Consuming Interest
Bring Forth More Fruits
By ELIZABETH DAVID COLD ROAST DUCK with a puree of green peas: cut up cold roast duck, and arrange it round a pyramid of green peas made into a puree. Garnish it with parsley.—Mrs. C. F. Leyel and Miss Olga Hartley. The Gentle Art of Cookery. (Chatto and Windus, 1925.)
ALmouon Hilda Leyel is better known as foundress of the Society of Herbalists and the Culpeper House herb shops, and as author .of some half-dozen books* on herbs and herbal medicine than as a cookery writer, The Gentle Art of Cookery is a book which should have its place, and an honoured one, in English culinary literature. My own feelings towards The Gentle Art, one of the first cookery books I ever owned, are of affection and gratitude as well as of respect.
One of the fallacies about the passing of judg- ment on cookery books is the application to the recipes of what is believed to be the acid test implied in the question : do they work?
The proper question to be asked about recipes is not so much do they work as what do they produce if they do work. A cookery book which gives foolproof recipes for seed cake and pears bottled in creme de menthe is a good cookery, book only to those' in whose lives seed cake and pears bottled in creme de menthe already play an important part. A book which tells you that you can make a purée from fresh green pea's and eat Weald and"that a cold roast duck will go very nicely 'with the, purée is not necessarily a bad cookery book because it does not tell you for how long you must roast the duck nor how. many pounds of 'peas you will need for the purée. I am not' tiow'speaking from the point of view of a cdOk whO has long ago understood that cookery books Cannot in any case tell you how to roast a uck nor teach you how many pounds of peas to .buy for each person. I am recalling, rather, the reactions..to Mrs. Leyel's book of a young woman quite ignorant of cooking techniques but easily, perhaps too easily, beguiled by the idea of food as unlike as could be to any produced by the conventional English cook of the time; and at this distance it is not difficult to perceive that Mrs. Leycl's greatest asset was her ability to appeal to the imaginations of the young.
Lack of technical instruction and vagueness as to quantities were faults—if faults they were— which didn't bother me because I did not know that they were faults, did not suspect what I was up against and would, 1 think, not have welcomed nor believed anybody who had tried to tell me.
Allowing for questions of temperament as well as of taste, the young and totally inexperienced will usually prefer a book which provides stimulus to one which goes into tech- nical details and keeps to the main roads of established cookery. At the age of nineteen one is better oil having a stab at Mrs. Leycl's martinis glaces in half an hour' than learning that the confection of professional marrons glact's involves no less than sixteen separate and distinct processes and that to make enough for two people is likely to mean a week's work.
Stimulus. That was the quality which Mrs. Leyel's book provided, and in plenty, for she had the gift of making her recipes sound enticing. Re-reading The Gentle Art and some of those little' books of Mrs. Leyel's published by Routledge under the collective title of The Lure
* Of these Hearts-Ease and Cinquefoil (Faber) are still in print. of Cookery and which included Meals on a Tray, Picnics for Motorists, The Complete Jam Cup- board and Green Salads and Fruit Salads one has to admit that Mrs. Leyel—or her collaborator— suffered from incipient jellyinania---I had for- gotten the high incidence of dishes set with gela- tine and turned out of 'moulds, because I never made them—and here and there lost her head over a picturesque idea. A picnic dish of hollowed-out lemons stuffed with salmon mousse evokes an alluring freshness of sharp scent and cool flavour; how many dozen lemons, I wonder, would make enough containers for, say, four people and would the mousse still be in the lemons by the time you have driven the picnic basket from London to the sea? Small and carp- ing criticisms, these, compared with the positive virtues of Mrs. Leyel's attitude to cookery, and of which the most attractive, 1 now see, was her love of fruit, vegetables and salads and her treat- ment of them almost as dishes to which meat and fish and poultry were little more than incidental accompaniments or scarcely necessary adjuncts of a meal.
Indeed, The Gentle Art was notable for the way in' which the recipes were . classified. Appended to the vegetable chapter were two separate sections dealing. with mushrooms and chestnuts respectively. How right of. Mrs. Leyel to emphasise the strangeness of these foods by isolating them in the reader's mind' from potatoes, sprouts, beans and beetroot. Her fruit chapter includes such rare recipes as a compote of pomegranates, an orange salad flavoured with sherry and lemon juice (a tablespoon of each to ' four oranges—she did give precise quantities when she knew that to overdo a flavouring would spoil the dish) and strewn with freSh Mint leaves, a melon Steeped in maraschino-flavoured syrup then filled with white grates, white currants and pistachio nuts. In a five-page section devoted. to alniond creams, almond soups, almond puddings and'almond pastes lurked a delicious recipe for a .rice cream to which ground almonds were added and 'when cool pour into a silver dishand sprinkle with powdered cinnamon and decorate with whole almonds.'
Evidently much beguiled by the idea of Eastern cooking with its almonds and pistachio nuts, apricots and quinces, saffron and honey, rose- water, mint, dates and sweet spices, Mrs. Leyel gave also in her book a little chapter of 'Dishes from the Arabian Nights' which contained the true essence of magic and mystery.
'An Arabian way of cooking red mullet'— grilled in a sauce composed of tomatoes, onions, spices, shallots, salt, pepper, garlic, curry powder and saffron—sounded irresistible, so much so that even if you barely knew whether a red mullet was a bird, a flower or a fish you very quickly set about finding out. A hors-d'oeuvre called miinkuczina, alleged by Mrs Leyel to have been brought from the East by Anatole France is a salad of sliced oranges strewn with finely chopped onion which in turn is covered with a layer of stoned black olives, the whole to be sprinkled with red pepper, salt and olive oil. Mrs. Leyel certainly took one very far away indeed from the bed-sitting-room world of grapefruit, lamb chops and scotch eggs. Her book, I think, was just about the equivalent in cookery of Walter de la Mare's Come Hither, that matchless miscellany of nourishment for youthful imagina- tions: and The Gentle Art has another quality which I have only now properly perceived. It is, and the dreams of far Arabia are entirely charac- teristic, quintessentially a book about one par- ticular facet of English food and English taste.
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