POPULAR COOKERY.
WE wonder if mankind, taken as a body, do care to have nice things to eat? Educated men in Europe, accus- tomed to comfort and solicitous for health, will open their eyes at the question ; but the answer to it is by no means past doubt. That the majority of human beings, or possibly all, like certain things to eat better than certain other things, may, of course, be true, just as the same assertion is true of all the animals which man has closely observed. A dog will follow liver for miles ; a cat, for all its dislike of wet feet, will whine with eagerness if it smells fish ; and a horse never forgets the giver of a long bit of sugar-cane. Man may have instinctive preferences of the same description. He almost certainly has one which is a little odd, upon the Darwinian theory, for it occasions him enormous inconvenience and expense. Whether from some instinct pre- servative of health, or from a mere taste, he distinctly prefers hot food ; and to gratify this fancy puts himself and his womenkind all over the world to the trouble of daily cooking. Even " bread " is eaten hot by the majority of mankind,—the use of bread which will keep well being a European particularity ; and very few races habitually eat anything cold, except when hot food is unattainable or expensive. They like their rice, or their millet, or their wheat- cakes, or their vegetables, or their meat just as it comes from the fire. As this practice involves immense additional expendi- ture for firing—which in most places is one of the heavy bur- dens on the poor—and the loss of at least six hours labour a week, this of itself might be held to prove that a taste for pleasant food is universal. Perhaps it is ; but except in this one particular it is, we are convinced, neither deep nor wide- spread. Women are careless about eating everywhere ; and the millions of labouring-men find food so difficult to procure, that when they have obtained enough they are content, even if the meal is a little hard to eat. If it were not so, they would not have left an art so important so entirely to traditionary teaching, would have developed it in a way they have not done, and would have combined to secure pleasant meals in a style they carefully avoid. Among the im- mense majority of mankind each household cooks for itself, the work falling mainly on the wife, who is never taught except by her mother, and in the most traditional way. Improvement, if any is ever made, is exceedingly slow ; and among some peoples, the English for one, popular cookery has probably retrograded, owing, in this instance, to the chasm of years which, so to speak, broke or interrupted the popular knowledge of the way to prepare meat. The women found flesh meat difficult to procure, and failed to hand down the need- ful instruction for its preparation. Half mankind at least knows nothing of boiling; of those who do know, another half will eat their vegetables in a sodden condition. Among the races which eat meat, only a limited per-tentage of persons try to make meat tender,—we believe the flesh-eating Mongols form an exception to this rule, and some of the Polynesians,—and among those who eat grain there is a distinct preference for the under-cooking alike of flour, rice, and millet, from a belief that such food is more fully satisfying. " I want to feel my 'tomach 'tiff," says one of Charles Reade's characters ; and he exactly expressed the view of the indistinguishable millions. Separateness in cooking is pushed everywhere to preposterous limits, till it is probable that the preparation of food for mankind, which is the second great expense in feeding them, costs three times what it need, and till in many countries a proper supply of fuel is wholly beyond the reach of the poor. In Asia entire peoples burn dung, and even in Europe firing is never quite sufficient. And, finally, cooking does not advance. A new article of diet is occasionally added, like the potato, or a new condiment, like pepper ; but it may be doubted if a Euro- pean labourer's dinner is made a bit more palatable than the dinner of an Israelite was when the law-givers promulgated the curious notion that roast meat was more acceptable to the superior powers than meat boiled or stewed. Indeed, the way to make a kibab, which is known to the humblest in Asia, has been lost here ; and only the gipsies are aware that meat covered with damp clay and placed among the hot ashes is not only delicious but much more nourishing than meat either baked or boiled. The natural way with a civilised people, if they cared for nice food, would be to entrust the prepara- tion of it to professionals, who would learn their trade by apprenticeship, and incessantly improve ; but, except in Tuscany and South France, this is hardly done anywhere, though it ought to be the easiest of arrangements. It is only in the making of bread that men combine; and they have only just begun to do that in Europe, and do not do it in Asia, or, we believe, in most parts of North America,—the Western woman making bread for her household as the Mexican woman makes her thin cakes. Yet the world everywhere combines in order to get its drinks, and the things it drinks gradually but quite steadily improve. Household brewing is, by the mercy of Providence, dying out; and nobody in Germany, America, or England would now swallow the horrible stuff which our ances- tors called beer.
