COOKING-WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

New Zealand Graphic, Volume X, Issue 1, 7 January 1893, Page 13

COOKING-WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Cooking means, in every grade of its application. from tbe poorest to tbe richest, that the best natural use shall be made of the materials employed ; that tbe peculiarities of each one of them shall be developed, not distorted ; that whether they be eheap or dear, c >arse or delicate, whether the result be a peasant's broth of potatoes and leeks or a sauce for Locallos, the dish prepared shall be itself and nothing else, with all the special characters that its elements can be made to evolve by treatment intelligently devised and carefolly applied. The true national uses of

THE ART OF COOKERY du not lie in its scientific and expensive applications (if they did, cookery would be closod to all but the ricbi, bnt in tbe preparation, in a cottage or a palace, of every article of food, whether alone or in combination with others, in snch a fashion that it shall retain tbe individuality that nature gave it, tbe full essence that belongs thereto, the properties, the aroma, the action on the palate that are specific to itself, and which ought to distinguish each di»h from every other. Rad cooks are nnable to bestow this character on their work; each of their productions resembles every other more or less, in niter contradiction to the fundamental la* that every dish shall be itself alone, with no echo from elsewhere. When that result is obtained, no matter where or in what, in the simplest as in the most complicated work, true cookery has been applied. In England, however, the distressing error prevails generally that cookery implies the

FABRICATION OF SWAGGERING KISHES, and that no one can be a good cook who does not possess acquaintance with such conceits. The Belgians and the tiermans (especially the South Germans), are probably at this moment the most improving cooks in Europe, precisely because they perceive and apply the law of individuality, which alone can give true variety in cookery. It is because it is not,‘and cannot be, applied when many contradictory dishes are being prepared in the same kitchen—each one infecting the air with its own smell, combining that smell with the others, and forming in each dish a mixture of them all—that hotel and restaurant-cooking is generally so detestable. Tbe cabbage soup of a cottage (you may see it simmering all day in almost every hut in France and Germany) stews in pure air ; it remains itself, untouched by, unpolluted by, the hundred damaging contacts of the atmosphere of a great kitchen, and, for that reason, all

TRUE CRITICS OF COOKERY will declare it to be a far more thorough representative of

the first principle of the a-t than any of the hundred fJatt sent up from a reeking basement tn Part". It is on the golden rule of simplicity and unity that every national system of eookery should rest. Eveh system may differ as much as it pleases in its details from the others, provided it agrees with them on that one point. Il is by adhering to that rule that many Continental women, despite the comparatively limited materials at their disposal, obtain tbe truest and the m «t numerous forms of variety of food ; while we, now that we are beginning in our torn to want variety, are content to obtain it, not from eookery, but from mere abundance of supply.