First lessons in the principles of cooking ..

CU&

FIRST LESSONS

IN THE

PRINCIPLES OF COOKING.

FIRST LESSONS

IN THE PRINCIPLES

OF

COOKING.

IN THREE PARTS.

LADYABARKER,

Author of " Stories About" "A Christmas CakeJ

OF THE

UJNIVERSITT

MACMILLAN AND CO.

1886.

RICHARD CLAY AND SONS,

BRBAD STREET HILL, LONDON, E.G.

And at Bungay, Suffolk*

CONTENTS.

PART I.

PAGE

INTRODUCTORY ........... . , . 3

I.

THE CHEMICAL COMPOSITION OF OUR FOOD . . . . IO

LESSON II.

BREAD AND BEEF ............. l8

LESSON III.

FISH .................. 25

LESSON IV.

VEGETABLES ......... ...... 29

PART II.

LESSON V.

THE PREPARATIONS OF FLOUR USED AS FOOD .... 38

CONTENTS.

LESSON VI.

PAGE

POTATOES AND OTHER VEGETABLES 44

LESSON VII.

MODES OF PREPARING BROTH OR SOUP FROM BEEF . . 5 1

LESSON VIII.

FUEL AND FIRE 58

PART III.

LESSON IX.

BOILING AND STEWING 73

LESSON X.

BAKING, ROASTING, AND FRYING 79

LESSON XL

BACON 86

LESSON XII.

THE GIST OF THE WHOLE MATTER , 88

PART I.

THE CHEMICAL COMPOSITION, AND THE EFFECT
UPON THE HUMAN BODY OF THE VARIOUS
SUBSTANCES COMMONLY EMPLOYED AS
FOOD.

FIRST LESSONS

PRINCIPLES OF COOKING
PART I.

INTRODUCTORY.

THE day has come in English social history when it
is absolutely the bounden duty of every person at
the head of a household — whether that household be
large or small, rich or poor — to see that no waste is
permitted in the preparation of food for the use of
the family under his or her care. I am quite aware
that such waste cannot be cured by theories, and
that nothing except a practical acquaintance with the
details of household management, supplemented by
a conviction of the necessity of economy, can be
expected to remedy the evil. At the same time, it is
possible that ignorance of the fundamental principles
of the chemicajl_ jcornposjtion and of the relative
nutritive value of the various sorts of food within our

a 3

4 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART i.

4o

reach, added co the widespread ignorance of the most
simple and wholesome modes of preparing such food,
may be at the root of much of that waste.

Many excellent works have been written on house-
hold management and expenditure on both a large
and a small scale, but I am not aware of any book
so small as this, which exactly supplies the need I
speak of, or which, laying other details aside, deals
only with the subject of the preparation of food, and
yet is not exactly a Cookery Book.

I shall attempt in this part to give in a condensed
form the reasons why one sort of food is better than
another, more nutritious, and therefore cheaper, and
also why certain methods of preparing that food will
cause it to be more easily digested, and render it
more wholesome. It must be stated in this, the very
beginning, that these " reasons why " are not the
result of any crude theories of my own, but are drawn
from a careful study of works upon the subject by
practical chemists. Whenever the question is a vexed
one, or learned doctors have agreed to differ upon it,
I omit it altogether, confining myself entirely to the
discussion of subjects upon which there is no doubt,
and stating the results of years of patient study and in-
cessant experiments as briefly and simply as I possibly
can. Although it is perhaps somewhat alarming to
come across scientific expressions in so unpretending
a little book as this, still I must entreat my readers not
to be scared away by words which are unfamiliar to
them ; and I may truthfully add my own experience

INTRO.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 5

to bear out the common assertion tlu the best and
highest method of learning any subject will always
prove the easiest in the long run.

Instead of helplessly wringing our hands and cry-
ing out about the high price of fuel and food, let us
accept the present state of things as the inevitable
and natural result of past years of extravagance and
carelessness on our own part. The sooner we make
up our minds that what we regretfully speak of as the
" good old times " with their good old prices will
.never come again, the sooner we shall cease to look
fondly back on a cheaper past, and brace ourselves
up helpfully and bravely to face the increased cost
of the necessaries of life. It is much more sensible
to do this, instead of going on in our old ignorant
way, buoying ourselves up with hopes of a shadowy
millennium of butchers' meat, of a future day when
carcases of Australian or South American sheep and
oxen shall dangle in English shops. Believe me,
that time is a long way off, and even when it
does come there will be many more thousands
of hungry mouths to be filled, so that the supply
will only keep pace — even then rather lagging
behind, as it does now — with the demand of the
coming years. If fuel and food cost nearly twice as
much at present as they did ten years ago, then surely
it becomes our imperative duty to see how we can,
each of us, according to our possibilities, make the
material for warmth and cooking go twice as far as
they have done hitherto. Nor in making such an

FIRST LESSON'S IN THE [PART i.

attempt are we blindly groping in the dark, feeling
our way step by step along the unaccustomed paths
of scientific experiment. It has all been done for us
whilst we were stupidly spending our capital, by men
whose clear sight could discern the dark days ahead ;
men who have, many of them, gone to their rest,
before the dawn of these dark days, but who have left
behind them clear instructions how to make the most
of certain necessary substances whose increasing value
they foresaw twenty or thirty years ago. If, therefore,
we have the common sense to avail ourselves of the
results of these researches and experiments, which
are still carried on day after day by worthy successors
of the great practical chemists I speak of, it is quite
possible we may so utilize their information as to
make our available material go a great deal further.
At present we all confess that the balance is uncom-
fortably adjusted, and a great many people are throw-
ing a great many remedies into the uneven scales.
Let us try a few grains of science, and a few more
of common sense, and see what the practical result
will be.

Before we proceed to do this, however, I should
like to endeavour to disabuse my readers' minds of
the idea that economy and stinginess are synonymous
terms. In point of fact they are precisely opposite.
An individual or a household habitually practising
economy has a far wider margin for charity and
hospitality than the shiftless people who never can
keep a penny in their purses or a meal 'n their cup-

INTRO.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 7

boards through sheer " waste-riff," as the north-
country people call it. " Take care of the scraps,
and the joints will take care of themselves/' would
be a very good motto in nine-tenths of our middle-
class households, and the practical result of such a
theory should be better food and more of it.

For my own part I have little hope of any real
progress being made in the right direction until it
shall have become once more the custom for ladies to
do as their grandmothers did before them, and make
it their business to acquaint themselves thoroughly
with the principles and details of household manage-
ment. In many cases there may be no actual pecu-
niary necessity for such supervision, but it would at
all events serve the good purpose of setting an
example, besides teaching servants the real good and
beauty of a wise economy, a liberal thrift. So long
as the world lasts, so long will there be a Mrs.
Grundy ; but if Mrs. Grundy can only be induced to
go down into her kitchen and insist on a good use
being made of sundry scraps and bones, and odds
and ends which at present may be said to benefit no
one, then will she deserve a statue in the market-
place. If Mrs. A., whose husband's income may be
one or two thousand a year, is able and capable to
show a new cook how such and such things should
be done so as to combine economy with palatableness,
then will Mrs. B., whose income is barely a quarter of
that sum, not consider it beneath her dignity to do so.
If this movement is to do any good, it will have to

8 F1KST LESSONS IN THE [PART i.

be inaugurated by people whose social and pecuniary
position makes them, to a certain extent, unaffected
by the pressure which weighs so heavily on their
poorer neighbours. And I am going to attempt, so to
speak, fo kill two birds with one stone ; to persuade
even rich people to insist on a due economy in the
consumption of the necessaries of life, and to assure
poor people that it is possible to make a good deal
more of the scanty materials within their reach than
they do at present. When I speak of inducing rich
people to be economical, I have no culinary Utopia
in my mind's eye, when millionaires will prefer to
dine off cold mutton or to lunch on bone broth.
What I mean is, that rich people can surely be made
to understand that it is now-a-days absolutely a
greater good to the commonwealth if their house-
holds are so managed that little or no material for
human food can be wasted in them, than if they
subscribed ever so liberally to all the great charities
of London. It is just in proportion as people's
minds are enlarged and their field of mental vision
extended by culture and true refinement, that they
will be able to perceive the importance of the ques-
tion. For tr^at reason I hope and expect that the
warmest supporters of the attempt now being made
by the National School of Cookery to teach the mass
of the English people how to make the most of the
material around them, will be found in the higher
ranks of our society, and that from them it will
spread downwards until it reaches the cottage where

INTRO.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING.

the labouring man is fed from year's end to year's
end on monotonous and often unwholesome food,
as much from lack of invention as from shallowness
of purse.

Before ending this preliminary lesson I feel it
incumbent on me to state most emphatically that I
do not wish or intend to organize a crusade against
cooks ! In the course of nearly twenty years' ex-
perience of that class of servants, I can declare that I
have found very little intentional dishonesty. Waste,
extravagance, and bad management I have met with
over and over again, but these evils have almost in-
variably arisen from want of opportunities of learning
better, and I can scarcely remember an instance where
there has not been an effort made to lay aside bad
habits and acquire fresh ones. It is only too true, as
dear Tom Hood says, that —

" Evil is wrought by want of thought,
As well as by want of heart."

So, if we can even teach our servants to think twice
before they throw things into the pig-tub, it will be
taking a step in the right direction.

If a cook and her mistress are at daggers drawn,
each regarding the other as a foe to be distrusted,
then, indeed, there is little real economy to be
expected. But if a cook sees that her mistress is
willing to give her fair wages for her services, and to
consider her comforts in other ways, whilst at the
same time the lady thoroughly understands how the

io FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART i.

cook's duties should be performed, the chances are
that the servant will readily submit to be taught a
thousand little helpful and comfortable ways. Such
knowledge on the mistress's part is not incompatible
with accomplishments and refinement of taste and
manner, but it is not to be learned from reading this
book or any other book. It can only come from
study and a possibility of acquiring practical expe-
rience on the subject whilst the future matron is still
a young girl ; and if the scheme of the Committee of
the National School of Cookery can be carried out
according to their views and intentions, it will be a
woman's own fault if in future her first visit to her
kitchen be made as an inexperienced bride with a
dozen years of apprenticeship before her ere she
can venture even to make a suggestion to her cook,
or dream of " tossing up " some little dainty dish
with her own hands.

LESSON I.

THE CHEMICAL COMPOSITION OF OUR FOOD.

THE old German poet who wound up each verse of
his famous drinking song by the assertion that " four
elements intimately mixed, form all nature and build
up the world," was not so far wrong after all. The
jovial song-writer referred to his favourite formula for
brewing punch ; and according to him the world of

LESS, i.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. u

conviviality was built up by lemon and sugar, rum and
hot water.

Now, it is perfectly true that four elements go a
great way towards building up the world ; but, setting
aside the question of brewing punch, they are called
carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. So universal
is their presence in the living and growing parts of
animals and plants, that they are always spoken of as
" organic elements/' and science has ascertained ex-
actly the proportion in which each should exist in a
healthy condition of the human body. That body is
incessantly, but imperceptibly, undergoing a process
which cannot be better described than by the expres-
sion of perennial moulting, only that, whereas certain
animals cast off certain parts of their body — their
skin, their hair, or their feathers — every year, we lose
a portion of our weight every day ; that is to say, we
should lose it if we did not absorb through our lungs,
the pores of our skin, and our stomachs, sufficient
oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, to supply the
loss caused by the wear and tear of our daily life.
There has even been an attempt made to prove that
our vital organs are entirely renewed every forty days
or so, but for this calculation there can be no really
satisfactory data, although there certainly is constant
loss and gain going on within us. The material for
repairing this incessant waste which is the inevitable
result of the activity of our nervous and muscular
system, is not supplied alone by the starch, sugar,
water, and fat, nor yet by the milk, m.eaL- and vege-

FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART :

tables we consume, but by a due combination of
food material which shall ensure the proper pro-
portions of albumen, fibrine, and caseine absolutely
required by our changing frames. These are rather
hard words, but their meaning will be quite plain if we
take as familiar examples of the three indispensable
ingredients, the white of an egg, a piece of lean meat,
and a bit of cheese. Everyone can understand that,
although these things contain the largest proportion
of one particular substance, still there may be many
other substances in which they are present, all to-
gether, and it is just to teach us this, and to explain
to us why we should rather give our attention to pro-
curing one form of food than another, that a know-
ledge of the elements of Practical Chemistry is useful.
In reading the accounts of the hardships and suffer-
ings of explorers and travellers, we are often surprised
to learn that first one member and then another of
the expedition dropped down and died long before
the supplies were actually exhausted. This is parti-
cularly noticeable in the account of Burke and Wills'
attempt to explore the great plains of South Australia,
where one by one the travellers died, not so much
from sheer lack of some sort of food to eat, as from
the unhappy circumstance of the only attainable food
being utterly deficient in the ingredients without
which the human body cannot be nourished. For
instance, there was abundance of an alkaline plant
on which the natives almost live at certain times of
the year, and occasionally even a few fish were caught.

LESS, i.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 13

But these materials taken by themselves were so weak
in life-supporting properties, that they failed to repair
sufficiently the waste caused by severe exercise and
exposure to the weather. A man may be starved to
death, and yet scarcely feel hungry ; that is to say, he
may be able to put food into his mouth which will
allay the cravings of his appetite, but which may not
have the least power to nourish his body, so that he
will die as surely as though he had nothing to eat

Men's instincts are generally the surest guides, and
however much we may have been disgusted to hear
of such facts as of Esquimaux and Samoiedes living
upon blubber and fat, and even eating 8 Ibs. or
10 Ibs. of flesh at a meal, Science teaches us that
they were unconsciously adopting the very best means
of keeping up the supply of carbon and oxygen, or
internal warmth, which their cold climate rendered
absolutely necessary. So in the same way we often
see a sick person take a fancy to some curious kind
of food, an4 perhaps begin to recover from the
moment he was allowed to have it. The chances are
that if we could bring all the practical chemists in the
world into his sick-room, and they were to analyse the
component parts of that particular food, and at the
same time ascertain exactly which of the organic
elements of human life was insufficiently represented
in the patient's system, the result of their researches
would go to prove that the sick man knew exactly
what he wanted to bnild him up in health, better than
anyone else.

14 . FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART 1.

