Cookery

Cookery (Lat. coquus, a cook), the art of preparing and dressing food of all sorts for human consumption, of converting the raw materials, by the application of heat or otherwise, into a digestible and pleasing condition, and generally ministering to the satisfaction of the appetite and the delight of the palate. We may take it that some form of cookery has existed from the earliest times, and its progress has been from the simple to the elaborate, dominated partly by the foods accessible to man, partly by the stage of civilization he has attained, and partly by the appliances at his command for the purpose either of treating the food, or of consuming it when served.

The developed art of cookery is necessarily a late addition—if it may be considered to be included at all—to the list of “fine arts.” Originally it is a purely industrial and useful art. Man, says a French writer, was born a roaster, and “pour être cuisinier, il a besoin de le devenir.” The ancients were great eaters, but strangers to the subtler refinements of the palate. The gods were supposed to love the smell of fried meat, while their nectar and ambrosia represented an ideal, which, though preserved as a phrase, would hardly satisfy a modern epicure. The ancients were poorly provided with pots and pans, except of a simple order, or with the appurtenances of a kitchen, and they were sadly to seek in the requisites of a modern table. So long as men ate with their hands no dainty confection was suitable; the viands were set forth in a straightforward style fit for their requirements. “Plain cooking,” which, after all, can never become obsolete, was the only sort. Oddities, no doubt, were the luxuries; and we can see to-day in the ethnological accounts of contemporary savages and backward civilizations, a fair representation of the cookeries of the ancients. The luxuries of the Chinese are, in their way, a survival of long ages of a cookery which to western civilization is grotesque. Even if it is an historic impertinence, it is impossible for the countries of western civilization to regard the fine flower of their own evolution as other than the highest pitch of progress. Autres temps, autres mœurs. To the Chinaman French cooking may possibly be as grotesque as to an Englishman the Chinaman’s hundred-year-old buried egg, black and tasteless. The history of comparative cookery is bound up with the physical possibilities of each country and its products; and if we attempt to mark out stages in the evolution of cookery as a fine art, it is necessarily as understood by the so-called civilized peoples of the West in their culmination at the present day.

It is obvious that opportunity has dominated its history, for the art of cookery is to some extent the product of an increased refinement of taste, consequent on culture and increase of wealth. To this extent it is a decadent art, ministering to the luxury of man, and to his progressive inclination to be pampered and have his appetite tickled. It is thus only remotely connected with the mere necessities of nutrition (q.v.), or the science of dietetics (q.v.). Mere hunger, though the best sauce, will not produce cookery, which is the art of sauces. For centuries its elaboration consisted mainly of a progressive variety of foods, the richest and rarest being sought out; and their nature depended on what was most difficult to obtain. The Greeks learnt by contact with Asia to increase the sumptuous character of their banquets, but we know little enough of their ideas of gastronomy. Athens was the centre of luxury. According to our chief authority Athenaeus, Archestratus of Gela, the friend of the son of Pericles, the guide of Epicurus, and author of the Heduphagetica, was a great traveller, and took pains to get information as to how the delicacies of the table were prepared in different parts. His lost work was versified by Ennius. Other connoisseurs seem to have been Numenius of Heraclea, Hegemon of Thasos, Philogenes of Leucas, Simonaclides of Chios, and Tyndarides of Sicyon. The Romans, emerging from their pristine simplicity, borrowed from the Greeks their achievements in gastronomic pleasure. We read of this or that Roman gourmet, such as Lucullus, his extravagances and his luxury. The name of the connoisseur Apicius, after whom a work of the time of Heliogabalus is called, comes down to us in association with a manual of cookery. And from Macrobius and Petronius we can gather very interesting glimpses of the Roman idea of a menu. In the later empire, tradition still centred round the Roman cookery favoured by the geographical position of Italy; while the customs and natural products of the remoter parts of Europe gradually begin to assert themselves as the middle ages progress.

It is, however, not till the Renaissance, and then too with Italy as the starting-point, that the history of modern cookery really begins. Meanwhile cookery may be studied rather in the architecture of kitchens, and the development of their appurtenances and personnel, than in any increase in the subtleties of the art; the ideal was inevitably gross; the end was feeding—inextricably associated in all ages with cooking, but as distinct from its fine fleur as gluttony from gastronomy.

Montaigne’s references to the revival of cookery in France by Catherine de’ Medici indicate that the new attention paid to the art was really novel. She brought Italian cooks to Paris and introduced there a cultured simplicity which was unknown in France before. It is to the Italians apparently that later developments are originally due. It is clearly established, for instance (says Abraham Hayward in his Art of Dining), that the Italians introduced ices into France. Fricandeaus were invented by the chef of Leo X. And Coryate in his Crudities, writing in the time of James I., says that he was called “furcifer” (evidently in contemptuous jest) by his friends, from his using those “Italian neatnesses called forks.” The use of the fork and spoon marked an epoch in the progress of dining, and consequently of cookery.

Under Louis XIV. further advances were made. His maître d’hôtel, Béchamel, is famous for his sauce; and Vatel, the great Condé’s cook, was a celebrated artist, of whose suicide in despair at the tardy arrival of the fish which he had ordered, Madame de Sévigné relates a moving story. The prince de Soubise, immortalized by his onion sauce, also had a famous chef.

