Practical home cookery

I FEAR that as a nation taste is not our forte. I wonder, too, if there is any French expression that would fully convey the idea, “ Wanted, a good plain cook.” Wanted, a woman who can convert joints of raw meat into some state sufficiently intermediate between blueness and cinders as to render them eatable, and who also can make certain plain puddings, more or less heavy, as the case may be, but who has no more conception of artistic taste than a cabbage, and would be as incapable of making a dish look elegant as of singing the shadow dance from ” Dinorah.” And yet many of these persons are good honest souls, who mean well and do their best, but somehow or other it is not in them, and what is more, it never will be. They have been born in an uncongenial chme. For instance, contrast the dress of an Enghsh workman’s wife whose husband earns, say, £2 a week, with that of a Frenchwoman in a similar station of fife, and yet probably the latter spends less in dress than the former. We have already compared a French pastrycook’s window with an English one, but if there is ever a time in which we feel that Waterloo is indeed avenged, it is when we contrast a French salad with the ordinary English specimen. It is somewhat strange, too, that the generahty of cookery-books intended for household use signally fail to explain how to make dishes look nice. For instance, “ garnish with beetroot and hard-boiled eggs,” is a very poor direction to give to one of the above-mentioned good plain cooks. Some again give the lucid direction — ” garnish prettily.” Other works, too, are at times extremely tantalising to young housekeepers with plenty of natural good taste, yet without the faintest knowledge of the principles of cookery ; they of course consult the cookery-book, which has perhaps been made attractive by some beautiful coloured engravings of dishes. We can well imagine a young wife in deep consultation with her next sister a week before her first dinner-party, the cookery-book between them. ” Oh ! what a pretty-looking dish,” exclaims one ; ” let’s have that.” Alas ! the index is hunted over in vain, no description of how to make the dish appears at all ; the next pretty-looking dish determined on shares a similar fate ; and at last they give it up in despair, and either fix on dishes of which they have no idea what the appearance will be when done, or more probably leave it to the cook to do as she likes, with one or two little things from the pastrycook’s — an expensive way of going to work, it should be borne in mind. I have been asked several times in strict confidence the question, ” But ought it to have looked like that ? ” — a question often involving a necessary sacrifice of either truth or politeness. Francatelli observes : ” The palate is as capable and nearly as worthy of education as the eye and the ear.” Now, without entering into the question as to whether a patty to eat is equal to a Patti to hear or see in the way of enjoyment, there is no doubt that the palate is to a great extent influenced by the eye. For instance, a large cold sirloin of beef on the sideboard at a good old-fashioned hotel, neatly decorated