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 traveller 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 house-building, 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 or 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 traveller 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 farm-houses

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 traveller 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 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 fulfil

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 bakers' 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 move 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 bread-stuffs, 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

travellers; 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 travellers 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

traveller, on approaching a 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 burned 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 travelled 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 _cotelletes_ 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 inclosed 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 skilful 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 recognizes 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, shrivelled 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 skilful 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 snow-flakes, 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 chiccory,

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, known 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 table-spoonful 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 traveller 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 cannonball, 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.