Nature is our surest guide after all, only unfor-
tunately our civilization has blunted our instincts,
and rendered us more or less artificial, so that we
can hardly tell what is Nature, and are obliged
to call in the aid of Science to teach us. Those
who live in hot countries do not require to provide
their systems with internal warmth by means of food,
and we shall generally find that they prefer a diet
which will contain very little carbon. But it often
happens that an Englishman travelling or living in
such places will become terrified at his loss of relish
for meat and heating food, and will fly either to his
doctor for tonics, to his cook for pickles to incite his
flagging appetite, or, still worse, to wine or brandy for
stimulants to repair his imaginary weakness. Nature,
thus thwarted in her arrangements, turns sulky, and
the man falls ill, accusing the climate of the fault
springing from his own ignorance and folly. In his
own country he knows much better what is good for
him ; and in mixing bacon with his beans, or in
taking, like the Irishman, cabbage with his potatoes,
or, like the Italian, a strong kind of cheese with his
maccaroni, he exhibits so many purely chemical ways
of preparing mixtures nearly similar to each other in
composition and nutritive value.

In the rudest diet, and in the luxuries of the most
refined table, the main cravings of animal nature are
never lost sight of. Besides the first taste in the
mouth, there is an after-taste of the digestive organs,
which requires to be satisfied if we want to arrange a

LESS, i.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 15

perfect diet. It is not necessary that a food should
yield every kind of material which the body requires to
nourish it, for then one sort of food might be sufficient
for the wants of man. Each sort must fulfil one or
more of the body's requirements, so that by a wise
combination the whole of its wants may be supplied.
It is also to be borne in mind that our nourishment
is not only the solid food which we actually take into
our stomachs, according to the popular idea on the
subject, but comprises the water we drink and the
air we breathe. But as these pages should treat simply
of the nourishment for our bodies, which nourishment
must needs be submitted to the action of fire, it is
only with the cooking of food we have to deal.

In considering the question of the best and cheapest
food, and the most wholesome mode of cooking it, we
must keep steadily before us the principle, that it is
not the quantity of food received into the human body
which nourishes it, but the proportion which can be
digested of such food. All else is sheer waste — an
encumbrance worse than useless — whose presence
clogs and throws out of gear the delicate mechanism
appointed to deal with it.

It is generally agreed by scientific chemists, that in
casting around for something like a form of food
which could be taken as a type of all others, there is
none so perfect as milk. During the period when the
young of animals as well as of human heings are fed
entirely on milk, they grow very rapidly in the size of
every part of their bodies. From this we infer that

16 FIRST LESSONS IN Th£ [PART i.

milk must contain all the essentials which go to build
up muscle, nerve, bone, and every other tissue. The
first lesson we learn from taking milk as an example
of perfect natural food, is that there should be a cer-
tain proportion of liquid mixed with the substances
we consume as food, though, as the animal attains its
full size and there is only waste to be made up, not
growth to be provided for, the necessity for the liquid
form of food diminishes.

Of the flesh-forming substances contained in milk,
caseine is the most important, and in the largest pro-
portions ; therefore it is with milk in the form of
cheese that it can best be dealt with as human food
in this place. Now, there is a popular theory that
cheese is unwholesome, and it certainly is an indi-
gestible substance, but still it need only be avoided
by those who suffer from weak digestions. The hard-
working man who labours with his muscles in the open
air, and whose stomach is in the best possible condition
to digest his food, does wisely to spend, as he generally
does, what little money he may possess in cheese, for
cheese contains nearly twice the quantity of nutritive
matter he would get in the same weight of cooked
meat. Even with delicate feeders, a small quantity
of cheese taken with other food facilitates digestion,
for caseine is easily decomposed or put in a condition
which causes other things to change. When, there-
fore, we eat a piece of cheese after a meal, it acts like
yeast in bread, and starts a change in the food j for
the chances are that the stomach in trying to digest

LESS. I.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING, 17

the cheese will digest the rest of its contents at the
same time. The mouldy cheese which some people's
instinct leads them to prefer, acts more quickly in
this way than fresh cheese. When cheese is spoken
of as a nourishing article of food, especially to those
who labour in the open air, it is only cheese in which
the cream has not been previously separated from the
milk, for the actual nutritive value will depend on the
amount of butter material left in it. The cheap skim-
milk cheeses of South Wales yield so little nourish-
ment in this respect, that they are of but slight value
as flesh-formers, whereas the rich cheeses from Ched-
dar, Stilton, and Ayrshire are not only infinitely
cheaper than meat, but are also very nourishing.

It will perhaps only be necessary to take bread
and beef as samples of food which contain in them-
selves every element required to build up the human
frame, to repair the daily waste, and to preserve all
the conditions of perfect health. The generality of
mankind have found out the value of these substances
for themselves without the aid of science ; but it may
be as well to learn something about bread and beef,
for the simple reason that as we cannot always, under
all circumstances, make sure of having them as food,
we may be able to select those substances which
come nearest to them in nutritive value, if we under-
stand the component parts which make them so im-
portant.

1 8 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [TART i.

LESSON II.

BREAD AND BEEF.

NATURE is always busy cooking inside us. She is
ever separating, arranging, and making the best of the
heterogeneous substances we give her to deal with,
and it is as well to find out what materials are the
easiest for her to manage, and so learn to economize
her forces to the utmost. Of all the food used to
repair the incessant waste caused by muscular exertion
in the open air, bread and beef, as we have already
remarked, best fulfil the needs of the human system
under those conditions ; and we will first look at the
chemical composition of bread.

It is needless to trace the growth of wheat before it
arrives at the mill to be converted into flour, but when
it reaches that stage it comes within the limits of the
inquiry which we propose to ourselves. Wheat is
practically divided into two parts : the bran or outer
covering, and the central grain or fecula ; and the
object of the miller in the preparation of flour is to
mix the qualities as above mentioned so as to suit his
market, and either to separate the bran entirely or
partially from the grain, or to leave the whole in flour.
According to the quality of the grain and the amount
of the husk left in it, the value of the flour varies, and
it is divided into four classes : the " fine households "

LESS, ii.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 19

or best, " households " or " seconds," brown meal, and
biscuit flour ; and the value must chiefly depend on the
estimate which is formed of the nutritive proportions
of the different parts of the bran.

Many people say, vaguely, " Oh, brown bread is
more wholesome than white " ; but it is impossible
it can be more nutritious, though it may be more
palatable; for the outer part of the bran is glazed
over with a layer of flint which is quite indigestible.
At the same time it must be acknowledged that our
practical experience teaches us that, although the
stomach may find it impossible to assimilate bran
itself, yet the presence of bran in bread stimulates
the juices of the stomach to greater activity, and
therefore, like cheese, promotes the digestion of other
things. To a delicate organization it would probably
act as an irritant, and therefore its use should not be
persisted in unless there is absolutely no disarrange-
ment of the digestive system. However finely the
outer bran may be ground, it still remains in nutritious,
but the inner husk possesses great value from the
large proportion of nitrogenous matter which it con-
tains. The whiteness of the flour is not always a test
of its purity or nourishing powers, as in cases where
the flour from red wheat has been most thoroughly
sifted or "bolted," it will still keep a darker tinge
than even " seconds " flour obtained from white wheat,
though the red wheat remains the most nutritious.

It is an instance of what I have before remarked
about the instinct which guides our choice of food,

FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART i.

that the; navvies, who work perhaps harder than any
other men in the world, make it a point to procure
the very best and purest and most expensive wheaten
bread. It is always the first thing thought of in
settling to a job of work in a new place, that these
men should be able to get the finest wheaten bread
to eat. In making this proviso they are really guided
by principles of true economy, for in their case the
necessary waste of tissue is so great that they cannot
afford to take into their stomachs any superfluous
matter which will not nourish their bodies. And we
will presently see why pure wheaten bread is the most
nourishing of all the cereals, although there are other
forms in which wheaten flour might be used with
advantage, such as when made into maccaroni or
sifted into semolina.

In other countries, where wheaten bread is not the
staple article of food, it is curious to notice how those
who have to work hard in the open air have struck
out substitutes for themselves which contain ingre-
dients as near to wheaten bread in chemical value as
can be procured. Thus the miners of Chili, whose
lives are very laborious, feed on beans and roasted
grain ; whilst some Hindoo navvies found their
physical powers too low to do a good day's work
when engaged in boring a tunnel, until they left off
eating rice and took to wheaten bread and flesh. But
the wheat grown in a tropical country is never of
much value for nutritive purposes, nor yet that grown in
a cold one. A hot summer in a sunny clime lying within

LESS, ii.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 21

the temperate zone produces the best grain — that is,
grain with the least proportion of water and the greatest
of nitrogen. Rice flour possesses so much less nitrogen
than does wheaten flour that its nutritive value is a good
deal lessened, and in countries where it is the staple
food, a very great deal has to be produced and con-
sumed to afford the inhabitants anything like a suffi-
ciency of nourishment. The innutritive quality of
rice is naturally the reason why a scarcity of that food
causes such fatal results in an apparently short time.
The people who habitually eat it have already brought
their vital powers to so low an ebb, that a very small
diminution of nourishment suffices to lower the life-
supporting standard beneath the possibility of exist-
ence. The chief reason why wheat, and indeed all
the cereals, are of such primary importance as food,
is, that whilst nitrogen is absolutely indispensable to
the animal body, it cannot be produced out of sub-
stances which do not contain it. The same is true of
carbon, but we must look to flesh to produce that.
The chief ingredients of our blood contain nearly
17 per cent, of nitrogen, according to Liebig, and
he was also convinced that no part of an organ con-
tains less than the same proportion of that elemen-
tary body. The nitrogenous principle in^ wheat is
called gluten ; but it is the cerealin which acts as a
ferment and assists in the digestion of the other
substances.

In wheat this is what we find — water, gluten, albu-
men, starch, sugar, gum, fat, woody fibre, and mineral

FIRST LESSONS IN THE

matter, all in certain proportions, but there is a great
deal more starch than anything else. Next to starch
comes gluten, and we must remember it is in that
ingredient the nitrogenous principle lurks. If these
component parts are again classed, the result will be
that wheat stands first as a "force-producer," and
second as a " flesh- producer ; " so, as strength is of
more importance to the navvies than flesh, they may
well be excused for being so particular about their
bread. In another place we will speak of the
simplest and best modes of making wheaten flour
into bread. Now we must pass on to beef, and try
to show why our national love of this particular form
of flesh-food has had its origin in an instinct of what
was best to keep ourselves in good working or fight-
ing condition.

Although bread actually produces fibrine, still it is
best if we need only look to it for gluten, albumen,
and so forth, and depend upon flesh for fibrine, where
we shall find it ready-made to our hand (or, should I
say to our mouth?) in the fibres of the meat. Of
all the forms of meat used for human food, the flesh
of the ox is that generally preferred where there is
any choice in the matter, and it is certainly both
nourishing and easily digested. In comparing the
nutritive value of different kinds of meat, we must
distinguish between fat and lean, and the amount of
nourishment is in proportion to the fat or lean of the
meat. Fat (that is, carbon) generates heat, but lean
generates heat and forms flesh as well, for in lean

LESS, ii.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 23

flesh all four " organic elements " are well represented,
In both mutton and pork we get so much fat that the
actual nourishment contained in the same amount of
beef (unless exceptionally fattened) is greater, and it
is also the fullest of the red blood juices. Besides
this, the loss in cooking beef is much less than in
cooking mutton, owing to the greater solidity of the
flesh and the smaller proportion of fat. "It is quite
certain," says Liebig, " that a nation of animal feeders
is always a nation of hunters, for the use of a rich
nitrogenous diet demands an expenditure of power
and a large amount of physical exertion, as is seen in
the restless disposition of all the carnivora of our
menageries." Hence it follows that for those whose
daily toil necessitates an expenditure of power, it
would be the truest economy if they were to endea-
vour to supply the waste of their muscular system by
ever so small a quantity of true flesh-forming food, in-
stead of being contented with a larger meal of a less
nourishing description, washed down by beer or spirit,
which contains no real nutritive worth. Malt and
alcohol possess narcotic and stimulating properties,
and do no harm in moderation — indeed, to the weak
or aged they are of incalculable value. But a strong,
healthy labouring man would keep himself in much
better working order if he economized his beer and
increased his animal food.

I have seen with my own eyes a very forcible illus-
tration of this truth in the working man of New
Zealand as he existed some years ago. In those

24 FIRST LESSENS IN THE [PART. i.

days beer and spirit used to be almost unknown
except in the young colonial towns, and the early
settlers up the country lived entirely on bread and
mutton, for even potatoes were a rare and pre-
cious delicacy for the first half-dozen years. Such a
splendid physical condition of the human frame it
had never before been my good fortune to behold.
Everyone looked in the perfection of health: clear
complexions, bright eyes, and active limbs which
seemed not to know fatigue, were the result of many
years of a compulsory and much-abused diet of bread,
tea, and mutton. When I say tea, it was really only
used as a stimulant or for warmth, for cold water was
the universal beverage. People might grumble, but
they throve, and the generation whom I saw growing
on that diet from childhood towards man's estate
might challenge the world over to produce their
equals for vigour and strength.

Perhaps it is rather "bull"-ish of me to insist in
one page upon beef, like motley, being "your only
wear," and then in the next going near to show that
mutton does just as well; but, seriously, one has only
to turn to Sir Francis Head's account of his ride
across the Pampas, to Jearn how much exertion can
be supported upon dried lean beef. It is not only,
as Sir Francis says, that he endured enormous and
incessant fatigue solely on this beef diet, but that
months of such fatigue left him in splendid physical
condition, able to do anything or go anywhere. To
reconcile the two theories, however, I must add that

UNIVERSITY)

LESS. HI.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING, 25

the gallant veteran confesses his beef diet rendered
him somewhat lean and ill-favoured, and that he did
not look so handsome and well as my mutton-fed
New Zealand colonists used to do.

LESSON III.

FISH.

IN many parts of the coast of our sea-surrounded
home, fish is, from necessity, the staple food of the
inhabitants; and although whole districts in other
parts of the world, such as Dacca, the Mediter-
ranean coast of Spain, &c., are fed almost entirely
on fish, our business lies only with our own people.
There is no doubt that fish, even the red-blooded
salmon, should not be the sole nitrogenous animal
food of any nation ; and even if milk and eggs be
added, the vigour of such people will not equal
that of a flesh- eating community. But of all
kinds of animal food, the fresh herring offers the
largest amount of nutriment for the smallest amount
of money, and this statement is the more curious
when we think of the turtle, which is produced in
such enormous quantities on the shores of the West
Indian islands, as well as the estuaries of the Indian
coast. Although the flesh of the turtle is palatable
and wholesome, it possesses a cloying peculiarity,
insomuch that, after a year or two, Europeans will

26 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART I.

suffer hunger to the verge of starvation rather than
touch it. Perhaps this repugnance may be an in-
stinct arising from the fact that the phosphoric fat
of the turtle renders it difficult of solution in the
digestive juices, and therefore its really nutritious
properties are counteracted by this superabundant
richness.

