The Press Saturday, February 1, 1930. Food.

Press, 1 February 1930, Page 16

The Press Saturday, February 1, 1930. Food.

If a recent contributor to a London paper is right, "food has become in " England a topic of conversation to " a degree unknown before." There is no doubt at all about another development he refers to, the more and more frequent appearance of cookery book-. These are welcome phenomena. Those who deplore slab and slop cookery and pretentious cookery, the two familiar. bad extremes, will take courage and hope, even more from the conversational than from the literary sign. Food and talk about food are good together, while people who cannot talk intelligently about it get the food they deserve. An art and science like cookery flourishes only where interest is wide-spread and deep but judicious as we ii_the antithesis of that interest which crudely expresses little more than Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum; and such a discriminating interest is sure to show itself in conversation. Of course there has always been plenty of talk about eating and drinking in England, much of it very good, like much English writing about food and drink. What Truth's contributor certainly means is not that a stupid silence has been broken, though no doubt better understanding has upset the vulgarly refined notion that it must be rather i gross to talk about food; he means that i people are talking about it with more j knowledge and taste and lively curiosity. The books will help them: but the books came because the good talk had begun. The War began it, perhaps, with the initiation of hundreds of thousands into gastronomical secrets which, as peaceful islanders, they might j have died without approaching; and j the ten years since have produced such | an expansion of travelling as has per- : mitted every second man or woman to i eat abroad and bring home a divine } discontent. So M. Boulestin has had to J explain how it is that " they order these I " things better in France "; BrillatSavarin has become a popular author j in a new edition. One recent English cookery book assembles and classifies dishes from the countries, capitals, and provinces of Europe, and gives the most admired recipe for each; and Mrs Beeton, we believe, has become defii nitely a cosmopolitan. j While English taste has been eduj eating itself, French taste, it seems, j has undergone a renascence. It had j become too elaborate and had inverted ' the importance of " finish " and " foun- ' " dation" —a sure sign of classical j decadence, among cooks no less than | among other artists. Pre-war admiration of French cookery was therefore sadly unenlightened; it worshipped blindly, and it worshipped the wrong thing. The formulae of French cookery had become classified [1 classicised] before the War to such an extent that the "a " la" type of cookery tracked you down all over the world; in big hotels; in country inns; in small restaurants; in the railway termini of England; in little French hotels that thought they must give their tourists this cosmetieised cookery, while the savoury local stew, prepared for the host, rolled on the air every time the kitchen door was opened. » But the spirit of a great art is soon replenished and revived when its real credit is in the hands of innumerable amateurs; and the French have easily traced back virtue to its fresh spring, to local dishes, like the landlord's stew. Publishers have freely responded to the new inspiration; and fresh collections of recipes and fresh editions of old ones crowd the bookshops. Their efforts are supplemented by the cartographers, who issue gastronomic maps of France, directing the enquirer where to find perfection at home and testifying to the fact that "the chief use " of a car is to go to and from a meal." Most of the cookery books are as personal in tone as in taste, quite unlik-3 many English books, which are as impersonal as a dictionary and as unexperimental. The French writer on cookery is generally a literary man, and thinks his subject worthy of his skill. Only a few of the very largest books are the work of professionals, like Ali-Bab's Gastronomie Pratique, a foot square and four inches truck, or Prosper-Montagne's similar monument. Among the amateurs is Aurieoste de Lazargne, of whose work on Lorraine cookery five impressions have been called for in the return to provincial teaching. Blandin's Cuisine et Chasse de Bourgogne is "very amusing," and Hugue Lapaire's Cuisine Borrichonne has "drinking songs at the end." At least five or six years ago M. Boulestin had already, in his Simple French Cooking for English Homes, dismissed the elaborate, internationalised food of the great hotels as " good "of its kind, good enough in any case " for people who dance between courses " and want to be seen rather than eat "well," and had invited attention to the simpler and better fare which is the travellers pot luck in provincial France. He also recommended conversation about food: " Food which is " worth eating is worth discussing. " And there is the occult power of " words which somehow will develop its " qualities." Apparently England has listened to his wisdom; and in France the tide of renascent simplicity is at the full. It cannot have been without its stimulating effect on the talk of French gastronomes, always witty, rich in speculation and disclosure, and not seldom philosophical and lyrical. M. Boulestin deliberately speaks as to novices; yet he cannot describe how

boouf a la mode is perfected by a liqueur glass of brandy and a glass of claret, how a roast leg of mutton is the better for two heads of garlic insinuated near the bone, or how to make that sauce verte which is one of the flavours Daudet almost communicates in prose, without speaking like an artist and a lover and reproving the dull, pupilteacher voice of our own manuals. If this is so, then what delicious, exciting exchanges must those be. when expert communes with expert, across the table ?