University of Virginia Library

10*

10. X.
COOKERY.

MY wife and I were sitting at the open bow-window
of my study, watching the tuft of bright
red leaves on our favorite maple, which warned us that
summer was over. I was solacing myself, like all the
world in our days, with reading the “Schönberg Cotta
Family,” when my wife made her voice heard through
the enchanted distance, and dispersed the pretty vision
of German cottage-life.

“Chris!”

“Well, my dear.”

“Do you know the day of the month?”

Now my wife knows this is a thing that I never do
know, that I can't know, and, in fact, that there is no
need I should trouble myself about, since she always
knows, and what is more, always tells me. In fact,
the question, when asked by her, meant more than
met the ear. It was a delicate way of admonishing
me that another paper for the “Atlantic” ought to be
in train; and so I answered, not to the external form,
but to the internal intention.

“Well, you see, my dear, I have n't made up my
mind what my next paper shall be about.”

“Suppose, then, you let me give you a subject.”

“Sovereign lady, speak on! Your slave hears!”

“Well, then, take Cookery. It may seem a vulgar
subject, but I think more of health and happiness depends
on that than on any other one thing. You may
make houses enchantingly beautiful, hang them with
pictures, have them clean and airy and convenient;
but if the stomach is fed with sour bread and burnt
coffee, it will raise such rebellions that the eyes will
see no beauty anywhere. Now in the little tour that
you and I have been taking this summer, I have been
thinking of the great abundance of splendid material
we have in America, compared with the poor cooking.
How often, in our stoppings, we have sat down to tables
loaded with material, originally of the very best
kind, which had been so spoiled in the treatment that
there was really nothing to eat! Green biscuits with
acrid spots of alkali, — sour yeast-bread, — meat slowly
simmered in fat till it seemed like grease itself, and
slowly congealing in cold grease, — and above all, that
unpardonable enormity, strong butter! How often I
have longed to show people what might have been
done with the raw material out of which all these monstrosities
were concocted!”

“My dear,” said I, “you are driving me upon delicate

ground. Would you have your husband appear
in public with that most opprobrious badge of the domestic
furies, a dishcloth pinned to his coat-tail? It is
coming to exactly the point I have always predicted,
Mrs. Crowfield: you must write yourself. I always
told you that you could write far better than I, if you
would only try. Only sit down and write as you
sometimes talk to me, and I might hang up my pen
by the side of `Uncle Ned's' fiddle and bow.”

“O, nonsense!” said my wife. “I never could
write. I know what ought to be said, and I could
say it to any one; but my ideas freeze in the pen,
cramp in my fingers, and make my brain seem like
heavy bread. I was born for extemporary speaking.
Besides, I think the best things on all subjects in this
world of ours are said, not by the practical workers,
but by the careful observers.”

“Mrs. Crowfield, that remark is as good as if I had
made it myself,” said I. “It is true that I have been
all my life a speculator and observer in all domestic
matters, having them so confidentially under my eye
in our own household; and so, if I write on a pure
woman's matter, it must be understood that I am only
your pen and mouth-piece, — only giving tangible form
to wisdom which I have derived from you.”

So down I sat and scribbled, while my sovereign
lady quietly stitched by my side. And here I tell my

reader that I write on such a subject under protest, —
declaring again my conviction, that, if my wife only
believed in herself as firmly as I do, she would write
so that nobody would ever want to listen to me again.

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 Indiancorn
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 eggplant
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 concoting 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
café-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 speices,
devised not for health and 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 sort 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 of effervescence may be retained;
but 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 more 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 æsthetics; 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 beef-steak,
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 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 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?

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 café 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. O, 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 cannon-ball, 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.