So we see that the balance has to be very
nicely adjusted : the old proverb, "If a little of a
thing is good, a great deal is better," does not hold
good at all with our food. We have to take great
care that, according to the means within our reach,
that supply of the proper proportions of the organic
elements which are as necessary to our bodies as fuel
to a fire, should be kept up. In fact, food is to our
body exactly what fuel is to a fire. If we choke up
the range or stove with dust and bricks, the fire will
go out ; and so, if we persist in supplying the furnace
of our life with materials which it cannot possibly as-
similate, or use as fuel, the fire of our lives will die out.
If people understood, or would even try to understand
— and it is not so difficult as many things uneducated
people learn quite easily — why certain kinds of food
produce certain conditions of the human frame, there
would be far less disease.

The great mistake is to think that actual want of money
is at the root of the bad food of English labourers.
It is not so at all. I do not deny the poverty nor the
toil requisite, alas ! to obtain even the scantiest meal ;
but anyone with any practical experience of the very

LESS, in.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 27

poor of our own country will agree in the assertion
that perhaps half of that pressure is removable by
education in the art of making the most of things. I
have often seen a poor woman who had been com-
plaining to me of the scarcity of fuel, or the want
of food, prepare to light her fire, cook her husband's
dinner, or bake her bread, in the most recklessly
extravagant manner. So with fish. How often at
the time of the Irish famine were the charitable
English public startled by hearing that people were
starving on a coast swarming with fish ? If it had
been possible to teach the poor ignorant sufferers,
that although there was not quite so much nourish-
ment in fish as in meat, still it would have made a
palatable and wholesome addition to their starvation
diet of Indian maize, much distress would have been
warded off.

The flesh of fish contains fibrine, albumen, and
gelatine in small proportions, and fat, water, and
mineral matter go to make up the rest of the com-
ponent parts. It is curious to find the difference of
fat in some fishes, especially mackerel, which pos-
sesses a very large proportion, herrings coming next
(some people say first), but at all events they both
should be cooked in such a way as to get rid of
as much of this fat as possible. Enough will re-
main to make the fish nourishing, but if there be
too much fat it renders fish indigestible. This
danger needs to be particularly guarded against with
eels. Haddocks, whiting, smelts, cod, soles, and

28 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART i.

turbot are all less fatty, and consequently more
digestible, than such fish as salmon, pilchards, sprats,
and mackerel. Raw oysters are more digestible than
cooked ones, because the heat coagulates and hardens
the albumen at once, besides making the fibrine too
solid, and rendering it less easy for the gastric juices
to dissolve.

We must bear in mind that the flesh of all fish
out of season is unwholesome, and often makes people
ill. I am afraid Mr. Frank Buckland and other true
lovers of pisciculture would view the sufferings of
such depraved gourmets with great indifference, and it
is, indeed, most shocking to the food-economist to
read of the shoals of baby soles an inch or two
long, of diminutive oysters, of the ova of the cod,
the roe of the salmon, and of the fry of the herring,
which are brought to our markets and readily sold
in spite of vigilant bye-laws.

It is not possible in this place to deal with the
subject of cooking fish : cooking it in such a manner
that the fat which renders it often unwholesome shall
be eliminated, and the nourishing and gelatinous por-
tions of the fleshy substance made the most of.

LESS, iv.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 29

LESSON IV.

VEGETABLES.

I FEEL that I cannot begin this chapter better than by
quoting what Dr. Letheby says on the subject :

" Primarily, all our foods are derived from the vege-
table kingdom, for no animal has the physiological
power of associating mineral elements and forming
them into food. Within our own bodies there is no
faculty for such conversion ; our province is to pull
down what the vegetable has built up, and to let loose
the affinities which the plant has brought into bond-
age, and thus to restore to inanimate nature the
matter and force which the growing plant had taken
from it."

It is thus plain that the beef and mutton we eat
derive their fibrine, gluten, and all other necessary
ingredients from the vegetables on which the oxen
and sheep have fed, though such food does not ap-
parently contain any of these substances. It is a
curious suggestion which I have often met with, that
if a vegetarian family lived in accordance with the
rules of one of their own peculiar cookery books, each
member would actually consume half an ounce more
animal food a day than a man would do who lived
according to the usual scale of diet.

Vegetables are aliments which dilute the blood, and

30 FIRST LESSON'S IN THE [PART i.

contain more salts than albumen. They convey very
little nutriment to the blood, as we may see in the
feeble muscles of tropic-dwellers who feed almost
entirely on vegetables. On the other hand, they are
of great service, first in the digestive canal, where
they dissolve the albuminous substances of the meat,
and afterwards in the blood itself, where, if they do
not actually nourish, they yet keep the albumen and
fibrine in a liquid state, and enable those substances
to perform their proper functions more vigorously.
Of course the cereals would naturally stand first in
a chapter on vegetables, as they, of all the products
of the vegetable kingdom, are the most depended
upon by man for food. As, however, wheat, which
is the principal cereal of England, has been noticed
in another chapter, we may as well proceed to ex-
amine the nutritive properties of other vegetables.
In such an inquiry the potato comes first, for,
owing to its large proportion of starch, it is the
most actually nourishing of all vegetables. This
starch is transformed into fat by the digestive pro-
cess, and if potatoes could be eaten with a suffi-
ciency of white of egg, their nutritive value would
be brought very near the meat standard. Other
roots and tubers contain a larger proportion of sugar,
and there is even fat present in some of them, but
none are so rich in this nourishing starch as the
potato. A man may, and probably will, look fat and
rosy on a potato diet, yet his muscle will not be
in first-rate condition, nor will he be able to endure

LESS. TV.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 31

prolonged fatigue. In spite, therefore, of the com-
parative low price of potatoes, they are not the most
economical food for a labourer, nor can he depend on
their nourishing starch alone to provide him with the
requisite bodily strength. All succulent vegetables
are anti-scorbutic, and since the potato was brought
into use as a daily ration in the fleet (not a hundred
years ago), scurvy has gradually died out. If there is
any difficulty in providing potatoes — for during long
voyages, when crossing the tropics, the potatoes
will begin to grow, and so become unfit for food —
lime-juice is the next best substitute, for it contains
most of the chemical ingredients which go to make
the salts of potash found in all fresh vegetables, but
which is specially present in the potato. It has
often been pointed out that there is really no
excuse for scurvy now-a-days, for potatoes, cabbages,
turnips, and carrots can be pressed into a very
small space, and yet carry their potash about with
them. Indeed, this process has lately been carried
to great perfection. Other vegetables are less actually
nutritious than the potato, and the palate grows
sooner tired of them, but yet one hundred pounds of
potatoes contain barely as much nitrogenous matter,
— that is to say, positive nourishment, — as thirteen
pounds of wheat.

As the wholesomeness and digestibility of vege-
tables depend much on how they are cooked, it is
perhaps useless to enter here into a longer expla-
nation why vegetables, though they constitute the

7.7 FIRST LESSON'S IN COOKING. [PART I.

entire food of animals whose flesh contains the
highest forms of nourishment, will not, of them-
selves, supply man with the food he requires to
keep his muscles strong and vigorous. In the coun-
tries where the inhabitants are compelled by the
necessities of the climate to live chiefly on them,
Nature is so bountiful that she does not call upon
man to cultivate the ground as we are obliged to do.
Therefore, it stands to reason that in a climate where
severe manual labour is necessary to produce food, a
diet of a muscle-relaxing, fat-forming nature is a very
poor economy.

PART II.

THE BES7 MODES OF PREPARING SOME SOR7S
OF FOOD FOR USE, WITH A SIMPLE EXPLA
NATION OF 7 HEIR RESPECTIVE ACTIONS.

PART II.

REMARKS.

THE very first principle of cooking is cleanliness.
No skill or flavouring can make up for the lack of it,
and if it be present, there is good hope of every other
culinary virtue. But cleanliness is an elastic term, and
I wish it to be clearly understood that I would fain
stretch its interpretation to the utmost limit. Even the
sacred frying-pan would I ruthlessly scour, all unheed-
ing the old-fashioned, and, let us add, dirty axiom, that
\t should be left with the fat in it. It is quite true
that the fat which has been used to fry potatoes, or
fritters, or anything except fish, may be poured out of
the saucepan into a daintily clean basin or empty
jam-pot and used again and again, but I would have
every cook taught to clean her frying-pan thoroughly
every time she uses it. The fat in which fish has
been fried should never be used for frying anything
else, and an economical housewife will take care that
the fish is fried last. I have sometimes been met
with the assertion that it is too much trouble and
takes too much time to keep everything in a kitchen
as clean as it ought to be kept. To that I reply,
that if a girl be brought up by a tidy mother or
mistress to understand and appreciate the value and

D 2

36 FIRST LESSONS TN THE [PART n.

beauty of cleanliness, she will never be able to endure I
any other state of things. I declare that I have ob- i
served greater dirt among the saucepans and a deeper
shade of black over everything in kitchens where
neither poverty nor want of time could be pleaded
in excuse, than in a place where one pair of willing
hands has had to keep the living-room of half a
dozen people tidy.

I am not sure that I do not detest surface-cleanli-
ness, with its deceptive whiteness, more than genuine
honest dirt about which there is no concealment, for
the sham snowiness is apt to throw youthful house-
keepers off their guard. For their encouragement
I can assure them that it is not such a superhuman
task as it appears to see that everything under their
sceptre is kept scrupulously clean, for the advantages
of cleanliness over dirt are as patent as light over
darkness, and ninety-nine servants out of a hundred
will soon come to acknowledge this themselves.
People of all ranks and classes differ in this respect
according to their instincts and training, and in many
a fine house a dirty cook would find things more
after her own heart than in a two-roomed cottage.

Let us, for a moment, take the case of a girl who has
been a housemaid or nursemaid in a small family, and
who marries a decent young artisan earning from 15^.
to 25^. a week. Here is enough money for comfort
i/ the wife knows how to manage and is clean and
tidy in herself. How far will that, or twice that sum,
go if she be an ignorant slattern ? The chances are

REMARKS.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 37

that such a girl knows absolutely nothing of cooking,
and that she will have to arrive at even the smallest
amount of such knowledge through a long series of
unpalatable meals and wasted food. Perhaps it may
be years before she attains to the production of any
dish which can fairly be called wholesome or nourish-
ing ; but surely she is not to be blamed for her igno-
rance. She has gone straight from her school to a
situation whose duties have never taken her into the
kitchen, and she finds herself at twenty-five years of
age at the head of a working man's home, with no
more notion of how to manage their income comfort-
ably than if she were an infant. She has hitherto
had no opportunity of learning how to cook ; but if
she has been taught to be thoroughly clean and tidy
in her habits and ways, she may rest assured that half
the battle is won. The other half, the National School
of Cookery at South Kensington steps in to help
her to win, and it is to be hoped that in due time,
by the establishment of branch institutions all over
the kingdom, by means of lectures and demonstra-
tions (for cooking cannot be taught by theory), any
young woman in such a position will know where to
go if she wants to learn how to cook the food her
husband's wages enable her to provide. But clean-
liness she must teach herself, and practise it diligently
in her little kitchen, for without it she can never be a
good cook, no matter how successful she be in the
matter of bread, or how deftly she may handle her
frying or sauce pan.

38 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART n.

LESSON V.

THE PREPARATIONS OF FLOUR USED AS FOOD.

IT is well known that so far as actual nutritive power
goes, both oats and barley, to say nothing of maize,
rye, the millets, and rice, contain as much (oats,
indeed, more) valuable material for the maintenance
of the human body as wheat does ; that is to say,
they all contain certain proportions of starch, protein,
or the nutritive ingredient, represented by oily or
fatty matter, besides sundry saline particles. All these
are indispensable to the building up of the human
body. Why then do we find wheat more cultivated
and used in greater quantities by all the civilized
nations than any of the other cereals? The only
reason can be that wheaten flour alone, of all these
farinaceous foods, will make fermented bread.

I used at one time to think that bread-making must
be the very simplest thing in the world, but when I
came to be face to face with flour and yeast I found
it was not so easy a matter to produce light good
bread. These pages are not written therefore for
the instruction of bakers or those fortunate people
who have learned, at an age and under circumstances
when learning is easy, how to make bread, but with

LESS, v.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 39

the hope that they may prove ever so slight a prac-
tical help to those who are as profoundly ignorant as
I was, not so long ago.

First of all the yeast has to be thought of. When
near a town this thorn in the path of the anxious
bread-maker is removed by the facility with which
brewer's or ready-prepared baker's yeast can be pro-
cured. Brewer's yeast is simply the scum which rises
to the top of the malt during the process of fer-
mentation, and is of no use to the beer, or wort. The
brewer is therefore glad to dispose of it, and the
baker takes it off his hands. But he does not put it
raw into his bread. A special ferment is first ob-
tained from mealy potatoes, by boiling them in water,
mashing them, and allowing them to cool to a tem-
perature of about 80° of Fahrenheit. Yeast is then
added to them, and in a few hours they will get into a
state of active fermentation with a sort of cauliflower
head. Water should now be gently poured into this
mixture, and it must be strained, after which a very
little flour should be lightly sprinkled into it. In
five or six hours the whole will rise to a fine sponge,
when more water must be added, and a little salt,
and then the yeast is fit to use. It may now be
bottled, but it is not advisable to make a great deal
at a time. On account of the fermentation, yeast-
bottles can only be kept from bursting by plugging
their mouths with soft paper or cotton-wool. If
neither the fresh yeast from the brewers (which will
not keep by itself for more than a day or two) or the

40 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART n.

dried yeast, which keeps a long time, can be ob-
tained, then it will be necessary to boil some dried
nops in a very little water, put some sugar to them,
and add this compound when in a state of fer-
mentation to the mashed potatoes instead of the
brewer's yeast.

