THE DOCTOR IN THE KITCHEN.

Evening Star, Issue 5230, 9 December 1879, Page 2

THE DOCTOR IN THE KITCHEN.

The public mind is not yet sufficiently awakened to the importance of a thorough and active campaign against the waste of food which characterises the habitual dietary of rich and poor in Great Britain ; but from the extended welcome given to the few words which we wrote on the subject last week, it is apparent that the prospect of a winter of much scarcity has predisposed many to the earnest consideration of this question as one of much public moment. A good doctor, it has often been said, must be a good cook ; and it is reported of a cynical physician of great repute, that, being seen to issue from the kitchen of a large institution which he was visiting, he said, on being interrogated, “ I always go to salute the cook; the cooks are the doctors’ best friends; if they were not so bad we should have but few patients. I owe half my income to bad cooks.” This light witticism—“ spoken ironical,” as Artemus Ward would have it—conveys a serious meaning which we all recognise. A bad cook is wasteful of material, of money, of fuel, and of health ; and, with a few exceptions, English cooks are all bad cooks, in one sense or other ; unskilful in execution, or extravagant in selection, and destitute of sound and economical traditions. Neglecting for the moment the cooking of the rich—who are usually content with a diet as monotonous as it is heavy and excessive in nitrogenous elements—we may turn to those who most interest us, as the” types upon whose model the poorer classes follow at a humble distance. If we look to the cuisine of the lower middle classes, and of the modest household of the curate, the clerk, and the skilled artisan, we see that, as a rule, the art of cooking begins and ends with roasting, boiling, or grilling a number of joints of meat and a limited repertory of vegetables. The smaller the household and the income the less the range of choice, and the smaller the ingenuity in rendering common things digestible and palatable. The stable dinner of the hearty and well-paid artisan is a rump-steak, or a cut of the best part of mutton or beef; and when there remains cold meat or cold vegetables, or cold fish, the art of dealing with them, however simply, is little studied either by housewife or cook. In a French household the little piece of stewed meat is preceded by a pleasantly flavored soup, made with the bones and parings of the meat and some of the remnants of yesterday’s dinner, with perhaps crusts of bread and some vegetables added ; the meat itself is served with stewed beans, or carrots or onions, or potatoes. If tho joint of one day be a piece of beef, next day the coid meat appears, perhaps cut in slices, with oil and vinegar, or with a mustard sauce. The cold potatoes and cold stewed beans or cauliflower of the previous day make an excellent salad next day, with perhaps a tomato added, cut in slices. The maccaroni and cheese left over from a previous meal re-appears at the next reheated with other sliced cold vegetable, celery or salsify, or whatever else, and covered with a little brown scraped cheese. The commonest fish, such as ray—which diet poor and rich alike neglect—is served habitually with a little “brown butter;” and neither workman nor epicure need despise the nourishing and toothsome dish. Cold boiled fish rc-appears either a Vhuile, or with a sauce of oil and mustard beaten together into a cream, and is as least as welcome as on the first day, when eaten hot; or, with bread-crumbs and pepper and salt, a “parade” is made in which much bread and a little fish make up a most nourishing and appetising plat . Even conger soup and dog-fish soup are not below the apjreciation of a maritime population ; and those who have tasted both on the coast of Normandy can answer for their being both palatable and nourishing. Boualon-baUse, the fish soup of Marseilles, is a speciality which it might not be easy to import; but anyone who has tasted it either in Marseilles or in the Rue Boieldieu, in Paris, will not think it a dish to be despised. What a plebeian and usually coarse and tasteless dish is tripe as usually prepared in England ; how digestible, nourishing, and cheap a dinner may be made off “ tripe a la Caen,” at 100 restaurants in Paris; and “soup a la frontage," the plebeian ornament and charm of many a “petit soup Jin and the whole tribe of vegetable purees m soup—potato soup, carrot soup, turnip soup —so simple, so nourishing, so inexpensive, and easy made. They are not unknown in England; but how rare 1 Again, in the art of cooking potatoes and fish, when shall we leam to fry fish, say, as the poor Jews in Whitechapel do ? or potatoes as is done at the corner of every poor street in Paris ? This mode of cooking is physiological ; it is scientific ; and, properly done, it is economical and delicious. English cooks use shallow frying-pans—in which it is impossible to fry properly chiefly because they are too careless to strain or clarify the fat or olive oil which they have used once, and to make it serve again and again, as all economical and reasonable cooks do—or should do. Olive oil is the best material for frying either potatoes or fish, and, if used carefully and strained, and from time to time cleansed, may be used over and over again. Anyone who chooses to take a lesson in frying potatoes at the corner of tho street may see the wire bowl of potatoes plunged, into a deep saucepan full of boiling fat, and rapidly cooked and browned in a vessel of fluid without ever touching the bottom of tho vessel; and if he choose to carry off a pennyworth in a paper bag, he will observe that they are of a delicate amber color ; the water having been driven off by tho great heat, they are dry, floury, and 'digestible, and nutriluus as they are savory; and the proof of tho perfection of the operation is that they do not grease the paper bag. We are reminded that we spoke last week of pork and beans as an economical and physiologically excellent food, unusually popular in some parts of America ; and that bacon and beans arc much used in rural districts of England. It is true, that bacon and beans make an excellent food ; but as they are generally boiled, and as the beans are often tough, the dish is open to improvement. Cooked in a “Warriner” pot, in which the liquor of the meat is not lost, aud the beans well steeped and softened lirst, and cooked with ths bacon and impregnated v\ith its juices, bacon and broad beans are an excellent dish; and boiled as it is usually—if the liquor be not wasted, but used for next day’s pea soup; and if tho beans be soft, and if what are left bo used with the sliced cold boiled potatoes for next day’s salad—we have nothing except in praise of the dish. It becomes, however, monotonous, and the beans, unless young, are apt to have hard sheila, which are not easily vanquished. The American pork and beans are prepared by placing a pi< ce of fat pork on a little iron tripod, in a pic-dish, of which the bottom is filled with haricot beans well softened, or partially stewed, with a little salt and pepper strewed over the beans ; this is put in the oven, and the i<*t of the pork as it falls upon the beans, softening them, adds its

