Her Majesty the Cook

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 20, 20 May 1909, Page 9

Her Majesty the Cook

Our local evening contemporary has been reading a wise and needful homily on the need of fair treatment of honest food at the hands of Her Majesty the Cook. Which moves us to remark that good cookery would often turn marriage from a failure into a success, and thereby diminish to an equivalent extent the output of our divorGe-mills. The high and higher education df our budding womanhood is a good thing. It was carried to a very high point indeed in the later middle ages — but so were the arts and graces that adorn woman in her proper sphere, the home. We cannot for the life of us see why the study of a Rhapsodic Hongroise on the piano, or the painting of a flake-white swan with the neck of a giraffe, or the spoiling of a "good piece of canvas by a daffy-down-dilly ' done ' in crude chrome yellow, should render ' miss in her teens ' incapable of boiling water without burning it. Yet so it often seems to be decreed. Simple Bertpldino couldn't see the forest for the trees, nor the town because there were so many houses. And in all this straining after ' the accomplishments ' of the moment, both teachers and taught are apt to miss some of the accomplishments that matter most.

In her Note Booh, published some time ago, Lady Nevill declares that only a small minority of the ' educated ' young ladies of her time had even an elementary knowledge of domestic management. She tells of a distinguished society leader (one Lady Caroline) who wedded, so to speak, when the bloom was off the rye — when the blush of youth had passed and the envious years had begun to engrave their signmanual around her once lustrous eyes. Lady Caroline determined to manage her household according to her own principles of domestic economy. One of her first acts was to dismiss the cook for specific dishonesty. The poor woman pleaded — but pleaded in vain — that there were only two legs of mutton to each sheep butchered on the premises; for (declared the angry matron) r have I not all my life seen them grazing with four?' Every nation may (as Brillat Savarin avers) have the cookery that it deserves. But none the less, there is a modicum of truth in a dyspeptic, gloom-pampered man's definition of a bad cook as ' a hired assassin.' In his Between Ourselves, Max O'Rell gives the other side of the picture: he tells of a French author who was blessed with a loving, sympathetic wife. Like most French matrons, she was a little wizard in the arts of domestic economy. ' Look at him !' said the wife fondly, as he was taking green-fly off some plants in his greenhouse. ' Look at him ! You wouldn't think, to see him killing green-fly, that he is such a great man, and writes those beautiful things out of his own head! He says it is all owing to the way I feed him that he is able to give such great thoughts to the world, and that as long as I look after his digestion, and believe in him, he'll write the books. Isn't he a dear I' And Max wrote : 'So are you, dear little woman!'