Having procured or made the yeast, the next thing
is to put the flour in a large tin milk-pan, make a
hole in the centre of the soft white heap, and pour in
a small capful of yeast mixed with a large cupful of
warm water. A little of the flour is stirred in to this
liquid so as to make it rather more of a paste, and
then the whole is covered with a clean cloth and set
to -work during the whole night. Great care must be
taken not to put it in too hot a place, as it will be-
come dry and crusty in the morning, and make heavy,
tasteless bread. On the other hand, if the tempera-
ture be too low, the flour will be dull and cold, the
mixture will not have penetrated it, and the bread
will not rise. But, supposing that the happy medium
has been hit, and that the gas contained in the yeast
has made its subtle way among the flour, then more
water must be added by degrees and a very little
salt. The whole mass should then be lightly kneaded
by very clean hands, and when it has attained a cer-
tain elastic consistency it should be quickly cut into
separate portions, dropped into well-floured tins (only
half fill them with the dough), which must instantly
be placed in the oven. The oven should be fairly
hot to begin with, and its heat increased until the

LESS, v.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 41

end. From time to time a clean knife should be
thrust into the loaf ; if it comes out with a tarnish on
the bright blade, as though it had been breathed upon,
then the bread is not sufficiently baked, and there is
no use in taking it out of the oven until the knife
can be readily drawn out with a perfectly undimmed
surface. The real art of bread-making consists in the
dough not being too stiff at first to resist the entrance
of the gas, nor too soft to permit the gas to pass
through it quickly. It should also be sufficiently
kneaded so that the gas may become well distributed
throughout the mass, yet not over-kneaded, in which
case a good deal of it will have escaped, and the
bread will consequently be heavy.

The difference between biscuits and bread is that
there is no yeast in the composition of the former;
they are also for the most part unleavened and very
highly dried. Though valuable as a temporary substi-
tute for bread, they can never be so wholesome from
the absence of the water which is absorbed in the
process of drying or baking. Biscuits should invari-
ably be taken with ever so small a quantity of liquid,
for by themselves they either absorb too much fluid
from the juices of the stomach, and so produce in-
digestion, or they fail to obtain as much fluid as they
require from those sources, and therefore remain a
long time undigested. Cakes are made by the substi-
tution of soda or carbonic acid for yeast, and the
addition of sugar, fat, and eggs. Of all these mate-
rials the sugar is the wholesomest and should be the

42 FIRST LESSON'S IN THE [PART n.

most freely used. The other ingredients are more
difficult of digestion.

Before leaving the subject of bread, it will be as
well to notice the extraordinary difference between
batches of bread. It is no reason because a house-
hold receives excellent bread one week — either from
the baker's shop or its own kitchen — that the next
week's baking will not be heavy and bad. This is
because we trust so entirely to the good old rule of
thumb in our kitchens, scorning to make the tempera-
ture of the oven a certainty by means of a thermo-
meter. Half, and more than half, of the hard baking
and the over or under boiling and frying with which
we are afflicted arises from the extraordinary prejudice
which exists against the daily use of this indispen-
sable little instrument. It is the only reliable way of
making sure of the oven, or the water, or the fat
being of exactly the right temperature ; and yet what
cook who " respects herself " would at present deign
to use a thermometer, still less even a charming little
contrivance which has been invented specially for her
use, and is called a frimometer ?

But to touch upon some of the other uses of flour.
We are apt to look upon macaroni as a luxury for
the tables of the rich, when it is really so low in price
that it is within the reach of those who have any
choice at all as to what they shall eat. It is considered
a foreign composition, unworthy to take a place among
the more solid flesh-formers dear to the heart of the
Englishman ; but if he understood what it is made

LESS, v.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 43

from, he might perhaps modify his contempt for one
of the most nourishing and wholesome forms in which
he can eat wheaten flour. Macaroni, then, is made
by the simplest imaginable process, and there is
no reason in the world why its manufacture should
not be carried on in- England, as indeed it is. The
finest wheaten flour is made into a peculiar smooth
paste or dough, and afterwards driven through a cylin-
der which cuts it into ribands or tubes. Wheaten
flour contains, of course, precisely the same amount of
nourishment, whether it be made into bread or into the
pasta from which macaroni is cut ; but whereas bread
can scarcely be cooked again (except as toast), there
are many ways in which macaroni can be dressed so
as to form a delicious food. Simply boiled with milk
and a little sugar it would be a wholesome and agree-
able change in children's diet, and we must remember
that for children who are born with soft bones — that
is, with too little phosphate of lime in their bones — a
diet of wheat will tend, more than anything else, to
form this deposit. When I say wheat, I include maca-
roni therefore, and semolina, which is the very small
grain left after grinding wheat in a coarse mill. Such
a mode of grinding gives but a small proportion of
flour, and a certain larger residue of coarse flour or
fine grains, and these grains are known as " semolina."
They are chiefly obtained from the most nourishing
of all the wheats, the red-grained wheat grown in
Southern Europe, and especially in the Danubian
Principalities.

OF THE

44 FIRST LESSONS IN THE PART n.

LESSON VI.

POTATOES AND OTHER VEGETABLES.

ALTHOUGH it is rather a departure from the plan I
pursued in the First Part to speak in this lesson
about potatoes, it is natural to me to do it, because,
so far as my practical experience — which was once
/Vz-experience, remember — goes, it is almost as difficult
to boil a potato properly as to bake good bread.
In the first place, we have one of the highest chemical
authorities on our side for saying that on both whole-
some and economical grounds potatoes should always
be boiled in their skins. They do not look quite so
well if they have to be peeled afterwards, but not only
is the actual material wasted by the process of peel-
ing— especially where there are no pigs to eat the
peelings — but a great deal of the starchy substance,
which is exactly what makes the potato so nourishing,
is wasted. In roasted or baked potatoes, which have
been peeled before cooking, the loss in weight from
the skin and the drying is actually a quarter of
the whole. It is curious to learn that potatoes
which come to us from the bog lands of Ireland
are far less watery and produce more starch than
those which are grown on the dry, light soils of
Yorkshire. This innate dryness is one reason why
the Irish potato contains so much more nourishment

LESS, vi.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 45

than an English one. The potato was first grown by
Sir Walter Raleigh in his garden at Youghal, in Ire-
land, and it is not much more than a century since
its cultivation became general in England. The first
potatoes grown in England came from a ship wrecked
on Formby Point, near Liverpool. The tubers were
planted by chance on the soil close by, which closely
resembled that of Ireland, and no part of their new
home has ever suited them better. The potato,
though, as we have seen, of a certain appreciable
value as a flesh-former, is not to be depended upon
entirely as a force-producer, for the proportion of
water in 100 parts is 75*2. Next to water, its pe-
culiarly nourishing starch is most largely represented,
and stands at 15*5. From this starch also a pasta
can be made which gives a fair macaroni, but of
course the advantages of the wheaten paste would
be absent.

In ordinary kitchens where a steamer is used, the
process of boiling a potato is easy enough, and that
dry mealiness dear to the heart of a good cook can
be reckoned upon. But if only a saucepan be attain-
able, then, having well washed — nay, even scrubbed
and brushed — your potatoes, put them into it with
cold water ; add a little salt when the water boils ;
at first it should only be allowed to boil slowly, but
it may boil as fast as you like during the last five
minutes. Some varieties of the potato can be cooked
much sooner than others ; there is often the difference
between them of twenty minutes and three-quarters

46 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART n.

of an hour. From time to time they must be tried
with a fork, which should go in freely when they are
sufficiently boiled. The potatoes being now cooked
enough, pour off as much water as can possibly be
got rid of. Sprinkle a little more salt, take off the
lid of the saucepan and set it on again in such a
manner that the steam can escape, but keep the sauce-
pan for a few minutes on the oven to dry the potatoes
thoroughly. The saucepan should be lightly shaken
from time to time to prevent the potatoes sticking to
the bottom. Then serve either in a wooden bowl,
with a clean cloth or a napkin, or else in a dish with
perforated holes in the cover so that the vapour can
escape. If potatoes form the principal diet of a family,
eggs should be added where practicable, and milk, or
dripping, or any sort of fat, as the potato itself is very
deficient in albumen and fat.

Next to the potato, the cabbage is the most widely
cultivated of all vegetables, yet it is far inferior to
the others in the nutriment contained in a given
weight. In point of value the parsnip ranks next
to the potato as a flesh-former, and possesses six
per cent, of carbon. Parsnips are followed closely by
carrots and onions, though the latter are principally
used as a relish. But all vegetables are chiefly valu-
able for their anti-scorbutic properties, and as a
flavouring for insipid food. Lentils are particularly
nutritious, and the food sold under the name of "Reva-
lenta Arabica" is only the meal of the lentil after
being, freed from its indigestible outer skin. In peas

LESS, vi.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 47

we find a great deal of caseine ; hence, in an analy-
tical table they rank next to wheat as a flesh and
force-producer, whereas we should find the other
vegetables relegated under the head of " Non-nitro-
genous substances," that is to say, substances which,
taken by themselves without milk, butter, or fat of
any kind, are absolutely incapable of producing either
flesh or force. In Ireland it is the milk taken with
the potato which makes it so nourishing. If potatoes
were eaten quite alone, the consumer would need to
eat an enormous quantity to keep himself in any sort
of condition, and he would never be able to do any
amount of real hard work in the open air.

It is quite certain that sufficient value is not
attached in England to the importance of the culti-
vation of vegetables. If a few leeks or sweet herbs,
a row of potatoes, or a dozen cabbages, were planted
in many a tiny spot beside a cottage door, which spot
at present is but a puddle or a down-trodden mass 01
caked mud, the hungry mouths inside would stand a
better chance of being filled. When a poor woman
has to go with her pence in her hand and buy every
onion or potato or sprig of thyme which she wants
to improve the flavour of the family meal, the chances
are she will look upon them — and very justly, too — as
luxurious additions to the bill of fare, and do without
them as much as possible. All over France the
poorest peasant has her " flavourings " close to her
hand ; and it is difficult to over-estimate the boon
which a few common vegetables and herbs are, when

48 FfRST LESSONS IN THE [PART IT.

used to assist in converting a scrap of bacon, a bone,
and a little pea-meal into a warm, comforting, nou-
rishing mid-day meal.

Mr. Ruskin attaches great importance to the culti-
vation of the land — the making the best of every inch
of our own native soil ; but I fear he wants to try
experiments, and grow all sorts of curious things in
every conceivable part of the British Isles, whereas I
only confine my ambition to those little shabby nooks
and odds and ends of ground which lurk around stray
cottages, whose occupants evidently prefer sitting in
the tap-room of the " Chequers" to digging for an hour
in a scrap of garden morning and evening. Perhaps,
if, in time, we are able to show the working man
how enormously his culinary comfort can be increased
by a little vegetable flavouring, he may take to plant-
ing and cultivating even a square rood of ground, if
that be all he can call his own. I say nothing of
the gain to health, for that is so easily ascertained by
his own or his neighbour's experience. The seeds
of common vegetables are very easily procured — in
fact, they can almost be had for the asking ; and, at
all events, one day's beer-money would go a long
way towards keeping a family in onions for a year if
laid out in seed. A little soup or stew thus flavoured
without extra expense, would surely be a vast gain on
the hunch of dry bread and mug of weak, cold coffee,
which I have often seen a labourer eating for his
dinner. Then there only remains the trouble to be
considered ; and a lazy man will have to make twice

LESS, vi.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 49

as much exertion in the long run to keep body and
soul together.

I repeat: it is not actual money which is abso-
lutely wanting in such cases. It is that the few pence
are generally laid out in the most improvident way —
in a way which becomes gross extravagance when it
is contrasted with what the same pittance would pro-
duce if properly managed. I have no hope of this
little book, or any other book, great or small, working
a miraculous and thorough reform, and converting
every cottage in the country into a smiling abode
of peace and plenty. What I do aim at and look
forward to is, first, to arouse attention to the subject in
those whose social rank is above that of the hand-to-
mouth working man ; and next, to induce rich people
to take as much trouble and spend as much money
in providing their servants and workmen with the
opportunity of learning how to cook their food, as
they now do in teaching them and their children to
read and write.

Mr. Ruskin, in his " Fors Clavigera," insists very
strongly that in his model farm, his land bought out
of the proceeds of the " St. George's Fund," every
girl shall be taught " at a proper age to cook all
ordinary food exquisitely." But I would go a step
beyond, and I would have every boy taught also. I
don't know about the cooking exquisitely ! I should
be satisfied, at first, if every boy and girl could be
taught to cook even a little. For a knowledge of
cooking, at all events in its simplest form, appears to

£

50 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART n.

me to be every whit as necessary for a man, if he
is to move about the world at all, as it is for a girl.
If the man does not move about, and is fortunate
enough to marry a girl trained and taught cooking
either at Mr. Ruskin's model farm or at the National
School of Cookery, then he may forget, or lay aside,
his culinary lore as quickly as he pleases ! But if he
emigrates, or enlists as a soldier, or does any of the
hundred and one things which men are obliged to
do in these busy days, the chances are that he will
find ever so slight a knowledge of cooking a very
great boon and blessing to him.

One thing is very puzzling to me, though I know
not why it should be brought in apropos of vegetables.
It is the staunch conservatism, where food or cooking
is concerned, of the working classes of England. In
politics they are very often to a man, nay, even to a
woman, advanced Liberals, to say the least of it. They
are much more ready to advocate and adopt sweep-
ing changes in things of which, after all, they cannot
know a great deal ; but they distrust anyone who
suggests that they could improve the matters which
lie close around them, and with which they are at
least familiar. " My ould grandmother did it that
way, and she lived till ninety," is an unanswerable
argument against making the scrap of meat into a
pot-au-feu, and adding vegetables and meat to it,
instead of frizzling and burning the same scanty
portion of meat in a greasy frying-pan over a smoky
fire. I feel persuaded, therefore, that the great

LESS, vii.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. $i

reform in cooking and economic management of our
food-material must begin in the classes above the
working man. When he sees and learns by experi-
ence that an ounce of meat, properly dressed, will go
further in actual nourishment and strength-imparting
qualities than two ounces heated in his old barbarous
method, he may perhaps be induced to consent to
his "missis " or the "gals " being "learned" how to
cook. My own private hope— and I would almost
say expectation — is, that an increase in the artisan's
or the working man's comfort at home, — such comfort
as better cooked food and more of it must surely
oring, — will lead to his wages finding their way
oftener into the butcher's shop than the public-house.
A well-fed man is very seldom a drunkard ; and it
may be that in the spread and development of an
attempt at culinary reform, two birds may, all un-
consciously, be killed with one stone. In improving
cottage comforts we may perhaps strike a great blow
(with our frying-pans and soup-kettles !) at the shining
glasses and quart pots of the gin-palace. God grant
that it be so !

LESSON VII.

MODES OF PREPARING BROTH OR SOUP FROM BEEF.