carbon to their nitrogen, and makes a dish of the smallest possible cost, ou the level of tho lowest culinary intelligence, and yet which may tempt any honest appetite. In the simplest things tho grossest ignorance prevails, Fried steak and onions is a sort of bourgeois speciality of England ; and yet how few English cooks can prepare a Diet to equal the Chateaubriand of a French cook ; and how few cooks know how to make a good puree of onions. The onions should be fried first—Breton fashion.

At the dinner which the German Emperor gave this week to the great officers of State and of tho army of Strasburg—cooked, no doubt, by a French cook—the piece de resistance was ft IVijot Breton, What is fpfjot Breton t Nothing else than a leg of mutton roasted, served in a dish of haricot beans * tewed closely in stock gravy, and a puree of onions fried and rubbed through a sieve. It Is ft dish for a king, for an emperor ; but it is the simplest of bourgeois luxuries, within tho means of every well-to-do artisan or small tradesman. , , . Tke grave side of this question is that with improved cooking power, and with a wider range of selection of food, comes greater economy. All vegetables—beet-root, radishes (which hardly ever appear at our dinner-tables), celery (which we mostly eat in chips), raw chestnuts (which our cooks hardly know except roasted or boiled at dessert), red beans, white beans, maize, rice, coarse fish, cold fish, scraps of meat, the previous day’s remnants of vegetables these are among the elements out of which a reasonable and economical cook constructs a savory and nourishing diet-list, with a due proportion of meat chosen not always from the choice parts. The servant of tho tradesman learns in time to practise these ingenious and pleasant economics in her own home; and the French artisan lives twice as well as the English working man, at half the cost, and that too in a capital such as Paris, where bread, butter, milk, sugar, coffee, in fact most of the necessaries of life, are from 20 to 50 per cent, dearer than they are in London.— 1 British Medical Journal.’