English cuisine

“ It is characteristic of the nature of our nationality, however, that while the Anglo-Saxons and their successors refused to confine themselves to the fare which was more or less adequate to the purposes of archaic pastoral life in this island, they by no means renounced their partiality for farm and garden produce, but by a fusion of culinary tastes and experiences akin to fusion of race and blood, laid the basis of the splendid cuisine of the Plantagenet and Tudor periods. Our cookery is, like our tongue, an amalgam. ”

“ When a foreigner or one of our American cousins, or a man from one of the Colonies, comes to England, the first question he generally asks is: "Where can I get a typical good old English dinner?" Good old English fare is by no means too abundant in London—and old English fare I would define as being the very best native material, cooked in the plainest possible manner. We talk of English cookery, though it should really be termed British cookery, for Irish stew and Welsh lamb, Scotch beef and cock-a-leekie soup, and even a haggis, can fairly be included in the comprehensive term. ”

“ I had far rather see England covered with schools of cookery than with schools of the ordinary kind; the issue would be infinitely more hopeful. Little girls should be taught cooking and baking more assiduously than they are taught to read. But with ever in view the great English principle—that food is only cooked aright when it yields the utmost of its native and characteristic savour. Let sauces be utterly forbidden—save the natural sauce made of gravy. ”

“ As for water-cress and pepper-grass and, of course, parsley, minced and otherwise, no French chef would think of preparing a meal without a plentiful supply of them on hand.
It isn't essential that every dish should be turned into an elaborate work of art, as if it were to be entered at the annual exhibition of the Société des Chefs de Cuisine, but neither is there any reason, even with modest means at command, for giving cause for that old slogan of the great American dinner table: “It tastes better than it looks.” ”

“ But the crowning audacity of his day was the purchase of a delicatessen dinner—cold chicken, sweet pickles, potato salad, Swiss cheese, bologna, rye bread, a wooden plate of butter, and four bottles of imported English ale. He spread it on the table, in the dishes of the "decorated English tea-set," drew up two chairs, and surveyed his work from the doorway with a chuckle of uncontainable delight. ”

“ But if we descend in England beyond the upper ten thousand, though the fried and roast are generally excellent, the attendance good, and the display of glass, crystal and plate much greater and better kept, than in any other country and capital in the world, yet the cookery is not to be compared to the finer cuisine bourgeoise of Paris. The professional and learned classes at Paris, as well as the class of superior traders, all feast at a cuisine, which, for its science, its relishing and appetizing qualities, greatly surpasses ours. ”

“ One has heard much condemnation of the English kitchen. Our typical cook is spoken of as a gross, unimaginative creature, capable only of roasting or seething. Our table is said to be such as would weary or revolt any but gobbet-bolting carnivores. We are told that our bread is the worst in Europe, an indigestible paste; that our vegetables are diet rather for the hungry animal than for discriminative man; that our warm beverages, called coffee and tea, are so carelessly or ignorantly brewed that they preserve no simple virtue of the drink as it is known in other lands. ”

“ Openly in London drawing-rooms people are heard expressing their preference for the food supplied in English homes and hotels. They dare to state that many of the courses provided in French hotels and restaurants are highly flavoured, but uneatable; that the meat provided is nearly always unaccountably tough and full of strange sinews and muscles that give one's teeth much inconvenience; that the clear soup is commonly little more than greasy hot water containing floating scraps of bread and vegetables; that the sweet course is incomparably inferior to that of the English table. ”

“ Apart from the simple processes of roasting, baking, boiling, and stewing, nearly all our cookery has been introduced from foreign sources. The French methods of dressing fish and vegetables, are now largely introduced into English kitchens, and French borugeoise dishes have become quite popular. ”

“ A tourist through England can seldom fail, at the quietest country-inn, of finding himself served with the essentials of English table-comfort—his mutton-chop done to a turn, his steaming little private apparatus for concocting his own tea, his choice pot of marmalade or slice of cold ham, and his delicate rolls and creamy butter, all served with care and neatness. In France, one never asks in vain for delicious cafe-au-lait, good bread and butter, a nice omelet, or some savory little portion of meat with a French name. ”

“ There are now several Schools of Cookery in London, from some of which one can obtain regularly educated female cooks, and it is quite possible, with small establishments and small fortunes, to give comfortable and even elegant dinners, in which the English style shall be diversified by the French. ”

“ We have lived better in point of eating and drinking beyond a question, than we should have done in going 332 from London to the Highlands of Scotland, at double the expense.
The common cookery of the French gives great advantage. It is true they roast everything to a chip if they are not cautioned, but they give such a number and variety of dishes, that if you do not like some, there are others to please your palate. The dessert at a French inn has no rival at an English one. ”

“ Yet good, simple German cookery is quite excellent of its kind. A German housewife knows how to make a goose into many delectable dishes which an English housewife knows nothing of, and the German tarts are excellent things amongst dishes of pastry. ”

“ Nothing could be simpler, yet nothing more right and reasonable. The aim of English cooking is so to deal with the raw material of man’s nourishment as to bring out, for the healthy palate, all its natural juices and savours. And in this, when the cook has any measure of natural or acquired skill, we most notably succeed. Our beef is veritably beef; at its best, such beef as can be eaten in no other country under the sun; our mutton is mutton in its purest essence—think of a shoulder of Southdown at the moment when the first jet of gravy starts under the carving knife! ”

“ If any professed cook or amateur succeeds in causing an abandonment of all that is coarse and unwholesome in the English kitchen, and in introducing all that is light, elegant, and varied in the French, he will have accomplished a great object, and have done the health of diners-out and dinner-givers equal service. ”

