Practical gastronomy and culinary dictionary

All connected with cookery should make it the rule to be economical, to endeavour to make the most of everything. There is perhaps no country where the study of economy in the kitchen is more needed than in England. Here we must take the French for our example. A French housewife will, say, with 40 francs be able to supply the table for a week with every comfort and luxury, and in addition save something out of the 40 francs, whilst the English housewife will hardly meet the wants with 40 shillings a week for meals of the plainest kind. The better a cook the more economy he will practise : this is one reason why there is more waste among the poor and middle classes, where the cooking is done by so-called plain cooks, who are ignorant of the art of cookery. These will throw away what an educated cook will turn into a seasonable dish. Time, however, will mend these wants, for already the schools have taken up the education of cookery, so that ere long children will learn as a part of their elementary education how to cook with economy. A little forethought in these matters will soon show the real meaning of economy. Scraps of meat or fish, fag- ends of bacon, so often wasted, with a little judicious management make, when re-dressed in a different form to what they were first served, tasty little dishes, which improve the appearance of the table with very little extra cost. 3 44 PRACTICAL GASTEONOMY Every cook has his own style of preparing and dressing a dinner. Some will study the elegance of dishing up, to the detriment of the modes of prepara- tion ; whilst others, on the contrary, will aim at refining the preparation, and thhik little of the elegance. Both are wrong. A good dish must be presented in an attractive form ; but there is excess in everything, and too much art m cooking may be as fatal as too little. An ingenious cook may form varieties as endless as a musician with his instrument or as a painter with his colours. The study of cookery books, their rules and recipes, are of little use unless the practising party has the natural gift for perfect cookery. To arrive at perfection in culinary art means to be able to make a perfect sauce, and a cook who is proficient in sauce-making must possess the most delicate skill for roasting. To merely make up a dish from a recipe is in comparison like dispensing from a prescription. The chemist, like the cook, will weigh or measure every ingredient em- ployed, with the exception that the former rarely or never tastes his preparations, whilst the latter must taste, and possess that power of judging of, say, a sauce which requires reducing where the flavour increases as the sauce simmers away. It would be blind work indeed for a cook to do without tasting ; the very best soups would be quite flavourless if the seasonings were omitted. Seasoning in cookery is what chords are in music ; the best THE COOK AND THE KITCHEN 45 instruments in the hands of the best professors without their being in tune would be insipid. A good cook, besides being versed in the technique of the kitchen, should also be a good judge of the kinds, qualities, and uses of every dietary article. The old Greek comic poet Dionysius says : —