Common-sense papers on cookery

It is a good old saying that the master makes the man ; equally true is it that the mistress makes the maid. Let each of our readers pause for an instant, and look round mentally among his relations and friends with whom he is in the habit of dining. Each one, probably, has had many changes of servants, yet there are some houses where the dinner is invariably good, others where it is equally invariably bad. Who has not, on entering a house where he expects to IO Common-sense Cookery. dine, been greeted at the door with a whiff of the smell of the cooking, from which whiff he could pretty well determine in his own mind the style of dinner he may expect? No cooking is so good as the French, none so bad as a certain style of English. Compare the smell of a good French restaurant, or outside the kitchen of a first-class hotel, like the "Pavilion" at Folkestone, an hour before the table d’hote, with the smell of an ordinary cook-shop, with its steampipes keeping warm large flabby joints and greasy Yorkshire pudding, the whole being impregnated with that peculiar smell of greens in which one can almost fancy he detects the flavour of caterpillars. I think it may be laid doAvn as a rule that if, on entering a house, you smell greens, you may make up your mind for a bad dinner. On the other hand, a gamey smell, with perhaps just a dash of garlic in it, is favourable, especially if mingled Avith the smell of rich pastry. It would, however, require many volumes to enter into a minute description of a good and a bad dinner. We would rather be practical, and, if possible, useful. The natural resource of young housekeepers is the cookery-book. After the pathetic statement with which our article commences, David Copperfield proceeds as follows : — Uses and Abuses of a Frying-pan. ii “In search of the principle on which joints ought to be roasted — to be roasted enough and not too much — I myself referred to the cookery-book, and found it there established as the allowance of a quarter of an hour to every pound, and say a quarter over. But the principle always failed us by some curious fatality, and we never could hit any medium between redness and cinders.” Here is the old story, and one that, probably, happens every day, and will happen — viz., reference to a cookery-book ; the directions followed ; the result — failure. Who is most to blame — the cook, or the book ? That the book is often in fault there can be no doubt. So long as we meet with such absurdities as “and flavour to taste,” or “add seasoning,” &c., we shall continue to maintain that recipes that contain these directions might just as well have never been written. But in the present article we wish to confine ourselves to the “ frying-pan,” one of the most useful, and, at the same time, abused articles of kitchen use. We will suppose that a certain dish consists of something fried. Perhaps one or two are expected to dinner who are known or supposed to be rather particular. The mistress has consulted the cookerybook, which gravely recommends as follows : — “ Fry of a nice golden-colour, and serve hot.” How to do Common-sense Cookery. I 2