The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1874-11-28 00:00:00

PLAIN COOKS.
(From the Saturday Review)

Wanted, an industrious, thrifty, sensible woman,
who has Boma idea of cookery, who will do a little
housework, clean the knives, and be content with the
wages of a governess. The servants who now apply
for such situations in middle-claas households are for
the mist part wholly unfit for them. Sometimes they
are kitchetimaids who have been under good cooks, but
have been too lazy or too stupid to learn from them,
and, being generally without any ambition to rice in
their profession, they have abandoned all hope of ever
earning high wages. Sometimes again, they belong to
a class of which the young or inexperienced house-
keeper must beware. Its representative is usually an
elderly woman of many places, who is destined to be
in many more; indeed she adds to their number
almost every month, for drink, or laziness, or both, will
account for any frequency in their migrations. A
third and more numerous class is that of the young
woman who has been maid-of-all-work. She has been
ignorantly I brought up, and her home training has
been worse than none. She has seen waste when money
and provbsions were plenty, alternating with starvation,
begging, and dishonesty when scarcity of work and
drunkenness have made times hard. She has inhabited
a crowded room Where tidiness was impossible; her
dress has consisted chiefly of rags, garnished with
artificial flowers; her highest ideal of amusement has
been a fair or a music hall; and her only preparation
for entering domestic service a few months at nominal
wages in a lodging-house. There she has learnt little
but peculation, and has been accustomed often to lie
down at night in her clothes too weary to undress, and
to rise in the morning and go about her work un-
washed and unmeshed. When the maid-of-all-work
obtains a place as plain cook she assumes the reins of
office with perfect self-satisfaction. She proceeds
without any hesitation to waste and destroy the
materials entrusted to her for conversion into food.
It need hardly be observed that her BUCCetli is com-
plete. She keeps her milk and cream in the hot
kitcaen and wonders that they turn sour. She puts
the butter into the same small cupboard with the
cheese, and is surprised that the sauce which she sends
to the dinner-table has an unpleasant taste. She will
not be at the trouble of cleaeing out the oven-
flues, and cannot imagine why the paste will
not rise. She leaves the fish upon the kitchen-
table from the time it is brought until she
is ready to cmik it, and stands by with a look of
innocence while the fishmonger is :melded for sending
stale fish. When she lays a fire she crams it with
bundles of wood so that it will not light, and supple-
mente her bad architecture with whole boxes of
matches and very long candle-ends. She fairs the
kitchen fire every time she passes it, and keels it
blazing even when there is no cooking to be done, and
when the family is dining out. If the heat makes her
ill, she blames the poor accommodation of the house,
and talks as if she had come from a palace to enter
service. If she has a gas stove the taps are constantly
turned on, and as to lowering the lights in the passage
or scullery such an idea never crosses her mind even in
dreams. She will send up the eggs either raw or hard
boiled rather than use your sand-glass. She will give
you bread and milk with roast chicken rather than
beat and flavour the mixture into bread sauce. She
will make tea with tepid water, will send up spinach
that looks like cabbage rather than put it through a
sieve, and will peel the potatoes an inch thick to save
the trouble of picking out their eyes.
Now, really refined cooking is the result of practice
and teaching. But, short of this, the geniuswhich con-
sists of "an infinite capacity for taking trouble" will
do much for the production of food which shall be I
wholesome and palatable as well. This hi exactly the
quality deficient in an ordinary cook. Flavouring,
frying, and making puff-paste are not to be learnt in a
day, though common sense an,l the will to use it are
enough for the preparation of an ordinary dinner. But
the contemporary cook has only one recipe for every
dish—namely, quantity and waste. She asks for a
dozen eggs and a pint of cream for the simplest cal met
pudding, and prefers ininglass to gelatine only because
it is more expensive. • whole pot of jam must be
consumed to make a single tartlet. A joint in the
kitchen and another in the parlour is the allowance
she prescribes for every day. She never keeps gravy;
it is mean to boil down bones and scraps. If gravy is
wanted, gravy beef should be ordered. The rind should
be cut off the bacon at least an inch thick, and a crock
of broken bread must always be kept to get mouldy
for the honour of the house. Frying can only be done
in lard in any respectable kitchen, and what number
of oysters are required for a single patty we do not
venture to estimate. Untidiness, too, the constant
companion of wastefulness, she has reduced to a science.
Her cupboards are an alarming mixture of scraps,
sauces, forgotten whites of eggs, and pots of dripping,
together with raisins and coruflour, furniture-polish
and blacklead.
