“A GOOD PLAIN COOK.”

‘WANTED, a good plain Cook,’ is hungrily echoed from the columns of the Times, by half the husbands and bachelors of Great Britain. According to the true meaning of the words ‘A good plain Cook’—to judge from the unskilful manner in which domestic cookery is carried on throughout the length and breadth of the land—is a very great rarity. But the conventional and the true meaning of the expression widely differ.

‘What is commonly self-called a plain cook,’ says a writer in the Examiner, ‘is a cook who spoils food for low wages. She is a cook, not because she knows anything about cookery, but because she prefers the kitchen-fire to scrubbing floors, polishing grates, or making beds. A cook who can boil a potato and dress a mutton-chop is one in a thousand.’

Such very plain cooks will always exist for dyspeptic purposes, while those who are in authority over them remain ignorant of an art which, however much it may be slighted, exercises a crowning influence over health and happiness. Eat we must; and it is literally a subject of vital importance whether what we eat be properly adapted for healthful digestion or not.

Medical statistics tell us that of all diseases with which the English are afflicted, those arising directly or indirectly from impaired digestive organs are the most prevalent. We are falsely accused in consequence of over-eating; but the true cause of our ailments is bad cooking. A Frenchman or a German devours much more at one of his own inexhaustible tables-d’hôte than an Englishman consumes at his dining-table—and with impunity; for the foreigner’s food being properly prepared is easily digested. ‘The true difference,’ says a pleasant military writer in Blackwood’s Magazine, ‘between English and foreign cookery is just this: in preparing butcher’s meat for the table, the aim of foreign cookery is to make it tender, of English to make it hard. And both systems equally effect their object, in spite of difficulties on each side. The butcher’s meat, which you buy abroad, is tough, coarse-grained, and stringy; yet foreign cookery sends this meat to table tender. The butcher’s meat which you buy in England is tender enough when it comes home; but domestic cookery sends it up hard. Don’t tell me the hardness is in the meat itself. Nothing of the kind; it’s altogether an achievement of the English cuisine. I appeal to a leg of mutton, I appeal to a beef-steak, as they usually come to table; the beef half-broiled, the mutton half-roasted. Judge for yourself. The underdone portion of each is tender; the portion that’s dressed is hard. Argal, the hardness is due to the dressing, not to the meat: it is a triumph of domestic cookery. Engage a “good plain cook”—tell her to boil a neck of mutton, that will show you what I mean. All London necks of mutton come to table crescents, regularly curled.’

This is but too true: the real art of stewing is almost unknown in Great Britain, and even in Ireland, despite the fame of an ‘Irish stew.’

Everything that is not roasted or fried, is boiled, ‘a gallop,’ till the quality of tenderness is consolidated to the consistency of caoutchouc. Such a thing as a stewpan is almost unknown in houses supported by less than from three to five hundred a year.

These gastronomic grievances are solely due to neglected education. M. Alexis Soyer, with a touch of that quiet irony which imparts to satire its sharpest sting, dedicated his last Cookery-book ‘to the daughters of Albion.’ Having some acquaintance with their deficiencies, he laid his book slyly at their feet to drop such a hint as is conveyed when a dictionary is handed to damsels who blunder in orthography, or when watches are presented to correct unpunctuality. It is to be feared, however, that ‘the daughters of Albion’ were too busy with less useful—though to them scarcely less essential—accomplishments, to profit by his hint. Cookery is 140a subject they have never been taught to regard as worthy of their attention: rather, indeed, as one to be avoided; for it is never discussed otherwise than apologetically, with a simpering sort of jocularity, or as something which it is ‘low’ to know anything about. When a certain diplomatist was reminded that his mother had been a cook, he did not deny the fact; but assured the company, ‘upon his honour, that she was a very bad one.’ People in the best society do not hesitate to bore others with their ailments, and talk about cures and physic; but conversation respecting prevention—which is better than cure—and wholesomely prepared food is tabooed.

