The Press. — London, England, 1858-10-30 00:00:00

No. 287.--Vol. VI. fittraturt. Prattreal and Economical Cookery. With a Series of Bills of Fare. By Mrs. Smith. London : Chapman and Hall. The English Cookery Book. Edited by J. H. Walsh. London : Routledge. As art or science in its complete and theoretical shape has usually somewhat of an imposing, not to say alarming, character to the unprofessional person who approaches the formulae in which it is enshrined. The mystery of cookery looks almost as thorny and incomprehensible a business to the amateur who rashly dives into its text books as the art of rhetoric, with which Plato long ago compared it. The " instructions for attaining a good style," by the methods of translation and retranslation, learning by heart, classifications of words, idioms, clauses, and sen tences—the paragraphs of Bolingbroke or Addi son to be conned and recast "in your own words," and the whole logical and forensic ap paratus which we sometimes find to have been actually adopted by a Cicero or a Romilly—seem scarcely more formidable and perplexing than the minute directions, the variety of materials and condiments, the scrupulous care and inces sant watchfulness which seem to be required by a modern professor of the noble science of Ude and Careme. The effort of imagination necessary to follow out a receipt through all its stages, and to realize the appearance of the intended result, is hardly inferior to that which enables us mentally to reconstruct from descrip tion the elaborate sepulchres of /slausolus or Porsenna, or to conceive the mathematical figures which demonstrate the laws of astronomy or optics. Certainly, people get on very well without knowing anything about the revolutions either of spits or suns, though they may be fed by one and warmed by the other ; and so, too, most persons contrive to fill their stomachs with some kind of nutritive matter, and communicate their ideas to their fellow-creatures, without anv assistance from either Professor Smart or the two distinguished writers before us. Yet few would deny that these, or some such autho rtnes, dese rve to b e more widely studied by at least some classes of the community. When we c a stout agricultural orator slowly emerging from behind a huge underdone piece of beef, a portion of which he has transferred to the central abysses of his person, and begin to utter his so ntiments on thin gs i n genera l , i t i s i mpossible not__.h to wish, on the one h an d , t h at C amp b ell and A ately had had a little snore to do with his tritiam,g, and that, on the otter, the food he has consumed, which Animain filluque pargravat Alp* affigit ]sumo divinte particulant aunt., had been so prepared by the artiste below as to lay a less onerous burden on his mental faculties. Per haps, some day or other, the progress of that instruction in " conunon things " which is sup- Posed to have been definitely inaugurated by Lord Ashb urton and hi s co ll eagues, will both enable the middle-class female human being to cook a pala table as w e ll as economical dinner, and also cause utterances of erunces of her consort to be listened to SUPPLEMENT TO 1856. rt6l LONDON, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 30 afterwards with as much pleasure as the song of the blackbird which comforts his mate during the process of incubation. Of such a golden age we do not altogether despair, though it is hard to convince Englishmen that it is worth while to look to anything but what is sternly practical, or that the ornamental and economical may sometimes coincide. From the days of Domitian's turbot to the plays of the last century, where virtuous characters in top-boots vent their conventional sneer against " French kickshaws," solicitude about the preparation of food has always been a stock theme for the satirist. The gourmand is considered by most a laughable, and by sonic highly transcendental persons a detes table character, and is often misunderstood in a manner which must rasp his sensitive mind to the highest degree. We fancy that his propensity is rather aesthetic than sensual, and that it is simply a development of general fastidiousness in a par ticular direction. lie is usually a person who likes everything to be " ship-shape " in all depart ments. He is not necessarily incapable of taking broad views of things, but, as a matter of fact, he rather favours minutia: ; has an eye for dress and decorations of all kinds, and likes a book to be nicely printed and bound as well as cleverly written. In objecting, with Southey, to Words worth's cutting the leaves of a new volume with a buttery knife, he would be obeying the same habit of mind as that which makes him unhappy at seeing salmon sent up without cucumber, or his intimate friend commit the shocking solecism of carving a bird with the hinder end pointing towards him. Perhaps he himself has been forbidden cucumber by the faculty, and does not mean to trouble the mangler of the other dish, but his sense of the eternal fitness of things demands that the one should be