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 an hotel is often saluted by the last shrieks
of the chickens which half an hour afterward are presented to him _à 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 æsthetics, the ready
reply will be, “O, 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 _débris_, 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 _côtelettes_ 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 egg-shell. 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 _habitué_ 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 down-right 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 _à 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?