Great cooks and cooking

Press, 8 April 1978, Page 15

Great cooks and cooking

Great Cooks and Their Recipes. By Anne Willan. Elm Tree Books. 190 pp. Bibliography and index. $19.10. To The Queen’s Taste. By Lorna Sass. John Murray. 131 pp. Index. $8.35. (Reviewed by Lorna Buchanan) “A master-cook! He is an architect, an engineer, a soldier, a physician, a philosopher, a genera! mathematician,” wrote Ben Jonson more than 300 years ago. Anne Willan, founder of a modern school of cooking in Paris, has assembled details of the lives and recipes of 13 great cooks. Only two of them are likely to be familiar names today — Escoffier and Mrs Beeton. A special place is reserved for Guillaume Tirel, called Taillevent, master-cook to French kings in Chaucer’s day, who died in 1395. Taillevent and a handful of Italian Renaissance cooks established cooking as a great art, especially in France. Taillevent was the first professional cook to write a best-selling cook-book. His recipes reprinted here include veal stew, chestnut puree, and apple pie. Anne Willan describes how, little by little, cooks abandoned the spiced and gaudy dishes of medieval times, when a grandiose display was half the justification for a feast, and developed the deceptive simplicity of modern cuisine With its delicate balance of a few carefully chosen ingredients. By the time she reaches Escoffier (who died in 1935) the recipes include cream of carrot soup, tornedas chasseur, and peach Melba. This last was the most famous of all Escoffier’s recipes. He created it for the singer Nellie Melba, one of his ■ favourite patrons; during one of her slimming bouts he also created and named Melba toast. In all, the book includes more than 100 recipes, a rich variety of illustrations, and enough detail to make it something of a history of grand cooking in Western Europe and the United States.

“To the Queen's Taste” is a much more modest book, devoted to the recipes and menus of Elizabethan feasts. As in “Great Cooks,” the recipes are adapted to modern ingredients and measures; almost everything mentioned is available in New Zealand. The flavour of the times is retained by such gems of ingredients as marie bone (marrow bone), cringeado (candied orange peel), veryjuyce (the acid

juice of crab apples) and fartes (small balls of light pastry or meat). Ihe book is liberally sprinkled with Elizabethan recipes, illustrations and quotations. "Let it haile „ kissing comfits and snow cringoes,” wrote Shakespeare in the “Merry Wives of Windsor.” Eringo was candied sea holly (regarded as an aphradisiact. and comfits, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth, were whole spices coated in sugar and chewed to sweeten the breath. 'Just about the most popular ingredient of all seems to have been rose water. It occurs, for instance, in apple and orange pie, in nimcemea' pie, and in jumbals (cakes made of knotted pastry strips). Not a book to turn to lightly for ideas for lunch or a snack; but highly recommended for such delights as “Quelquechose" (oyster and lamb casserole topped with asparagus) "Pudding in a Turnep Root,” and “Baked Eeles.”