Handbook of practical cookery

It has been unjustly said that "God gave us food, and the devil cooks ; " but it is not with the cooks that the fault mainly lies of inducing disease by fostering gourmanderie and gluttony. The cook is only fulfilling his vocation when he makes every article of food grateful to the palate and more digestible. And the custom among the more wealthy ranks of assembling the guests around a dinner-table, at which the host and hostess sit as if they too were guests, whilst silent servants simply offer to all every dish in turn, throws upon each individual the responsibility of eating wisely or unwisely exactly as he pleases. That plentiful dyspepsias are the fruits of such feasts is certain ; but it is hard to blame the cook, whose dishes were wholesome, and so mingled that a Liebig would have given them his chemical imprimatur. The fault has lain with the dyspeptic himself, and has chiefly consisted, PHILOSOPHY OF COOKERY. XXXV11 not in his innocently eating a temperate meal of wrong things, treacherously disguised as dainties by the perverse ingenuity of the genius of the kitchen, but in his deliberately tasting too many wholesome dishes, and too much of each, forgetting that the cook makes every dish palatable, that each of the guests may find something suitable to his taste, not that each may eat of all. On the other hand, when we consider how unwisely a large portion of the wages of the working-classes, and also of classes higher in social rank, is spent in the purchase of food, from ignorance of what is best to be purchased, and how much of this ill-chosen food is wasted or rendered ungrateful and unpalatable through defective skill in cookery, and how often the tavern is fled to as a welcome refuge from a comfortless home, and whole families go headlong to destruction, we cannot but wish that the fundamental principles of Cookery, which are few and simple, instead of being held things for the wealthy and the luxurious alone to consider, were regarded as things as essential to be taught, by precept and example, to every girl as how to handle a needle or a pair of scissors. The work to which this is an introduction aims at contributing to produce this laudable result. A HANDBOOK OF COOKERY. SOUPS-FIRST DIVISION. Brown Stock.— For this stock there will be required material in the following quantities : — Four pounds of the shin of beef, four young carrots, four Bermuda onions, one small turnip, one half-head of celery, one half table-spoonful of salt, one half tea-spoonful of white pepper-corns, one half tea-spoonful of black pepper-corns. First, cutting all of the meat from the bone, remove the marrow, and break up the bone with a hammer. Put the meat and bone together in a large sauce-pan, and pour over these five pints of cold water, placing the saucepan over the fire. Bring the water now quickly to the boiling-point and skim off, when boiling, all of the scum that rises to the surface. Throw into the sauce-pan then the salt, which will bring any remaining albumen or scum to the top; when, skimming once more, add to the contents of the pan the carrot, turnip, and celery, all cut into very small pieces. Before adding the onion blanch it with boiling water, to draw from it the greenness which produces indigestion ; having done which, put it together with the pepper-corns into the saucepan and allow all again to boil.