Culinary jottings

A few years ago I met an officer of the Artillery, who, after having served in various parts of the world, had just been appointed to a command in this Presidency. Conversation happened to turn upon cookery, and the Colonel soon proved himself to be a man who had for years studied the science con amore. He had had little or no experience of Indian life, and he expressed himself agreeably surprised, rather than otherwise, at the style of living to which he had been introduced. " But," he said, " preserve me from your dinners of ceremony." He had arrived, he told me, quite unexpectedly a few evenings before, and had been at once invited to the Mess ; the dinner, — just the ordinary daily one, — was, he thought, excellent, and so it was the next day, and the day following, but on the fourth day he was formally invited to dine as a Mess guest, and that was a very different affair. Considerable expense had been incurred, he observed, on this occasion in tinned provisions, but with the worst possible result. There was a dish of preserved salmon hot, and sodden ; the entrees were spoilt by the introduction of terrible sausages, and muslirooms ; and the tinned vegetables were ruined by being wrongly treated by the cook. " There are few men," the Colonel went on, " who have had more to do with preserved provisions than I have, but until I attended this big Indian dinner, I never saw such things actually regarded as delicacies, and put upon the table to the exclusion of the good fresh food procurable in the market." This is the proper way of looking at this question. There will be times and places, when and where you will be obliged to fall back upon Messrs. Crosse and Blackwell, and be thankful. Until those evil days come upon you, however, do not anticipate your penance, but strive to make the food you can easily procure, palatable and good by scientific treatment. I look upon tinned provisions in the hands of Ramasamy as the cloaks of carelessness, and slovenly cooking. He thinks that the * tin' will cover a multitude of sins, so takes comparatively little pains with the dish that it accompanies. There are many ladies who, when giving out stores for a dinner party, have no hesitation in issuing ' tins' to the value of many rupees, but if asked for extra cream, butter, eggs, and gravy-meat, — the true essentials of cookery, — begin to consider themselves imposed upon. The poverty of our cookery in India results almost wholly from our habit of ignoring these things, the very backbone, as it were, of the cook's art. If an English cook, surrounded with the best market supplies in the world, be helpless without her stock, her kitchen butter, and her cream and eggs, how much more should Ramasamy be pitied if he be refused those necessaries, for his materials stand in far greater need of assistance. In the matter of firewood and charcoal too, I am aware that there is often a difierence of opinion between the IN THE STORE-ROOM. 27