THE reason I have placed this subject in a separate
lesson is because of its enormous importance in
the sick-room. More delicate children are reared

E 2

52 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART n.

into health and strength, and more lives are saved,
by good beef-tea than most of us have any idea
of. This is the more extraordinary when we re-
member that even the strongest and best beef-tea
contains an almost infinitesimal amount of actual
nourishment. So that it is not to its capacity for
supplying to the wasted and feeble human frame
either strength or nourishment that we must attribute
its wonderful efficacy. If the strongest beef-tea be
analysed, the meat would be found to have lost in
the process of turning into liquid nearly all its albu-
men, fibrin e, and caseine. In other words, it would
have parted with its most important constituents ;
and we might suppose it therefore to be valueless
to the human system. But Experience steps in where
Chemistry stops and shakes her head, and Experience
declares that well-made beef-tea possesses a reparative
power on a weakened digestion which nothing else in
the world except milk can come near. It may not
actually contain all the elements of nourishment within
itself, as milk does, but it is a wonderful assimilator.
It soothes and repairs and collects the enfeebled
organs and juices, and enables them to return to
their proper functions. Therefore we say that beef-tea
is nourishing, when it is not in the least nourishing
in itself, but it has the power of making ready for
other substances to nourish.

Although every sort of meat can be made into
soup or broth, bee makes the best and wholesomest.
For one reason of this we must search in the fibrin e,

LESS. vii.J PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 53

which holds more red juice than that of any other
meat, and it is this red juice which we particularly
want. Everybody knows that the leanest meat is the
best for soup-making ; the least particle of fat is out
of place in broth or soups, and indeed renders it
absolutely unwholesome as well as nauseous.

In many emergencies beef-tea has to be prepared
at almost a moment's notice, and then I would re-
commend that the meat be as thoroughly freed from
fat as possible, chopped finely, and soaked in its own
weight of cold water for ten minutes or so. Then
heat it slowly to boiling-point, let it boil for two or
three minutes, and you will have a strong and deli-
cious beef-tea, better than can be obtained by boiling
in the ordinary way for many hours. Another method
is to place the finely-chopped meat in a large, clean
jam-pot, with a little water and a pinch of salt.
The mouth of the vessel should be closed by means
of a tightly-tied bladder or a thick paste all over it,
as if it were a meat-pudding, and placed in a sauce-
pan half full of cold water. The saucepan should
then be covered with its own lid and set upon or by
the side of the fire to simmer slowly. If there be no
time to let the beef- tea or essence in the jam-pot get
cold, it must be skimmed as clearly as possible, and
any extra globules of fat floating on the surface re-
moved by a careful application of white blotting
paper. Some people do not add any water at all to
the cut-up beef, under the impression that the essence
must be stronger without the addition. But my indi-

54 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART n.

vidual experience teaches me that whereas the differ-
ence in nutritive value is very slight, sick people do
not like the beef-tea thus prepared, and will not take
it so readily as when it has been made after the fol-
lowing manner. It is necessary, however, to state
that the process I am now going to describe cannot be
hurried, and that it is therefore imperative to have
one day's notice when beef-tea made in this way is
required.

Take two or three pounds of the leanest beef to
be procured, add one quart of water, and two shank
bones of mutton, which bones should be well washed
before using. A pinch of salt, and another pinch of
grated lemon-peel, or a tiny bit of the peel itself, are all
I should add, for a sick person's throat is generally
too tender for pepper, and his palate too delicate for
anything like flavouring or sauces. The lean meat
and shank bones are to be put into a saucepan, whose
white enamelled lining should be daintily and scrupu-
lously clean, and the saucepan, with its lid fitting very
close indeed, set by the side of a moderately good
fire to simmer slowly the whole day long. It must
never approach boiling, and yet the action of fire
upon its contents should be decided, though gentle.
At the last moment before shutting up for the night,
strain the soup through a fine hair sieve into a clean
basin, and in the morning you should find, beneath a
preserving scum of fat, about a pint of clear, solid,
beef jelly, which can either be eaten cold, or warmed,
without the addition of one drop of water, into a deli-

LESS, vii.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 55

cious <r/#z;z-tasting cup of beef-tea. In cold weather
double the quantity may be made, but in that case
it should be poured into two basins, and the fat left
to hermetically seal the second basin until it be wanted
in its turn for use. In hot weather the beef-tea should
be prepared fresh every day for the next day's con-
sumption, I have seen beef-tea rendered perfectly
colourless and white by repeated strainings through
fine muslin sieves, but I do not know that this is any
particular advantage.

In some cases, such as the terrible state of the
intestines after typhoid fever, beef-tea is no use as a
reparative agent when prepared after the above fashion.
The meat should then not be cooked at all, only
cut up as lean and fresh and full of red juice as pos-
sible, and soaked for ten or twelve hours in a small
quantity of cold water. This will give a liquid which
has never been submitted to the action of fire, and
which looks and tastes like the gravy of under-done
meat, but it is of the highest reparative value to the
lacerated stomach. A judicious nurse will take care
that her patient never sees this sort of beef-tea until
he has learned to drink it freely, which he will do if
not at first disgusted by the sight of the clear red fluid.

I have dwelt thus minutely on the value and process
of making beef-tea because I believe it to be the
strongest resource of the culinary art in sickness ; but
the proper preparation of soup is of great importance
in all households. It is at once an economical, whole-
some and savoury form of nourishing food ; yet, to

56 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART u.

many a plain cook, soup, unless she has costly ma-
terials bought expressly for its manufacture, merely
means greasy hot water flavoured by a soup$on of plate-
washing ! No soup should be used the same day it is
made, on account of the impossibility of removing all
the scum and fat. But, supposing that a scrag end of
mutton, or the trimmings of cutlets, or bones with a
fair amount of meat left on, should have been sim-
mering gently all the preceding day, and allowed to
get cold at night, so that the layer of fat (which can
be used for other purposes) is easily removed, then we
should proceed this way, always imagining it is wanted
for the use of a poor and economical family. To the
clear, fat-free soup, add half a tea-cupful of well-washed
pearl barley or rice — and we must remember that the
inferior and cheaper kind of rice does just as well as
the best for this purpose — a few cleaned and cut-up
vegetables, a little onion, pepper and salt, a sprig or
two of herbs tied together, a little pea-meal, any cold
potatoes left from yesterday's dinner, and the whole
allowed to simmer together, without removing the
remains of the meat and bones, until it be wanted,
great care being taken that it should not boil away.
The result of this simmering ought to be a nice, warm,
comforting, <r/#z;/-tasting basin of broth, very different
to the weak, greasy liquid which results from a hastier
preparation. It is a very common mistake with all
cooks, except the very best, to put too much water
in the first instance to their materials for soup, and
so produce a good deal of weak, tasteless meat-tea,

LESS, vii.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 57

instead of a smaller quantity of strong, good soup.
English people do not use macaroni half so freely as
they might, for, apart from its nutritive value as offer-
ing such a pure form of wheaten flour, it is exceed-
ingly cheap. Boiled with ever so little soup made in
the way just described (before the addition of the rice
or vegetables), it would form an excellent and whole-
some change to the smallest bill of fare.

All cooks prefer beef to anything else for making
soup, but a very nourishing and delicate broth can be
made from two parts of veal and one part of lean beef,
or from chicken or rabbit, though the latter is not
advisable for sick people. Everyone knows the value
of good, fat-cleared mutton broth such as I have just
described, but there is a good deal of truth in the
instinct which leads the sick person to prefer beef- tea,
and the healthy labouring man to buy a couple of
pounds of beef instead of double the quantity of any
other meat. Beef contains most iron, which in the
state of oxide is one of the chief constituents of the
blood : and we must bear in mind that the nutriment
of all carnivorous animals is derived from the blood
originally. A diet, therefore, to be strengthening,
must contain a certain amount of iron, and we do
not obtain this so readily from any other meat as
from beef.

58 FtRST LESSONS IN THE [PART 11.

LESSON VIII.

FUEL AND FIRE.

THE object of cooking is to render the flesh of ani-
mals and vegetable substances easier of mastication,
and therefore easier of digestion. How this object
is carried out in most English households let each
declare for himself. And yet there is nothing in the
world so simple and so certain in its effects as the
action of fire upon food, if only we can learn to apply
and to regulate that action according to certain laws.
I propose therefore to devote a short lesson to each
of the simplest processes of cooking.

But before doing so I may be permitted here to
say a word or two about the management of the
kitchen fire. Few ladies, or even those servants whose
duties lie entirely upstairs, and who see a bright or
blazing fire every time they go into the kitchen, can
have any idea how difficult a thing it is to keep up a
good fire all day. When I say a " good fire/' I mean
a good cooking fire — a clear, bright fire, which, with-
out being a roaring furnace, shall yet be equal to any
emergency. It can only be managed by constant
small additions of coal, unless a great deal of cooking
is imminent, and then of course more fuel must be
added each time. But a really good cook will so con-
trive as to have a small, bright fire all day long, even

LESS, viii.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 59

when she is not actually cooking. Whenever I hear
that a bit of bread cannot be toasted, or a cup of soup
warmed, because the fire has "just been made up," I
know what has happened. The cook has allowed
the fire ,to burn down to the last bar of the grate,
and then she has emptied half a coal-scuttle on the
few live embers. For about two hours, therefore, it
is useless to expect any cooking from that fire, and it
will be fortunate if no sudden call be made for its
services. Now, if the cook had watched her fire, and
had kept it supplied from time to time with small
portions of coal, this emergency would never ha.ve
arisen. She could screw up her fireplace to very
small dimensions and yet keep an excellent fire, fit for
any unexpected demand. It is doubtful whether,
when she acts on the momentary impulse of trying to
make up for lost time, a cook has any idea of the
mischief she does. Letting the kitchen fire, burn
low and then flinging on coals, is not only an incon-
venient, but it is a recklessly extravagant proceeding.
The fire and fireplace have become thoroughly chilled,
and the fresh fuel evaporates almost entirely in the
form of smoke for a long time before the remainder is
in a state to use for cooking.

If this rule of preventing waste by constantly add-
ing small portions of fuel were better understood and
acted upon, cooks would not have such a bitter preju-
dice against the use of coke. It is, of course, abso-
lutely valueless to a half-extinguished fire, especially
when, instead of being put on in small quantities, it

60 fIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART n.

is flung on in shovelfuls. But to an already clear,
well-established fire, nothing is so satisfactory or
economical an addition as a few lumps of coke
judiciously put on. If frying or broiling is to be
done, the fire cannot be too clear, and coke, if it be
properly managed, will give the clearest fire in the
world, but then it requires a certain amount of intelli-
gence and willingness on the part of the cook to use it
to advantage. When I use the word cook, I do not
mean only a regular servant, but any young woman
who is acting, for perhaps the first time in her life, the
part of cook in her husband's, or father's, or brother's
house. She will find her culinary labours much sim-
plified if she keeps the needs of the kitchen fire
always before her mind. I don't mean to say that
such a one may not what is called "make up" her
fire, and leave it untouched between breakfast and
dinner, and dinner and tea, because the chances are
a hundred to one she will not need it, and her duties
probably call her elsewhere ; but a cook in a house
where there is a family, and perhaps sickness, or even
very young children, ought never for one moment to
forget or neglect her fire all through the day.

I could give her scientific reasons about radiation,
and use many long words to prove to her why, if she
keeps her grate well blacked arid polished, she will
find her fire burns better and gives out more heat, but
I prefer to appeal to everybody's experience and com-
mon sense if such warmth and brilliancy be not the
result of a beautifully clean and shining fireplace.

LESS, viii.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 61

To Sir Benjamin Thomson (an English knight and
an American by birth, but better known to us by his
Bavarian title of Count Rumford) we owe perhaps
more improvement in the economical management of
fuel and the construction of stoves and fireplaces,
with due regard to that economy, than to anyone else
in modern times. He was induced to turn his atten-
tion to the subject by the scarcity of fuel on the Con-
tinent, and his ideas naturally expanded and enlarged
themselves by constant practice. At last he suc-
ceeded in inventing a method of heating houses and
of cooking food which did not require much more
than half the usual amount of fuel, and this economy
in firing became such a mania with him that the joke
of the day used to be that his highest ambition was
to be able to cook his own dinner by means of his
neighbour's smoke.

However that may have been, it is very certain that
to Count Rumford we owe a great increase of our
knowledge on such subjects, and the reason I mention
him particularly in this place is that he never seemed
to weary of insisting on the necessity of a well-kept
brightly-blacked fireplace to the due economy of the
fuel used in it. He explained incessantly how that
kind of heat which is absorbed by either black or
white surfaces is totally devoid of light, and may
almost be considered as pure, radiant heat. So that
the first point to be taught, in ever so humble a
kitchen, is that the fireplace should be exquisitely
clean, besides well and brightly blacked, in order to

62 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART n.

give the fuel which will be used in it a fair chance of
giving out, by radiation, every particle of its latent
heat.

The next thing to be considered is the division and
arrangement of that fuel, beginning from even the
starting-point of lighting the fire. A careful house-
wife— careful either on her own account or her mis-
tress's— will only use half as much wood or shavings to
start her fire with as a thriftless one, because she will
take trouble to learn that there is a scientific but
perfectly simple mode of laying and lighting a fire.
She will be told in theory, and prove for herself by
practice, that she must thoroughly clear out her grate,
clean and brighten it up to the highest pitch, and then
place in it whatever is her lightest material, her paper,
or dry grass, or shavings, whatever she has at her
command. Next come the slender twigs or dried
sprays of heather of the country, or the neatly- cut
firewood of the town. Unless all this is thoroughly
dried over-night, • it will be worse than useless, and
it is in attention to details of this sort that true
economy consists. A damp bundle of wood or twigs
will smoulder, and be consumed without making any
appreciable difference in the state of the fire, whereas
half the quantity, when thoroughly dry, will start a
satisfactory blaze in a few minutes. Then should the
cinders be thoroughly and carefully sifted ; and now-
a-days I have no hesitation in saying this is as im-
peratively necessary in a palace as in a cottage, on
account of the increased price of coal. No cinders

LESS, vin J PRINCIPLES Oi^£Q&KW£\^ — ' 63

should be relegated to the dus thole at all, for every-
thing, except actual dust or the hard flakes (called
clinkers) left by coke, can be used. The largest
cinders may be laid lightly on the logs of the blazing
sticks, the smaller ones being thrown up, later, at the
back. Cinders are the best material in the world for
starting a fire, and even small lumps of coal should
only be sparingly used at first. Above all, a beginner
should be taught that her fire will never light or burn
up if she does not take care to establish a free circula-
tion of air beneath. I am, of course, speaking of
ordinary open fireplaces. Stoves and other patent fire-
places are generally constructed on entirely different
principles, and require special instruction for the
management of their fuel, but this is easily obtained
from the person who fixes them.