Her destruction of articles of food is well matched
by her treatment of the crockery and kitchen utensils
in her charge. She warms the best China dinner plates
to a white heat. The dishes she puts into the oven,
until their surface resembles that of the crackle
porcelain admired by collectors. If they are adorned
with arms or monograms in colour and gilding, she
early dis,overs the efficacy of strong soda and soft
i soap n the removal of such vanities. A few dexterous
movements will chip the edges on a stone sink, and
she thinks it well to remove such excrescences as the
handles of cliehes or the tops of their covers; her
reasons for these measures may be sanitary, as handles
only form recesses for grease and dust, and it is im-
possible to clean them without trouble. Pudding
basins she consumes in large numbers, and uses
butter-boats to feed the cat. The dishes she sends
to table invariably soil the cloth, anci are so full
of gravy that they often spill on the way upstairs. The
covets are smeared with grew), finger-marks, and it is
well if the outside only is dirty. The kitchen is her
fortress; from it drawing room company is care-
fully and jealously excluded. In all families the chil-
dren look upon the kitchen as a paradise of dainty
devices. In some they are never allowed to enter it;
but in others the little missy is sometimes privileged to
make a bit of paste into ducks and drakes, or to
knead some dough into a cake for the doll's birthday.
Such frivolities a modern cook sternly represses. She
supposes the young ladies will want to make puddings
next or to come down and try reeipes out of "them
rubbishing books." She has no action of encouraging
such pranks. . . . Even the lady of the house is in-
formed very plainly that after her morning visit she is
not expected to disturb the quiet of the lower regions.
The trap is always missing from the kitchen sink, and
things run into the drain which should never go there'
the valve itself disappears among the ashes, and is carried
away by the dust-cart, together with the stoppers of
sauce bottles, the heads of pepper-casters, jam pots, and
half-bumt coals. Indeed one might think that the sock
had a personal interest in the, dustman, and wished to
bestow as many useful articles upon him as possible; or
perhaps her benevolent feelings are stirred by some,tale
of the poor sorters in the cinder yards to whom these
things are perquisites, and she would be charitable by
proxy. She has a kind heart for all sorts of tramps,
and frequently has her fortune told. The woman
whose babies seem endowed with a perpetual youth,
the man who sells pencils, the various folks who eke
out a precarious livelihood by hawking mittens,
combs, and pen wipers, find in her a sympathetic
patron, and draw from her large supplies of her
master's bread and meat. A carrier, whose pony was
more sleek and well fed than carriers' ponies often are,
confessed on one occasion that he obtained from the
tramps in his neighbourhood their stores of crusts at
one shilling a peck ;—"Sometimes I am almost in-
clined to pick out the pieces of cheese and meat, but
Jack here eats it all up as sweet as can be, and his
coat's like satin."
Her personal habits accord with her domestic and
social qualities. She labouis under a chronic hydro-
phobia, for though her thirst is unquenchable she care-
fully avoids cold water. Copious draughts of beer,
occasionally varied in the afternoon with tea, and in
the evening with gin, assist her in her work and impscrt
her exhausted frame. Personal ablutions she does not
affect, but wipes her hands usually on the tablecloth,
or whatever else is within her reach. Pudding-cloths
are convenient for the purpose, and become so satu-
rated with various animal oils, butter, fat, and lard,
that they are devoured by the niice which, with flies,
kittens, and blackbeetles, constitute the fauna of the
kitchen. A small piece of broken looking-glass on the
dresser enables her now and then to smooth her hair,
the usual appearance of which suggests the occasional
but scanty use, of the blacking-brush. The chief efforts
of her toilet upon week-days are made for the advent
of the butcher's boy, but she is not given to wasting
time in the decoration of her form. All her powers
in this line Me reserved for Sunday, when she turns
out, as she confidently believes, quite the lady, her
whole earnings being spent on the display, for she never
saves out of her wages, and seems to live in the quiet
expectation of a handsome legacy or a wealthy hus-
band. Perhaps it is to We end that the hair, so un-
tidy on Saturday, is now braided into shining rolls;
the hands, yesterday so grimy, arc covered with green
leather gloves; the feet, which all the week have only
worn slippers, are encased in tight and high-heeled
boots, decorated with arabesques; and, to her great
delight, she fondly thinks there 13 nothing of the cook
ab mt her. Those who have to submit to her profes-
sional shortcomings may think there is no more of the
cook about her on week-days. She despises her occu-
pation, and can hardly therefore be expected to suc-
ceed in it. She looks upon her mistress as an unrea-
sonable being, full of whims and fancies, which it is
her painful duty to evade and thwart as often as
possible. She explains to her young man, for cooks
are never without sweethearts, that her people are a
mean lot, that they buy from the Civil Service, make
soup of distracted meat, and eat irritated bread, and
that she means to give warning immediately.