In England the names of certain cookery-books may be noted, such as Sir J. Elliott’s (1539), Abraham Veale’s (1575), and the Widdowe’s Treasure (1625). The Accomplisht Cook, by Robert May, appeared in 1665, and from its preface we learn that the author (who speaks disparagingly of French cookery, but more gratefully of Italian and Spanish) was the son of a cook, and had studied abroad and under his father (c. 1610) at Lady Dormer’s, and he speaks of that time as “the days wherein were produced the triumphs and trophies of cookery.” From his description they consisted of most fantastic and elaborately built up dishes, intended to amuse and startle, no less than to satisfy the appetite and palate.

Louis XV. was a great gourmet; and his reign saw many developments in the culinary art. The mayonnaise (originally mahonnaise) is ascribed to the duc de Richelieu. Such dishes as “potage à la Xavier,” “cailles à la Mirepoix,” “chartreuses à la Mauconseil,” “poulets à la Villeroy,” “potage à la Condé,” “gigot à la Mailly,” owe their titles to celebrities of the day, and the Pompadour gave her name to various others. The Jesuits Brunoy and Bougeant, who wrote a preface to a contemporary treatise on cookery (1739), described the modern art as “more simple, more appropriate, and more cunning, than that of old days,” giving the ingredients the same union as painters give to colours, and harmonizing all the tastes. The very phrase “cordon bleu” (strictly applied only to a woman cook) arose from an enthusiastic recognition of female merit by the king himself. Madame du Barry, piqued at his opinion that only a man could cook to perfection, had a dinner prepared for him by a cuisinière with such success that the delighted monarch demanded that the artist should be named, in order that so precious a cuisinier might be engaged for the royal household. “Allons donc, la France!” retorted the ex-grisette, “have I caught you at last? It is no cuisinier at all, but a cuisinière, and I demand a recompense for her worthy both of her and of your majesty. Your royal bounty has made my negro, Zamore, governor of Luciennes, and I cannot accept less than a cordon bleu” (the Royal Order of the Saint Esprit) “for my cuisinière.”

The French Revolution was temporarily a blow to Parisian cookery, as to everything else of the ancien régime. “Not a single turbot in the market,” was the lament of Grimod de la Reynière, the great gourmet, and author of the Manuel des amphitryons (1808). But while it fell heavily on the class of noble amphitryons it had one remarkable effect on the art which was epoch-making. It is from that time that we notice the rise of the Parisian restaurants. To 1770 is ascribed the first of these, the Champ d’oiseau in the rue des Poulies. In 1789 there were a hundred. In 1804 (when the Almanach des gourmands, the first sustained effort at investing gastronomy with the dignity of an art, was started) there were between 500 and 600. And in 1814, to such an extent had the restaurants attracted the culinary talent of Paris, that the allied monarchs, on arriving there, had to contract with the two brothers Véry for the supply of their table. Among the great gastronomic names of Napoleon’s day was that of his chancellor Cambacérès, of whose dinners many stories are told. Robert (the eponym of the sauce Robert), Rechaud and Mérillion were at this period esteemed the Raphael, Michelangelo and Rubens of cookery; while A. Beauvilliers (author of Art des cuisines) and Carême (author of the Maître d’hôtel français, and chef at different times to the Tsar Alexander I., Talleyrand, George IV. and Baron Rothschild) were no less celebrated.1 Perhaps the greatest name of all in the history of the literature of cookery is that of Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), the French judge and author of the Physiologie du goût (1825), the classic of gastronomy.

In England Louis Eustache Ude, Charles Elmé Francatelli, and Alexis Soyer carried on the tradition, all being not only cooks but authors of treatises on the art. The Original (1835) of Thomas Walker, the Lambeth police magistrate, is another work which has inspired later pens. Like the Physiologie du goût, it is no mere cookery-book, but a compound of observation and philosophy. Among simple hand-books, Mrs Glasse’s, Dr Kitchener’s and Mrs Rundell’s were standard English works in the 18th and early 19th centuries; and in France the Cuisinière de la campagne (1818) went through edition after edition. An interesting old English work is Dr Pegge’s Forme of Cury (1780), which includes some historical reflections on the subject. “We have some good families in England,” he says, “of the name of Cook or Coke.... Depend upon it, they all originally sprang from real professional cooks, and they need not be ashamed of their extraction any more than Porters, Butlers, &c.” He points out that cooks in early days were of some importance; William the Conqueror bestowed land on his coquorum praepositus and coquus regius; and Domesday Book records the bestowal of a manor on Robert Argyllon, by the service of a dish called “de la Groute” on the king’s coronation day.

At the present time, whatever the local varieties of cooking, and the difference of national custom, French cooking is admittedly the ideal of the culinary art, directly we leave the plain roast and boiled. And the spread of cosmopolitan hotels and restaurants over England, America and the European continent, has largely accustomed the whole civilized world to the Parisian type. The improvements in the appliances and appurtenances of the kitchen have made the whole world kin in the arts of dining, but the French chef remains the typical master of his craft. Schools of cookery have been added to the educational machine. The literature of the subject has passed beyond enumeration.

It is unnecessary here to pursue so vast a practical subject into detail; but the following notes on broiling, roasting, baking, boiling, stewing and frying may be useful.

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