Taking it for granted, then, that our ideal cook
thoroughly understands how to light her fire, and is
impressed with a due sense of the importance of a
well-blacked shining kitchen-range, or humbler tiny
fireplace — the rule is the same everywhere — and that
she is one of those capable people who would dis-
dain to shelter themselves behind the excuse of an
ill-tempered chimney or a " bad draught/' we will
presently proceed to see what she should cook upon
her fire.

PART III.

THE PRINCIPLES OF DIET AND A FEW CHEAP
AND EASY RECIPES.

PART III.

REMARKS.

THE first principle of diet is that the stomach should
not be asked to receive more than it can digest 5 and
the second, that the food should be suitable to each
person's digestion. We are very tyrannical to our
stomachs, and they, in their turn, generally retaliate
upon us sooner or later. If a certain form of diet
agrees with one individual, it is no absolute rule that
it should suit our neighbour ; but we too often insist
on feeding others according to what we imagine agrees
with ourselves. Especially is this the case with chil-
dren's diet, and few grown-up people make allowance
for the healthy appetite of girls or boys who are still
growing, or understand how much food-material the
rapidly-expanding frame requires.

My own firm conviction is that no schoolboy ever
gets as much nourishing food as he requires, and that
that is the secret why boys of fourteen or fifteen years
old scarcely ever look anything but thin and pinched.
The general remark is, " Oh, they are growing so fast ! "
So they are, and that is the exact reason why their
food should be particularly nourishing, more so than
at any other time of their lives. Instead of that, an

F 2

68 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART in.

English schoolboy gets two slops and only one nourish-
ing meal a day, during the years of his life when he
requires the greatest amount of nutritive food. Think
of the actual force-producers contained in a school-
boy's breakfast and tea (or supper), and think of the
amount of exercise his restless young limbs will take
or have taken in the course of the day. After a game
of football or cricket, or a paper-chase, a boy sits
down generally — I might almost say invariably — to a
meal of weak tea, skim milk, bread, and perhaps
cheese or a little butter. I am not, of course, speak-
ing of cheap schools. When a person undertakes to
feed and teach and board a boy for a sum between
2O/. and 5o/., or even more, it is well-nigh impossible,
at the present scale of prices, to give him better, 01
even as good food as what I have described ; but it
does appear to me a shame that at the more expen-
sive schools to which boys are sent by parents of
fairly good means, the scale of diet should be kept so
low, and the proportion of really nutritive food so
small. Perhaps the only exceptions to this rule are
to be found in the liberal tables of some of our best
public schools, but even there the boys, without being
absolutely starved, do not get enough to eat, and two
meals out of the three will probably contain insuffi-
cient nourishment. In girls' schools,. I fancy, this evil
is still more decided, and a poor diet whilst a child is
growing rapidly is the root of delicate constitutions,
feeble frames, and general " breaking down " at the
outset of life.

REMARKS.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 69

There should also be the greatest imaginable differ-
ence in diet between different classes of workers ; for
although a certain section of the community monopo-
lizes to itself the honourable title of the " Working
Class," the term embraces many more thousands
than the labouring man imagines. The popular idea,
for instance, among the poor and ignorant masses
who work for their daily bread, is that the Lady who
rules over this country leads a blissful life of idleness,
seated on her throne all day, orb and sceptre in hand,
and gazing placidly before her into space. Now, I
believe it to be a fact that few people in all Her wide
dominions work really harder, in every sense of the
word, than our dear and good Queen. At the head
of the workers her Majesty may well claim to take her
place, and then will come a crowd of men and women
who wear good clothes and live in fine, or at all
events decent, houses, and yet work absolutely harder,
all the year round, than any day labourer in the Mid-
land Counties.

The diet for work of this nature must necessarily be
very different to that required by the man who exer-
cises his muscles in the open air, and whose appetite
and digestion possess far larger capacities of receiving
and assimilating food than those of the poor brain
worker who uses up his life-power at a much quicker
rate. The absence of fresh air, and the want there-
fore of constantly renewed supplies of oxygen to the
blood through the lungs, prevent the man who works
indoors with his head or his hands from feeling so

70 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART in.

hungry, yet the exhaustion of his nervous system de-
mands as urgently that it should be renewed by means
of food. At the same time the digestion of such a
one is weaker, and cannot manage gross substances.
For these workers, then, a diet where the cooking is so
perfect, however simple it may be, that there shall be
as little strain as possible thrown upon the gastric juices,
is of the first importance. To brain-workers albumen
is even more necessary than fibrine, and raw eggs
afford this in its purest form. There is a popular
fallacy that eggs beaten up in milk are rendered
doubly nourishing, but if the egg be fresh and good
the combination is rather more fitted to hinder than
to promote digestion. It would be better to beat the
egg up in a little brandy or wine, and wine is the
best. Fibrine, in the form of meat, should be
sparingly used by those who live by their brains, and
the meat should be of the best quality, and always
very well and delicately cooked. Fish supplies most
easily the phosphorus which is needed by such a
system, and good pure milk and cream are also very
essential articles of diet.

But to the man who exercises his muscles in the
open air a very different regimen must be prescribed.
The labourer instinctively stops the gaps between his
scanty meals with cheese, which is the best thing
for him, and he enriches his poor diet of potatoes
with bacon. Some day, when his wife has learned
how to make the most of every scrap of meat, he ought
to be able to vary his food with a good drop of warm

REMARKS.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 71

nourishing broth. If only he could be persuaded to
diminish his beer and increase his allowance of meat,
he would find himself in a far better condition for work.

The diet of our soldiers, and even of our sailors,
appears to me — in spite of tables showing the pro-
portions of flesh-formers and starch, of gluten, and
heaven knows what, swallowed daily by every soldier
• — to be really insufficient for a healthy man with
a good appetite. They may be supplied with food
enough to prevent anything like actual starvation,
and even to keep them in some sort of condition,
but I question whether a British soldier ever knows
what it is to feel thoroughly satisfied after his meals
for one whole day. It is just possible, is it not,
that the men would be easier kept away from the
canteen if they had as much as they could eat ?
Tables of food-proportions are very well in their
way, but I know that I have seen working men in
New Zealand, and growing boys of eighteen and
twenty years old in colonies where meat was cheap,
consume fibrine — or, in other words, eat plain roast
meat — in quantities which would soon leave the most
liberal military dietary several pounds behind.

It is not- at all certain that, in spite of danger and
discomforts, our soldiers do not really fare better
abroad, or in time of war, than at home in peace.
In the face of a national excitement we are not so
very particular as to the number of ounces of meat to
be dealt out to the men who have to stand between us
and ruin, so the soldier has then a better chance of

72 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART in.

occasionally getting as much as he can eat. If he
could cook his own food, he would be still better off ;
and anyone who saw those good-looking German
soldiers cooking their rations in the little tent behind
the School of Cookery last summer, must remember
how deftly they set about their preparations, and how
savoury was the result of a pea-sausage and a bone
or two. No doubt every year brings its improvements
in these matters, and if a soldier who fought under
Marlborough could see the rations and barrack ac-
commodation of his modern brethren-in-arms, he
would indeed think they had nothing to complain of
in the way of food and shelter. But still there is
ample room for improvement, and I would endorse
the suggestion often made before, that the British
soldier be taught to cook, and to make the most of his
rations by such cooking. Each man might take it in
turn to try his hand over the fire, and there might be
some regimental emulation in the form of small prizes
for clever contrivances to vary the food, and so forth.
I am aware that the food is not nearly so mono-
tonous as it used to be a short time since, when all the
meat eaten by soldiers was invariably boiled ; but still
I question whether the mess dinner of the rank and
file is anything like so savoury and palatable as the
dinner to be had a few years ago in Paris, at one
Madame Roland's, near the Marche des Innocents.
For twopence she gave you cabbage soup with a slice
of bouilli (beef) in it, a large piece of excellent bread,
and a glass of wine, which it must be admitted, how-

LESS, ix.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 73

ever, was rather thin. Some 600 workmen used to
throng daily round her table in a shed, and yet she cal-
culated that she gained a farthing by each guest. In
Glasgow, Manchester, and elsewhere, similar public
dining places have been established on the cheapest
possible scale, and found to answer very well j but
although a workman may be able to get a fairly good
and nutritive dinner "at such an institution, it is not
the less necessary that his wife should know how to
cook his food decently for him at home.

LESSON IX.

BOILING AND STEWING.

THERE is all the difference in the world between
boiling meat which is to be eaten, and meat whose
juices are to be extracted in the form of soup. If
the meat is required as nourishment, of course you
want the juices kept in. To do this it is necessary
to plunge it into boiling water, which will cause the
albumen in the meat to coagulate suddenly, and act
as a plug or stopper to all the tubes of the meat, so
that the nourishment will be tightly kept in. The
temperature of the water should be kept at boiling-
point for five minutes, and then as much cold water
must be added as will reduce the temperature to 165°.
If the whole be kept at this temperature for some
hours, you have all the conditions united which give

74 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART in.

to the flesh the quality best adapted for its use as
food. The juices are kept in the meat, and instead
of being called upon to consume an insipid mass of
indigestible fibres, we have a tender piece of meat,
from which, when cut, the imprisoned juices run
freely. If the meat be allowed to remain in the boil-
ing water without the addition of any cold to it, it
becomes in a short time altogether cooked, but it will
be as hard as iron, and utterly indigestible, and there-
fore unwholesome.

If soup is to be made out of meat, then it stands to
reason we want all the juices which we can possibly
extract from the meat to mix with the water. There-
fore the meat should be put into cold water, with a
little salt and a few vegetables (if in a poor family a
few crusts of bread may be added at the last minute),
and allowed to simmer as long as possible. It is un-
doubtedly the most economical form of nourishment
which exists, and it is an absurd prejudice to suppose
that the same amount of meat is invariably more
valuable to the human system if it be frizzled in a
greasy frying-pan, so that it becomes burnt outside
but remains raw within, and eaten in this state as
" good solid food/' dear to the heart (but surely not
to the stomach) of a true Englishman. In the first
place, even a pound of meat will only feed one
person in a solid form, whereas, if to exactly the
same weight of meat be added a pint of cold water,
a few vegetables, or even herbs, a couple of potatoes,
a bone or two, a scrap of bacon, an onion — almost

LESS, ix.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 75

anything which comes handy — we have at once the
pot-au-feu of the French peasant, and produce a
warm, savoury, wholesome meal for two or three
persons. It may be as well to mention that the scum
which rises on the top of the water whilst meat is
boiling is always useless and unwholesome, and
should be got rid of as completely as possible. The
way to help this scum to rise, so as to be able to get
rid of it, is to keep pouring in a little cold water from
time to time. This will always have the effect of
sending up some of the obnoxious substance to the
top, from whence it should speedily be removed.

Stewing occupies a sort of middle position between
roasting and boiling, and must be carefully attended
to, if the meat is not to be hardened instead of
softened by the process. It is desirable to dip meat
into boiling water for stewing as well as boiling, unless
indeed it should have been soaked before. What,
for instance, makes hashed mutton a byword of
nastiness ? Because an ignorant cook plunges her
chunks of cold meat into a greasy gravy when it is
at boiling-point, thereby thoroughly and hopelessly
hardening the meat, and then serves up the mess with
large pieces of half-toasted bread. Now, is this way
more extravagant? I can answer for its being more
palatable. Make a nice little gravy of any cold stock
— and a good cook will always have a small basin or
cup full of stock by her — add an onion finely shredded
and fried, a little pepper and salt, and, if it is to
be had, a tea-spoonful of ketchup. Let the mixture

76 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART in-

come to boiling-point, without boiling over, and
strain it into another saucepan. If you have only
one saucepan, strain it into a basin, quickly clean
out your saucepan, and pour the gravy back into it,
setting it aside to let it get nearly quite cold. Then,
and not until then, lay in thinly- cut, small'slices of the
cold meat, and let the gravy and the meat warm
thoroughly and gradually together, without boiling,
but don't allow it to stew too long. Whilst it is
getting ready, have the frying-pan ready with a little
boiling fat (not that which fish has been fried in,
remember), and put into it some small, thin, three-
cornered pieces of bread, which will quickly fry into
a crisp toast. Serve these round the hash, which,
by the way, should not be swamped in gravy, and I
can answer that a certain cockney millionaire friend
of mine will no longer issue this solemn warning to
his family: "Never eat 'ashes away from 'ome."

But to return to stewing. If it be properly under-
stood and practised, stewed meat makes a very agree-
able and palatable change from the monotonous
boiling and roasting which alternate on the middle-
class daily bill of fare. A shoulder of mutton stewed,
Indian fashion, with a handful of well-washed rice, a
few Sultana raisins, half a dozen cloves, and a tea-
spoonful of currie powder to flavour it, makes an
agreeable change. Some meats are far more whole-
some also when stewed than when roast ; as veal,
for instance, and many kinds of fish. Eels are in-
variably more wholesome stewed than boiled— though

LESS, ix.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 77

all fish is wholesomer boiled than fried, for stewing
is a more gradual process than boiling, and the fat is
more surely got rid of. If it should ever be necessary
to cook a beefsteak which has not yet had time to
become tender by keeping, then, for the sake of the
digestion of the family, it would be better to stew it,
and this is the way it should be done.

The meat should first be cut into convenient, but
large-sized pieces (all the fat having been removed)
and lightly fried on both sides in butter or clarified
dripping. This will make it of a nice brown colour,
and prevent the pale flabby appearance it would
otherwise present. Then get a saucepan and put the
meat into it, with a little sliced onion, turnips and
carrots (which are also improved by being half-fried
first), pepper and salt, and a tea-spoonful of any sauce
you prefer. If there is any stock, add it, but if not,
put in about half a pint of water, and let it all simmer
very gently for two or three hours. At the last mo-
ment skim it well, for it is odious if it be greasy ; stir
in a few pinches of flour to thicken the gravy, and let
it all boil up together for a couple of minutes before
serving. Some people are very fond of fat with all
their food, though they should bear in mind that fat
affords no nourishment whatever to the human body.
It merely goes to make fat. A stout person should
therefore not eat much fat, and a thin one should.
The function of fat, as we all know, is like starch or
sugar, to keep up the heat of the animal, and a certain
proportion is even present in healthy animal muscle ;

78 FIRS'l LESSONS IN THE [PART in.

so it does not do to buy lean meat, although all the
fat on the joint need not be sent up to table. How-
ever, it is necessary to serve a certain portion of fat
with stewed steak, but do not let it stew with the
meat, for it will only melt and rise to the surface
in the scum which has to be so carefully removed.
Rather keep the fat till the last moment, cut it into
little pieces a couple of inches long, and put it by
itself in the frying-pan or on a gridiron for a minute
or two just to cook it, and serve it in golden-brown
nodules on the top of the stewed meat.