Young ladies of the leisure classes are educated to become uncommonly acute critics of all that pertains to personal blandishment. They keep an uncompromisingly tight hand over their milliners and ladies’ maids. They can tell to a thread when a flounce is too narrow or a tuck too deep. They are taught to a shade what colours suit their respective complexions, and to a hair how their coiffure ought to be arranged. Woe unto the seamstress or handmaiden who sins in these matters! But her ‘good plain cook’—when a damsel is promoted to wedlock, and owns one—passes unreproached for the most heinous offences. Badly seasoned and ill assimilated soup; fish, without any fault of the fishmonger, soft and flabby; meat rapidly roasted before fierce fires—burnt outside and raw within; poultry rendered by the same process tempting to the eye, till dissection reveals red and uncooked joints! These crimes, from their frequency and the ignorance of ‘the lady of the house,’ remain unpunished. Whereupon, husbands, tired of their Barmecide feasts—which disappoint the taste more because they have often a promising look to the eye—prefer better fare at their clubs; and escape the Scylla of bad digestion, to be wrecked on the Charybdis of domestic discord. All this is owing to the wife’s culinary ignorance, and to your ‘Good Plain Cooks.’

We do not say that the daughters of the wealthy and well to do should be submitted to regular kitchen apprenticeships, and taught the details of cookery, any more than that they should learn to make shoes or to fit and sew dresses. But it is desirable that they should acquire principles—such principles as would enable them to apply prompt correction to the errors of their hired cooks. It is no very bold assertion that were such a knowing and judicious supervision generally exercised, the stomach diseases, under which half our nation is said to groan, would be materially abated.

Let us take a step or two lower in the ladder of English life, where circumstances oblige the Good Plain Cook and the wife to be one and the same person. Many a respectable clerk, and many a small farmer, is doomed from one year’s end to another to a wearying disproportion of cold, dry, uncomfortable dinners, because his wife’s knowledge of cookery takes no wider range than that which pertains to the roasted, boiled, and fried. Thousands of artisans and labourers are deprived of half the actual nutriment of food, and of all the legitimate pleasures of the table, because their better halves—though good plain cooks, in the ordinary acceptation of the term—are in utter darkness as to economising, and rendering palatable the daily sustenance of their families. ‘If we could see,’ says a writer before quoted, ‘by the help of an Asmodeus what is going on at the dinner-hour of the humbler of the middle class, what a spectacle of discomfort, waste, ill-temper, and consequent ill-conduct, it would be! The man quarrels with his wife because there is nothing he can eat, and he generally makes up in drink for the deficiencies in the article of food. Gin is the consolation to the spirits and the resource to the baulked appetite. There is thus not only the direct waste of food and detriment to health, but the farther consequent waste of the use of spirits, with its injury to the habits and the health. On the other hand, people who eat well drink moderately; the satisfaction of appetite with relish dispensing with recourse to stimulants. Good-humour, too, and good health follow a good meal, and by a good meal we mean anything, however simple, well dressed in its way. A rich man may live very expensively and very ill, and a poor one very frugally but very well, if it be his good fortune to have a good cook in his wife or his servant; and a ministering angel a good cook is, either in the one capacity or the other, not only to those in humble circumstances, but to many above them of the class served by what are self-termed professed cooks, which is too frequently an affair of profession purely, and who are to be distinguished from plain cooks only in this, that they require larger wages for spoiling food, and spoil much more in quantity, and many other articles to boot.’

Great would be the advantage to the community, if cookery were made a branch of female education. To the poor, the gain would be incalculable. ‘Amongst the prizes which the Bountifuls of both sexes are fond of bestowing in the country,’ we again quote the Examiner, ‘we should like to see some offered for the best-boiled potato, the best-grilled mutton-chop, and the best-seasoned hotch-potch soup or broth. In writing of a well-boiled potato, we are aware that we shall incur the contempt of many for attaching importance to a thing they suppose to be so common; but the fact is, that their contempt arises, as is often the origin of contempt, from their ignorance, there not being one person in ten thousand who has ever seen and tasted that great rarity—a well-boiled potato.’

This is scarcely an exaggeration. The importance attached to the point by the highest gastronomic authorities, is shown by what took place, some years since, at the meeting 141of a Pall Mall Club Committee specially called for the selection of a cook. The candidates were an Englishman, from the Albion Tavern, and a Frenchman recommended by Ude. The eminent divine who presided in right of distinguished connoisseurship put the first question to the candidates. It was this:—‘Can you boil a potato?’

Let us hope that these hints will fructify and be improved upon, and that the first principles of cooking will become, in some way, a part of female education. In schools, however, this will be difficult. It can only be a branch of household education; and until it does so become, we shall continue to be afflicted with ‘Good Plain Cooks.’