The spirit of cookery

* 'East Indian Rapid Preparation of Curry, after Count Solaroli,' 1840. For curry powdered, pastes, and additional spices, cf. 'Wyvern,' loc. cit. p. 284 et seq. sufficiently or too strongly flavoured. To make such dry food moister, to lubricate it and thus aid in its use, to increase the attractiveness of the taste by additions of flavours and juxtaposition of contrast, to hide or mask excessive flavours, certain liquid additions have been invented which pass by the name of sauces. A liquid such as we now define as a sauce the Romans termed jus, but it is uncertain how far they distinguished between meat juice or gravy and accessory liquids such as we now term soups. This word jus remains in French, but with a more closely circumscribed significance, namely, gravy. This may not be a compound, but merely the juice issuing from the meat, or extracted from it by direct means. The mere addition of hot water to jus makes it bouillon. Jus and bouillon are the bases of all sauces and soups. Sauces are no longer comprised under the Roman term jura (the plural of jus), although this expression had prevailed for centuries, and been current in the Middle Ages. It is surmised that the jura became in practice gradually mixed with the artificially-prepared solutions in which meat was preserved or matured for cooking, and thus the salsugo or salsilago of Pliny, the briny pickle in which meat was stowed away, furnished the name for the liquid with the aid of which it was eaten. When salt was rare, salted jura were of much greater importance than they are now, when salt is prudently mixed with all appropriate dishes, and placed before the eater for use at his discretion. Thus a standard jus became a salsus or a salsa, in Italian salza, which the French transformed into saulza, and ultimately into sauce. The importance of sauce as a lubricating principle is easily demonstrated by an experiment on potatoes made with and without any sauce. But if a sauce, in addition to lubricating the morsel, also stimulates the organs of taste, it causes an increase of the salivary secretion, and by thus ENGLISH SAUCES enhancing the appetite and augmenting the juices capable of effecting digestion, increases the pleasure derived from eating, and the usefulness of the result in the shape of improved nutrition. The physiological principle of the preparation of food is summed up in the postulate that it shall produce the highest efficiency in the individual and the race. Experience teaches that as regards the human subject it cannot be attained by the greatest simplicity, but, on the contrary, is best attained by high quality of materials and preparation, for every item of v/hich the most cogent physiological reasons can be given, derived from the consideration of man’s place in nature, his structural abilities and inextinguishable rational desires. Thus, a sauce becomes transformed from an accident into a necessity ; it is a want long before soups and made dishes, and when it is missing, salt, and salt only, can supply a substitute as a corrective of taste and a stimulant of gustation and secretion. Salt, mustard, and pepper are the most elementary appetisers, correctors of taste, and overwhelmers of nausea, such, e.g., as is easily produced by overripe or peculiarlyflavoured meat.