All nice cooking — be its materials ever so simple —
is more or less troublesome ; but I have always found
(and the experience of others bears out my own) that
bad cooks will take quite as much trouble to spoil
food. It is therefore a great pity that when a
woman is conscious of her own deficiencies and is
anxious and willing to improve by learning, she should
not have the opportunity of doing so. But unfor-
tunately cooking is not to be learned "from a book,
nor from a lecture. It is an art in which practical
experience, supplementing theoretical information,
alone can be of any use. It is doubtless a great
advantage to intelligent beginners to have the why
and wherefore of everything explained to them either
by voice or page, but it is equally necessary for
them to see with their own eyes and try with their
own hands the result of these instructions, for half-
an-hour's practice is worth a week's theorizing, in
cooking as well as in other things.

i ESS. x.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 79

LESSON X.

BAKING, ROASTING, AND FRYING.

THE same principle which has been advocated in
boiling holds good with regard to roasting. If you
wish to retain all the juices in the meat, place it close
to the fire for five minutes at first, and then remove it
to a greater distance until the last five minutes, when
it should be brought near the fire again. It is possible,
by this method, to roast a joint thoroughly, so that it
shall be perfectly well cooked, and yet, when carved,
the imprisoned juices shall flow out readily. All meat
ought to be well floured and sprinkled with a pinch
or two of salt before putting it to the fire, and it
should be kept constantly basted with clear dripping.
Some things, such as hare, are better basted with
milk ; and poultry, or any very small joint, is much
improved by being covered with lard or oiled paper.
Instead of larding game or poultry, it is often prefer-
able to bard it, i.e. to cover the breast with a thin
slice of fat bacon, which may be served up with it as
with quails.

We must remember that the object in cooking is to
present meat, and indeed all food, to the palate in an
agreeable form without changing its composition more
than we can help, or losing its nutritive value. Raw
meat, quite apart from other objections, is so tough

£° FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART in.

that it would be impossible to masticate or digest
enough of it to satisfy hunger, whereas the application
of heat is intended to force the juices to expand, thus
separating the fibres and making mastication easy and
pleasant.

The loss of weight in roasting, especially if the
joint be a fat one, is very considerable. As much as
4lb. 4 oz. have been lost in roasting a joint of 15 Ibs.
weight in the ordinary manner. Although meat actually
loses more of its weight by roasting than by boiling,
yet, if no account be taken of the matters extracted,
it contains, when roasted, a larger proportion of nu-
tritive elements than the larger mass of boiled meat,
and in a given weight is more nutritious. Meat is
often baked, and though this method maybe harmless
and agreeable as a change, it is not such a wholesome
form of cooking as roasting.

The primitive manner of baking meat is the only
one which ensures it from becoming dry and tasteless,
namely, to enclose it in a crust of some sort. The
gipsies to this day bake their meat and poultry — we
will not inquire how this latter item is added to the
bill of fare — in a sort of mud mould or case, covering
up feathers and all ; and the Indians and Maoris
generally cook in the same way. A fowl, or a piece
of meat of any sort, is delicious when enclosed in a
flour-and-water case — dough, in fact — and baked in
the embers 'of a camp fire. If the meat were put in
the fire without this protection, it would simply get
burnt

LESS. x,j PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. Si

Frying is the simplest, the commonest, ami, if pro-
perly done, the wholesomest form of cooking food,
but it is perhaps the least understood, and more often
results in burning the outside of the meat whilst the
inside is left raw. To begin with, a clear, smokeless
fire is indispensable for frying, and it is equally neces-
sary to have a perfectly clean frying-pan. Of course
the best oil, or the best fresh butter, would offer the
most perfect conditions of the fat in which anything
should be fried ; but good, pure, clear fat, and clarified
dripping, make capital substitutes. Cold meat is ex-
cellent when lightly fried and served up with yester-
day's vegetables and potatoes (also cut up and fried),
but the excellence depends entirely on the delicate yet
savoury flavouring, the clearness of the fire, and the
goodness of the fat in which the frying process is
carried on. It is also very important that the fat
should be actually boiling. Here again we are met
by prejudice, for ninety-nine cooks out of a hundred
will allege that they are " respectable women " when
asked to use a frimometer or a thermometer, and
prefer to go on ascertaining the temperature of
their fat by guesswork or by means of a sprig of
parsley. It is more economical to roast the flesh of
young animals, such as lamb, chicken, veal, or pork,
because such flesh contains an undue proportion of
albumen and gelatine in the tissues, and these sub-
stances will to a great extent be lost in the boiling.

If I had to cook a dish of cutlets and potatoes, or
a tender rump-steak and potatoes, this is the way I

G

82 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART in.

should do it, or, to speak quite truthfully, these are the
directions I should give for its being done. First, I
must say that whenever it is practicable to use a grid-
iron in the place of a frying-pan, and to broil meat
instead of frying, it should be done. But, at the same
time, I have tasted such excellent cutlets served out of
a frying-pan, that it shows it is not an invariable rule.
It is the attention to small details which makes all the
difference in nice cooking, and if persons thoroughly
understand the value of these important trifles, they
learn to do the thing always that way, and so it be-
comes no more trouble to them than is the slatternly
method which results in grease and cinders, heartburn
and disgust. Well, then, let us imagine that we are
rich enough to possess a frying-pan and a gridiron, and
that our fire, however small, is clear and bright, with-
out a film of smoke, for it is of no use trying to fry
or broil unless the fire is in a proper condition. In
spite of what has been said in a former place about
cooking potatoes in their skins, potatoes for frying
must needs be peeled, well washed, and cut rapidly
up with a sharp knife into thin slices. Again, they
should be thrown into a basin of water for a moment,
and then laid on a clean cloth, slice by slice, to be
thoroughly dried. All this time the nice, clear fat
should have been melting on the fire, and when it is
actually boiling throw in the potatoes, keeping the
frying-pan frequently moving so that they shall not
stick to its bottom. A couple or three minutes ought
to crisp them to a beautiful golden brown colour ;

LESS, x.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 83

then skim them swiftly out of the boiling fat, throw
them into a large, fine wire sieve (which would be all
the better for having been warmed to receive them;,
sprinkle a pinch of salt over them, and turn them
into a very hot dish, every particle of fat having been
left behind in the sieve. Although the potatoes have
been mentioned first, the meat should really have
preceded them in the order of cooking, as it is
the easiest to keep hot If you are going to have
cutlets, trim them from the best end of a neck of
mutton very neatly. There is no occasion to throw
away the scraps ; they should either go into the stock-
pot, or, if strict economy be necessary, they may after-
wards be made into a pudding or pie. The chine-bone
must be sawn off, and the seven or eight chops (which
are all you will be able to get off a moderate-sized
neck of mutton) neatly pared, and only about an inch
of bare bone left to each cutlet for a handle. The
cutlets should then be sprinkled with a little salt and
pepper, and laid for a moment in a dish of oil :
then put them on the gridiron, or into the frying-
pan, but in this latter case add a little more oil, and
broil or fry them for six or seven minutes. They
ought by that time to be nicely done, and should be
served hot. Beefsteak can be cooked exactly in the
same way, only from its larger size the gridiron is
more strictly indispensable. A frying-pan is a very
serviceable implement in the hands of a skilful
manager. I trust she will make it a point of keeping
it scrupulously clean, and then she can serve up

G ?

FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART in.

the cold vegetables left from yesterday in this
fashion at a moment's notice. Melt a little fat
or butter in your frying-pan, shred an onion into
it with a spoonful of chopped parsley, a little
salt and pepper, and a sprig of any savoury herb
or bit of lemon-peel which comes handy. Then
cut up the vegetables — cabbage, turnips, carrots,
and so forth — into small pieces, and fry the whole,
lightly tossing the contents of your frying-pan all the
time, so that they may not get into a burnt fat-soaked
mass. On a sudden call for a late supper, such a dish
as this forms a capital addition to the cold meat or
fried bacon and eggs.

Of all the uses, however, to which a housewife
turns her frying-pan, I suppose an omelet is the
least in demand, and yet it is at once the cheapest
and easiest way in the world to cook eggs with
other things. All it requires is vigilance and knack.
Don't 0zw-beat your eggs, just whisk them up
(three are quite enough for a manageable omelet),
whites and all, lightly and swiftly, beat in with
them a pinch of salt, a little pepper, some finely-
chopped parsley, or a teaspoonful of grated cheese,
or shredded bacon, or even shredded fish ; almost any*
thing mixes well in an omelet, provided it is cut fine
enough. Have the frying-pan ready on the fire with
butter enough in it to fairly cover its surface when
melted, which it should do without browning. Into
this clear liquid butter pour the contents of your
basin (your eggs, &c.), holding the frying-pan with

OF THE

NIVERSITT

, x.] PRINCIPLES O

the left hand, and gently stirring the mixture with
a wooden spoon in the other. The omelet will set
almost immediately, and then the stirring should be
discontinued, and the gentle shaking carried on inces-
santly : the edges being lightly turned up with the
wooden spoon every now and then. If you turn
your head, or cease shaking for a moment, the omelet
will be spoiled. Four minutes should be quite enough
to cook the inside thoroughly, and yet leave the out-
side of a rich, yellowish-brown colour, but the time
required to attain this result will entirely depend on
the fire. Too fierce a fire will burn the omelet before
it has had time to set or become thoroughly cooked,
and yet a clear brisk fire is necessary. As soon as it
begins to assume the shape of a small plate and the
colour of a golden pippin, take your wooden spoon
once more and dexterously double it over, serve it in
an exceedingly hot dish, and eat it whilst it is still
sputtering and frothing. The only things requisite
in an omelet are, presence of mind and prompt-
ness of action. Timidity and hesitation have ruined
many an omelet, and it is better to practise as
often as may be necessary, before serving up a
failure.

In fritters, the yolks of the eggs and the dissolved
butter are beaten into a batter, and the slices of fruit,
previously dipped in finely-powdered sugar, dropped
into the mixture, to which, by the way, the well-
whisked whites of the eggs must be added at the last
moment. Then the slices of fruit, with the batter

86 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART in.

adhering to them, may be placed in the buttered
frying-pan for a moment or two just to get lightly
cooked, and the pan should be kept well shaken
during the process.

LESSON XL

BACON.

AMERICAN bacon is considerably lower in price than
English bacon, but it shrinks more when boiled, and
you can get a larger number of slices from a given
weight of English bacon than can be obtained from
the other. Pork is the great stand-by of the poor
man's dietary, by reason of its strong flavour as well
as its low price, and the relish it affords to mono-
tonous and insipid fare. The dripping from fried
bacon is often preferred by children to the rancid
stuff sold as butter to the poor ; and in any case the
fat from bacon is more palatable with cabbage or
potatoes than the suet of either beef or mutton could
possibly be. It is easier to carry when cold into the
fields ; and another great advantage of bacon is that
it requires less fire to cook it, and fewer utensils.
From a scientific point of view, a diet in which
bacon is the principal meat, needs to be largely
supplemented by milk and other highly nitrogenous
food, for it contains very little nitrogen itself, and
we know that nitrogen is of great importance to

LESS. XL] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 87

the blood. Bacon supplies a fair amount of carbon,
and does not therefore require the aid of bread.
With the addition of a little pea-meal, the liquor
in which bacon has been boiled makes a good soup,
and it would be improved both in flavour and
nutritive value by a few potatoes and an onion being
boiled in it.

But as a general rule, however valuable the pig may
be in an economical sense, it is quite certain that pork
is less wholesome than almost any other meat. For
the reasons why this should be so, we must go in the
first place to the habits and ways of the animal itself,
its absence of any guiding instinct about food — for
quantity, not quality, appears to be the first principle
of a pig's diet — and the motionless life it leads. Pigs
which are turned out in a field run about too much
to grow fat, and therefore, if it be necessary to use the
animal for food, it is speedily relegated to its sty.
There it never does anything except sleep and eat,
and this want of exercise tells not only on the inor-
dinate growth of fat which is laid up outside the body,
but upon the muscles and fibres of the flesh, which
become hard and indigestible. The pig stores up in
its body three times more of its food than the ox, and
from its large proportion of fat is not of equal value
with beef or mutton in nourishing the system of those
who need to make much muscular exertion. The leg
of pork is the part of the body which, if deprived of
its large proportion of fat, approaches the most nearly
to the nourishing elements of beef or mutton. How

88 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART in.

ever, I do not for a moment expect that any scientific
theories for or against pork will have any ill effect on
the keeping of pigs or the curing of bacon. Happy
is the family which can keep a pig ; therefore, what
does it matter whether it be a " highly nitrogenous
food " or not? Piggy pays the rent, and furnishes
the " childer " with many a savoury bite besides. In
fact, if any food can, in these high-priced days, be
called economic, bacon deserves the name, for it
goes further than any other meat. My remarks,
therefore, must be taken to apply only to those who
have a choice, and who therefore should use it more
as a relish than as the principal ingredient in the
family bill of fare.

LESSON XII.

THE GIST OF THE WHOLE MATTER.

Now let us sum up what we have been trying to teach
and to learn in this little book. To begin with, we
will run through the first part, which is perhaps rather
alarming on account of its hard words, and see what
has been said.

