Practical home cookery

“We had such an awful time of it with Mary Ann ! ” Probably, never have the domestic trials and difficulties of young housekeepers been summed up in fewer or more expressive words. However, the more we look into the world, the more we find it to be the case that we make our Mary Anns, and not our Mary Anns us. 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 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 some of the best at the seaside, an hour before the table d’hote, with the smell of an ordinary cook-shop, with its steam-pipes 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 down 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 with 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 chapter commences, David Copperfield proceeds as follows : — “ 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,” etc., we shall continue to maintain that recipes that contain these directions might just as well have never been written. But in the present chapter we wish to confine our- selves to the “ frying-pan,” one of the most useful and, at the same time, abused articles of kitchen use.