not say

pleasant things of us there. One of these days you will think better

of us. Of late, the introduction of English breakfast tea has raised

a new sect among the tea drinkers, reversing some of the old canons.

Breakfast tea must be boiled! Unlike the delicate article of olden

time, which required only a momentary infusion to develop its

richness, this requires a longer and severer treatment to bring

out its strength,--thus confusing all the established usages, and

throwing the work into the hands of the cook in the kitchen.

The faults of tea, as too commonly found at our hotels and

boarding-houses, are that it is made in every way the reverse of what

it should be. The water is hot, perhaps, but not boiling; the tea has

a general flat, stale, smoky taste, devoid of life or spirit; and it

is served, usually, with thin milk instead of cream. Cream is as

essential to the richness of tea as of coffee. We could wish that the

English fashion might generally prevail, of giving the traveler his

own kettle of boiling water and his own tea-chest, and letting him

make tea for himself. At all events he would then be sure of one merit

in his tea,--it would be hot, a very simple and obvious virtue, but

one very seldom obtained.

Chocolate is a French and Spanish article, and one seldom served on

American tables. We in America, however, make an article every way

equal to any which can be imported from Paris, and he who buys Baker's

best vanilla-chocolate may rest assured that no foreign land can

furnish anything better. A very rich and delicious beverage may be

made by dissolving this in milk slowly boiled down after the French

fashion.

* * * * *

I have now gone over all the ground I laid out, as comprising the

great first principles of cookery; and I would here modestly offer the

opinion that a table where all these principles are carefully observed

would need few dainties. The struggle after so-called delicacies

comes from the poorness of common things. Perfect bread and butter

would soon drive cake out of the field; it has done so in many

families. Nevertheless, I have a word to say under the head of

_Confectionery_, meaning by this the whole range of ornamental

cookery,--or pastry, ices, jellies, preserves, etc. The art of making

all these very perfectly is far better understood in America than the

art of common cooking.

There are more women who know how to make good cake than good

bread,--more who can furnish you with a good ice-cream than a

well-cooked mutton-chop; a fair charlotte-russe is easier to come by

than a perfect cup of coffee; and you shall find a sparkling jelly to

your dessert where you sighed in vain for so simple a luxury as a

well-cooked potato.

Our fair countrywomen might rest upon their laurels in these higher

fields, and turn their great energy and ingenuity to the study of

essentials. To do common things perfectly is far better worth our

endeavor than to do uncommon things respectably. We Americans in many

things as yet have been a little inclined to begin making our shirt at

the ruffle; but nevertheless, when we set about it, we can make the

shirt as nicely as anybody,--it needs only that we turn our attention

to it, resolved that, ruffle or no ruffle, the shirt we will have.

I have also a few words to say as to the prevalent ideas in

respect to French cookery. Having heard much of it, with no very

distinct idea what it is, our people have somehow fallen into the

notion that its forte lies in high spicing,--and so, when our cooks

put a great abundance of clove, mace, nutmeg, and cinnamon into

their preparations, they fancy that they are growing up to be French

cooks. But the fact is, that the Americans and English are far

more given to spicing than the French. Spices in our made dishes

are abundant, and their taste is strongly pronounced. In living a

year in France I forgot the taste of nutmeg, clove, and allspice,

which had met me in so many dishes in America.

The thing may be briefly defined. The English and Americans deal in

_spices_, the French in _flavors_,--flavors many and subtile,

imitating often in their delicacy those subtile blendings which Nature

produces in high-flavored fruits. The recipes of our cookery-books are

most of them of English origin, coming down from the times of our

phlegmatic ancestors, when the solid, burly, beefy growth of the foggy

island required the heat of fiery condiments, and could digest heavy

sweets. Witness the national recipe for plum-pudding, which may be

rendered: Take a pound of every indigestible substance you can think

of, boil into a cannon-ball, and serve in flaming brandy. So of the

Christmas mince-pie and many other national dishes. But in America,

owing to our brighter skies and more fervid climate, we have developed

an acute, nervous delicacy of temperament far more akin to that of

France than of England.

Half of the recipes in our cook-books are mere murder to such

constitutions and stomachs as we grow here. We require to ponder these

things, and think how we in our climate and under our circumstances

ought to live, and, in doing so, we may, without accusation of foreign

foppery, take some leaves from many foreign books.

* * * * *

But Christopher has prosed long enough. I must now read this to my

wife, and see what she says.