No one will deny the importance of urging rich and
poor alike, in the present state of things, to try and
economize the fuel and food which they may have at
their disposal. When I use the word economize, and

LESS. xii. 1 PRINCIPLES OF COOKING.

apply it to rich people, I mean it to bear a wider
significance than when I speak of the very poor, with
whom it is an absolute necessity. It is just because
there is not this absolute necessity on the score of
expenditure, that a due attention to the principles
of economy in food and fuel sits so gracefully on a
rich person. I do not mean that only two fires should
be lighted in a splendid mansion, or that its inmates
should gather every day around a dinner of bone-
soup or a lunch of bread and cheese. That would
of course be absurd nonsense, and no one is so
short-sighted as not to perceive that such economy
would starve a good many thousand people in other
grades of life. What I mean is, that in all house-
holds, beginning with those costly establishments
where the duty devolves on a steward or house-
keeper, there should be such arrangements, such
training, such recognized principles, that the possi-
bility of waste should be reduced to the lowest point.
Everyone will acknowledge that in what are called
" great kitchens/' the " waste," — the broken victuals,
scraps, crusts, bones, and so forth — would feed many
a poor and hungry family. All I say, then, is : " Let
it feed such families : don't let it be thrown away, or
sold as refuse. ". When we have made the most of
everything, there will still be quite enough refuse in
the world, without adding to it portions of food which
would be a boon and a blessing to a starving child.
The same with fuel Let people who can afford to
pay for coals have as many fires as they choose, but

90 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART HI.

let them take care that the coals are fairly used and
made the most of, cinders and all, so will there be
more left in the market for those to whom a hundred-
weight of coal is of more importance than is a ton to
a rich man. Let such people have grates and stoves,
and all the new inventions for the economy of fuel,
and then, if everybody makes a conscience of being
careful with their coals — economical without being
stingy, but insisting on every cinder being duly used,
or even given away, instead of finding its way into the
dust-hole — we shall not perhaps have constant alarms
of scarcity and famine prices.

So much can rich people do to help j but those in
the lower grades of society can do a great deal more ;
and I am persuaded that the chief reason a great deal
more is not done is because people don't know how
to do it. The mistress of a middle-class household
considers that she fulfils the whole duties of her
position by giving a few languid orders to her ser-
vants, which they obey or not, according to their
several dispositions. By all means let her confine
herself to this feeble style of housekeeping until she
knows how the things should be done, for until then
it is better she should not interfere. If everything
was exactly as it should be, if cooks knew not
only how to lay and light fires, but to cook ex-
quisitely, it would be very delightful, and we might
all live happy ever after. But, unfortunately, we
seem to be a long way from such a desirable state
of things ; and complaints of the bad, and an outcry

LESS. XIL] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 91

for good, servants grow louder every year. Now, it
appears to me that good mistresses are just as much
needed as good servants, mistresses who are capable
of explaining kindly and clearly to a servant how and
why their duties — or such portion of their duties as
they are ignorant of — should be performed. Expla-
nation is a good deal better than scolding, and the
practical knowledge from which such explanations
should spring is quite compatible with the utmost
refinement and cultivation of the mind. I don't
want ladies to do the servants' work ; I only want
them to have the opportunity of learning to ex-
plain how such work should be performed, and
to understand, even in theory, why and wherefore
certain causes bring about certain results in domestic
economy.

Let us take the mistress of an ordinary middle-
class household, a household where the husband
works hard to make an income of from 5oo/. to
i,ooo/. a year, on which four or five children have
to be educated and set forth in the world, and
perhaps relations to be helped besides (for poor
people generally have to help their relations). Ten
years ago it would have been, for that rank of life,
almost a large income. Nowadays it is a very small
one, and it has therefore become more than ever of
grave importance that the person on whom its
management chiefly depends should know something
besides music and drawing. Well, then, this typical
lady shall be amiable, intelligent anxious to do her

92 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART m.

best for her family and household, and yet what
state of things shall we be tolerably sure to find in
such a house ? In the nursery, " Missis " is all that
is capable and useful. She thoroughly understands
how to provide for the health and pretty toilettes of
her nice little children. She and Nurse get on very
well ; they have a mutual respect and confidence in
each other's " knowledgeableness," and a thorough
belief in each other's capacity. All is right at the
top of the house. On the next story the lady is not
quite so certain of her ground. She has indeed
slender theories on the subject of dust, and, we will
hope, a wholesome love of fresh air, but a new house-
maid will probably find that she can do pretty much
as she likes in her own department.

But it is not till we come down to the kitchen that
we begin to suspect there is a screw loose somewhere.
If our lady has been fortunate enough to stumble
upon a cook who for i4/. or i6/. a year will cook
savoury meals for her every day of her life ; a cook
who is as clean as she is clever, and as honest as she
is sober, then indeed there will be peace and harmony
in that establishment, unless the cook should happen
to have a bad temper. But how is it if the cook be
merely an ignorant, honest, " willing " young woman ?
Who is to teach her ? How and where is she to be
trained ? That has hitherto been the great difficulty
of English middle-class life, and it is to remove, or
at all events to give those who wish it an opportunity
of removing it, that the National School of Cookery

LESS, xii.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKTKG. 93

is to be established at South Kensington. Everything
cannot be done in a moment ; unsuspected needs will
crop up, an extended sphere will necessitate wider
arrangements ; but I can safely affirm that the point
which will be steadily kept in view by the Committee
is this great need of the English people — the want of
some place where a girl or woman can be taught how
to cook. It is not necessary for ladies to bend over
the fire and harden their palms with saucepan handles,
for it is easier to teach an educated person by theory
than an uneducated one ; and a lady will carry away
a great deal of useful knowledge from a lecture where
a cook-maid would have been swamped by words
and phrases above her capacity. There will therefore
be both forms of education ; but, so far as my own
experience goes, and speaking confidentially, I should
have been very thankful for both opportunities oi
practical instruction before I went to New Zealand.
I might then perhaps have been saved many an
anxious moment, to say nothing of constant culinary
discomfiture. I did go down to a friend's kitchen
more than once, and try what knowledge I could pick
up, but I was so bewildered by the size and splen-
dour of the batterie- de-cuisine, and the cook would
persist in regarding my desire for information as either
a whim or a joke on my part, so that it ended by my
learning nothing whatever which proved of any prac-
tical use to me. To begin with, I could not explain
to the cook what I wanted to know; I could not even
say where my ignorance began or where it ended,

94 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART in

though indeed I found out afterwards that it would
have been well to have established some infallible
test for ascertaining when the kettle boiled. What
experiments even in this line were necessary when I
set up for myself ! including one recipe of turning
the kitchen poker into a sort of tuning-fork, and hold-
ing the handle to my ear, whilst the poker-point
rested on the lid of the kettle. That method soon
fell into disfavour, for it used generally to result in
upsetting the whole affair and extinguishing the
kitchen fire.

Well, then, to return to the purpose of this slender
volume. If it even awakens a sense of ignorance in
its readers, something will have been gained, for I am
much mistaken in my knowledge of women of my
own class and position in life, as well as of those
in a higher rank, if, when once they feel the need
of practical instruction and improvement in their
domestic arrangements, the next step will not be to
endeavour to acquire that knowledge. Also, I hope
and believe that the artisan's young wife, who
feels the commissariat and cooking a heavy burthen
on her mind and her hands, will set to work to
learn how and why certain food-substances are more
wholesome and therefore more economical than
others, and in what fashion they should be cooked
so as to make them go further and render them
palatable.

Lower than this grade in our social scale it seems
hard to go. It is too much to expect the crowds

LESS. xii. PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 95

whose daily bread is a perpetual miracle, to have the
time and the means to learn to cook better. When
it is generally a matter of chance and locality what
sort of food they can provide for themselves and
their children, it seems a bitter mockery to tell them
this, that, and the other is the most nourishing diet,
or to recommend rump-steaks to them instead of
bread and dripping. But here, those rich and bene-
volent people, whose comforts and luxuries have been
and will be secured to themselves and their families
for many a day, may possibly find another outlet for
that spring of human sympathy and charity which —
whatever pessimists may say to the contrary — runs
bright and sparkling beneath our natures, and wells
up to make many a green and blessed spot in our
own lives and those of others.

Let us look for a momerut at our country villages,
and think how often it happens that the Squire's and
the Rector's wife is asked to take some well-behaved
cottage-girl and " learn " her to cook.

With the best will in world, what can these kind
ladies do ? With a sigh they will consent, and return
home to announce — probably with some trepidation —
to their cook, that " a new girl " is coming. This
means a year of misery and discomfort to everybody*
The cook does not care about teaching the girl, and
will most likely take but slender pains to do so,
The girl feels that she is only on sufferance in the
kitchen, and is in a false position there, besides. It
will probably be very difficult, if not impossible, for

90 FIRS7 LESSON'S IN THE [PART in.

her to get anything like a regular useful lesson from
her aggrieved instructress. Everything that is broken
in the kitchen is laid to her charge, and at the end
ot the year I question whether, even under the most
favourable circumstances, such a girl can possibly
have learned anything which will be of real practical
value to her. As soon as ever she begins to have
a dawning idea on the subject of a mutton-chop,
she must go elsewhere and make room for another
beginner. Now, the same money which would keep
this girl for a year, would give her proper instruc-
tion in a proper place.

How constantly it happens that a young woman
who is happily placed as housemaid or nursemaid, or
apprenticed to a trade, loses her mother, and it be-
comes absolutely necessary that she should give up
her situation and return home to fill, as best she may,
her mother's vacant place. Such a girl has probably
never cooked a meal for herself in her life. She may
return home with an earnest and affectionate desire
to do her best for her father's and brothers' comfort,
but can she know by inspiration how to cook their
meals ? Even in my own limited experience I have
repeatedly heard laments on this score, and felt my-
self at the same time quite powerless to help beyond
the vague suggestion that the beginner should ask
Mrs. So-and-so to show her a little how to cook ; Mrs.
So-and-so knowing probably very little herself.

Many hundreds and thousands of people in London
and our other cities and watering-places live, at all

LESS, xii.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 97

events for a certain portion of the year, in lodgings,
or, as they are more elegantly styled, furnished apart-
ments. Imagine a monster meeting of lodgers in the
Albert Hall, assembled to proclaim their greatest
grievance. Would there not be one universal roar of
"The food"?

I have occasionally lived in lodgings myself, and
I can speak from my own experience, feeling con-
fident that it will represent the experience of a con-
siderable portion of the houseless community. I
found invariably civility, generally cleanliness (or at
all events that is a remediable evil), and, with scarcely
any exception, vile food. When I complained, the
stereotyped answer, given in a very hopeless tone;
used to be : " Well, ma'am, I know it's not exactly
right, but it's the gal ; you see, she don't know nothing;
and I can't cook myself, not to say well." Now, whj-
can't the " gal " cook, poor soul ? Has she ever been
taught, or had even a chance of learning? Do wt
put ever so willing a man to fire an Armstrong gun
or set up type without the slightest previous instruc-
tion on the subject ? Why should a " gal " be taken
from her school life (this is imagining the most favour-
able conditions), and suddenly be expected to know
how to cook, especially when her teacher is con-
fessedly as ignorant as herself? The only bright
exception to this rule is when a girl has had the rare
good fortune to be trained in some charitable institu-
tion, where she has been properly taught to cook as
weJl as to scrub and clean, and to keep herself neat

H

98 FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART in.

and tidy, even whilst she is working. Yet, as I write
the words " rare good fortune," a remorseful pang
comes over me ; for, however such training may
benefit the poor child and her employers in after
years, it has probably been necessary, in order for
her to be admitted into such an institution, that she
should have been a waif or stray, an orphan, or a
poor deserted child, or exceptionally wretched in
some way, and it is from her very homelessness and
helplessness that what I find myself calling her " rare
good fortune " has sprung.

I have already alluded in another place (page 36)
to the case of the domestic servant who has been a
housemaid or a nursemaid, or waited on ladies, and
who perhaps marries and finds herself in a nice little
home which it becomes her duty to keep bright and
clean. She can do everything except cook, but I
venture to say she will find this a great difficulty, and
there will be a good deal of unconscious waste and
extravagance before even the Rubicon of fried bacon
is passed.

It would be a good opportunity for this class of
servants to learn cooking at the National School when
families go out of town for the autumn, and two
or three servants are left in an empty house to while
away a couple of months as best they can. I do not
want to curtail or interfere with any one's holiday, but
it could scarcely be a grievance to a yonng woman
who is perhaps looking forward to a little home of
her own some not very distant day, to have the

LESS. XIL] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 99

opportunity of taking lessons in the art of cooking
her husband's meals. Many of our subscribers may
be fortunate enough to possess cooks who are masters
or mistresses of their science, and to whom the word
instruction dare not be mentioned. What I would
venture to suggest to such people is, that although
they may not need instruction for their cooks, they
might utilize the advantages which their subscriptions
will give them, for the benefit of their younger ser-
vants or even of their tenants' daughters.

The great point which I have reason to believe
the Committee of the National School of Cookery
will insist upon is, thoroughness. No one will be
allowed to run, or try to run, before she can walk.
The elementary knowledge of how to light and manage
a kitchen fire, of scrupulous cleanliness in pots and
pans, of attention to a thousand small but all-im-
portant details, will be taught and insisted upon be-
fore the learner is allowed to do anything worthy of
the name of cooking. She will then probably be
surprised to find how comparatively easy it will be
to acquire the art, and she may be very sure she
will not be allowed to try a second thing until she
can do the first, if it be only boiling a kettle or toast-
ing a piece of bread to perfection.

Such is the plan for complete beginners — who, by
the way, generally prove the most successful pupils ;—
but for servants or artisans' wives who wish to u better '
themselves in their kitchens, there will be a different
mode of instruction, into which we need not enter

ioo FIRST LESSONS IN THE [PART in.

here. Ladies will also have an opportunity either of
sitting in a chair and listening^, a lecture or series
of lectures on cooking, begB^jfetwith a mutton-
chop and ending with a souffle^ or they may turn
back their sleeves, take off their rings and bracelets,
and try for themselves. It will be hard if any eager
inquirer does not find some course or class to meet
her needs ; and it is to be hoped that whatever excuse
may hereafter be urged for our national bad cookery,
the reproach of the want of a place and opportunity
of instruction will be done away with for ever.

There is but one parting remark I have to make.
It is this. The National School of Cookery is not
a mercantile undertaking. I have no wish to attempt
to throw discredit upon such undertakings, but simply
to state the School of Cookery at South Kensington
is not one. There will be no question of dividends or
bonuses, nor will there be shareholders whose interests
and pockets must be considered. The School has every
reason to expect that it will be liberally supported by
contributions and donations ; if it finds itself mistaken
in that expectation, it will close its doors, and there
will be no harm done to anybody. It is managed by
a Committee of gentlemen whose names are a sufficient
guarantee for their actions, and no one of them will
be individually a penny the richer or the poorer,
whether the undertaking succeeds or not. If the
School be well and liberally supported, it will be a
sign that the need of improvement in cooking is felt
by all classes, and for every shilling subscribed it is

LESS, xii.] PRINCIPLES OF COOKING. 101

the intention of the Committee to afford means of
instruction. The more money which is forthcoming,
the more widely-spread will be the benefit which the
promoters of the National School of Cookery hope
and believe it is capable of producing.

THE END.

LONDON I RICHARD CLA\ & SONS, PRINTERS,

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