there, and that the other should be divided after a different fashion. He is quite aware that his little peculiarities may be found amusing, but is content that the satirist should strike, if he will but hear. Juvenal expends sonic very fierce indignation on a set of professors who seem to have taught carving by means of wooden models of all sorts of cooked birds, beasts, and joints, and whose " elmy supper" resounded, he says, all over the Suburra. To the gourmand, as we have described him, the idea would seem not altogether so hopelessly absurd as classical prepossessions might lead some others to consider it. Whether Juvenal himself was an expert, or hether the entertainment spoken of in a sub sequent satire required much exhibition of the science, is not ascertained ; but it is very possible that there may be great comic geniuses now living who could no more carve a fowl than they could write the l)unciad. At all events, it is pro verbial that those who have most need of economy are in this respect the most wasteful, and if the teaching of " common things" were in part to consist of a school of carving with object les sons," or some other kind of actual demonstra tion, possibly many a poor man's table would reap the benefit in the neater and more appetizing appearance of the second day's dinner. That books on cookery no longer exclusively concern themselves with the delicacies of the rich and great, but are written with an eye to the economy and entertainment of the million, is an encou raging symptom, which leads us to hope that one day the kitchens of the poorer classes may cease to form the most glaring instance in support of the saying that " they manage these things better GRATIS. in France." In echoing the wish of the benevo lent Henri IV., that every poor man might have a fowl in his pot, an English king would as yet have to add, " May he also know how to cook it !" The arrangement of a cookery-book is a matter of some importance, and almost as difficult as the classification of Fallacies in Logic under their proper heads. Most writers seem to forget that their office is to be suggestive as well as directive, and that the young housekeeper quite as often looks at her receipts through perplexity as to what dishes she shall order, as the cook does from ignorance of how she shall dress them when ordered. Some books classify the various com pounds under the heads of the different kinds of meat of which they are made, which is about as sensible a plan as for a drawing master to exhaust his instructions as to the number of things which can be painted with cobalt before going on to those which can be painted with sepia. As, in the latter case, the pupil requires to be told what treatment is necessary for all objects occurring in the distance, then for those that are nearer, then what to fill a foreground with, and how to paint the various things that compose it ; so it is neces sary for the cook to have some idea of what will be acceptable at breakfast, dinner, or supper respectively, and to have a certain range of resources in regard to each. The problem is not, given a whole ox or sheep, how many dishes can you make out of it ? but, given a hungry individual at a certain time of day, and what, with the aid of the grocer and butcher, can you concoct for him to devour ? Both the books before us, though not coming up to our standard of arrangement (of which, if we rightly remember, the best example is Soyer's Menagere), are works of considerable merit, and contain much that is excellent. The face of the benevolent-looking old lady whose portrait is prefixed to her " Practical and Economical Cookery" is in itself a letter of recommendation, and we feel confident that most of the leading families in the metropolis" to whom, she tells us, she has been for "forty years professed cook," could not possibly have committed their port folio of the Minister of the Interior to more com petent hands. Those sagacious eyes have roved over whole oceans of soup—have witnessed the evolution of leagues of barley-sugar, and the dis position of miles of macaroni ; those good humoured lips, with a slow, wise smile gently curled about their corners— Where old experience doth attain To something like prophetic str.tiu— have formed the minds and fired the young ambition of generations of kitchen-maids and those plump fingers have compounded with impartial care the succulent callipash for the portly alderman in his civic hall, or the beef-tea for the prostrate invalid in his lonely attic. In a remarkably crisp and juicy dedication Mrs. Smith offers her work to the "excellent judgment" of Lady Carroll, whom she assures that she has " studied to ex press " herself "so as to be understood by the meanest capacity." Mrs. Smith need not imagine that any excuse is necessary for her • plainness of style; " and her patroness will doubtless inform her that if grandiloquence is sometimes appropriate in a lord mayor, cooks and generals cannot well err on the side of clearness and sim plicity. The receipts are brief and intelligible,