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

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,

1070

and comprehend nearly all varieties of food, from
a Nesselrode pudding down to a boiled egg; but
we are surprised to find that no directions are
given for making coffee, which is not so common
an accomplishment in this country that it ought
to be taken for granted. We have met with one
receipt, however, in Mrs. Smith's volume which
is so peculiar that we extract it for the amuse-
ment of our readers :