“ There you will find, too, fifty or more dry seasonings, including 11anise, basil, saffron, savoury, clove or garlic, cassia buds, bay leaf, ginger root, pepper-corns, marjoram, mint, thyme, capers and so on.
Herein lie the “secrets” of French cookery which are, in truth, not secrets at all, but merely the application of common sense to the cuisine. The French have never allowed their taste to be restricted by prejudice, so they hail a new flavor with delight rather than registering an instinctive dislike because it is not familiar. ”

“ We find no fault with the elegances of the table, in plate, crystal, china, and so forth; but an English dinner is not an elegant meal. The guests are supposed, by a polite fiction, to have the hunger of the whole day to satisfy, and provision is made accordingly. Varieties of soup, fish, flesh, fowl, game, rich-made dishes, load the board spread for a group of well-dressed men and women, known to have already dined, and who would affect to shudder at so heavy a meal, if it was termed supper. ”

“ Even in the humblest auberge, in the least frequented district, the (p. 398) dinner served up is of a quality such as can very rarely be had in any English public-house, or even in most of our country inns. Cooking seems to be one of the lost arts of England, if indeed it ever possessed it; and our people are in the habit, through want of knowledge, of probably wasting more food than would sustain many another nation. But in the great system of National Education that is to be, no one dreams of including as a branch of it skill in the preparation and economy in the use of human food. ”

“ And eventually we came to a big kitchen at the top of the house, very airy and very clean, where a French chef de cuisine rules over cooks of all nationalities. Descending again, we went into the basement to look at Appenrodt's Keller, decorated after the German style with landscapes and figures, where two bands play alternately all the afternoon and evening, and where good Germans, and Englishmen who like good German beer, congregate to eat simple food and drink the produce of Austrian and German hop-fields. ”

“ But the modern cuisine is a perfect system of chemistry. The science of the cook consists in decomposing, in rendering easy of digestion, in quintessencing (so to speak) the viands, in extracting from them light and nourishing juices, and in so mixing them together, that no one flavour shall predominate, but that all shall be harmonised and blended. This is the high aim and great effort of art. The harmony which strikes the eye in a picture should in a sauce cause in the palate as agreeable a sensation.” There is nothing new under the sun. ”

“ Dining and Cookery in England Fifty Years Ago.—England can boast of a Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, and many other illustrious poets, clearly indicating that the national character of Britons is not deficient in imagination; but we have not had one single masculine inventive genius of the kitchen. It is the probable result of our national antipathy to mysterious culinary compounds, that none of the bright minds of England have ventured into the region of scientific cookery. Even in the best houses, when I was a young man, the dinners were wonderfully solid, hot, and stimulating. ”

“ It is possible to get an excellent dinner at any of the “Gordon” hotels, at the “Savoy,” the “Cecil,” and at some other noted food-houses—more especially at Romano’s—by paying a stiff price for it; but it is due to a shameful lack of enterprise on the part of English caterers that a well-cooked English dinner is becoming more difficult to procure, year after year. There be three purely British dishes which are always “hoff” before all others on the programme of club, hotel, or eating-house; and these are, Irish stew, liver-and-bacon, and tripe-and-onions. ”

“ There were brown cooks from India who looked to the making of spices and sauces, yellow cooks from China who held the secret of many strange recipes unknown in Europe, French cooks for the pastries, Italian cooks for the creams and jellies, German cooks for the baked meats and the mulled beers, Spanish cooks for the chocolate and the game, Persians to mix the sherbet and the fruit drinks, and two English cooks to make what they call in that country “rosbiffe,” “biffstek” and “plumpouding.” ”

“ In this region there are scores of restaurants of the first rank in which one eats the best soups and stews, the best veal, the best poultry, the [245] best salads and sauces, the best vegetables, the best entrées, the best bread and butter, the best cheeses, to be found anywhere on this big planet of ours. Some persons, for sufficient reasons, prefer English roast meats or German, Swiss, or Austrian pastry, but in the preparation of the foods just named French supremacy is unquestionable. ”

“ It is upon variety that the French cook confidently relies to make each dish of each meal not just something to eat because her family must have food, not merely a sop to the Cerberus-gnawings of hunger, but a delight to the eye, to the palate, to the stomach—truly a consummation devoutly to be wished for the American home table, and just as possible to attain as it is possible to procure from the grocer or the nearest pharmacist the ingredients by which these wonders are wrought. ”

“ The science of gastronomy made great progress under Louis XV., a brilliant epoch for the literature of gastronomy: together with the fashions, customs, freedom of opinion, and taste for equipages and horses brought from Great Britain—some new dishes taken from the culinary code of this country, such as puddings and beef-steaks, were also introduced into France. Thanks to the increasing progress and discoveries in chemistry, and to the genius of our artists, the art of cookery rose to the greatest height towards the end of the last century. ”

“ All restaurant forms are being tried out—French, Greek, Italian, Turkish, English, Spanish, German—to say nothing of teahouses of all lands. In the long run, possibly some one school will become dominant or a compromise among them all. By that time American cooking will have become a complex of all the others. I sincerely trust that in the internecine struggle fried chicken, gravy, fresh hot biscuit, blackberry pie and fried mush do not wholly disappear. I am fond of French cooking and have a profound respect for the German art—but there! ”

“ And if the criticisms on the modern English methods of preparing food should attract the attention of the home caterer, he may possibly be induced to give his steam-chest and his gas-range a rest, and put the roast beef of Old England on his table, occasionally ”

“ We must, however, remember that Cookery flourished in the reign of Richard II., who rebuilt Westminster Hall, and gave therein a house-warming, at which old Stow says, "he feasted ten thousand persons." Richard is also said to have kept 2,000 cooks, who left to the world their famous cookery-book, the "Form of Cury, or, a Roll of English Cookery," compiled about the year 1390, by the master-cooks of the Royal Kitchen. ”