The truth is, man, though he cares to get food, and has an almost insane fear of hunger, which sometimes perverts his whole moral nature—as in the instance of the horrible tolera- tion of shipwrecked sailors for cannibalism—is comparatively very indifferent to the preparation of his diet. He does not, as a rule, know even what is good for his health, and shortens his life with half-cooked flour which is deadly to the old, or kills off his children in heaps with .half-swelled grain, though he sees in the latter case that they are distended to a degree which in his animals would seem to him dangerous or distressing. Every fifth child in India and Africa has a disease due exclusively to its diet. Man takes no trouble whatever to circulate knowledge on the subject ; and, unless he is disgusted with an animal, as Western Asiatics are with the pig, or contracts a horror such as Hindoos feel for eggs, seldom lays down inflexible laws on eating, and when he does, they are not sanitary laws. There are fifty lecturers in Europe and America on the abuse of alcohol for one on the abuse of food; and careful instruction on the comparative nutriment in different edibles, the value to health of thorough cooking, the immense utility of sugar to children, and the aid which certain diet would give to the formation of bone, would be probably thrown away. We wait to be corrected by experts, but we do not think that the rather feeble. efforts made by the Educa- tion Department in this direction have elicited much popu- lar response, though they are so strongly approved by educated women. Even in London, if we understand Mrs. Davenport Hill's paper in Macmillan, the majority of those -who profit by the cookery schools do it because they hope to be servants, and know that cooking may pay. Here and there an exception occurs—as in the case of the little girl whose father approved her cookery ; but that seems to be the rule. It is, of 'course, very good that all candidates for service should learn cookery, and the mode of teaching seems to be perfect in every respect but one—the use of a range when the thing to learn is the use of a minute grate, or of hot ashes, or of a gipsy fire ; but the true " people " will never learn cooking so. We must awaken an interest in the subject &et; and that, we believe, can be done only by incessantly pressing the argument of health. The multitude everywhere care little what they eat so that they be but filled ; but they do care to be healthy, and, above all, that their children should grow up " strong." If they only knew, as doctors and missionaries and experienced barrack serjeants could tell them, vhat food could be made to do for them, they would very soon alter their tone, and be clamorous for knowledge. Suppose, as a wild supposition, that they only knexr what oatmeal and milk, or even oatmeal and gravy, would do for their future lives, what a difference it would make. They know all about it in animals, but will not apply it to themselves,—do not believe, in fact, that diet can make any difference to human beings, except, of course, by being plentiful or inadequate. Yet when we tell them that weedy boys grow in barracks into powerful men because of their food; that in India hereditary native Christians often weigh one- fourth more than their kinsfolk because they eat a little meat ; -or that a tribe of Hindoos, unable to finish a profitable job of earth-work, resolved to suspend its caste laws, and eat meat, and in one month found its members strong enough for the labour —they will believe, for they have heard those things before. It
is the gain to be obtained from good food, not the enjoyment to be expected from it, which will ultimately attract the millions, and we wish the work of persuading them that good cooking can be made gainful could be begun. It can only be carried on by direct teaching, for cooking is one of the arts in which know- ledge does not gradually filter down. There have always been good cooks, and the multitude round them have always, never- theless, put up with bad cooking. They either do not care, or are hopeless, and they wilt not grow properly discontented on the subject until they know that their strength depends mainly on their diet, and diet in an immense degree on certain ideas of cooking. Let the sedentary trades, for example, just learn what half-baked bread means—and much of the bread eaten in England is half-baked—and they will alter that particular evil within a month. Or let them just become aware what lentil
meal (dhal, or " Revalenta Arabica ") can do for the poorly fed,
and they will start a new trade as profitable to shipowners as the trade in rice. Like the Irish when offered Indian corn, they reject the most heat-giving of all foods—a food with every good property at once of wheat and of alcohol—because they have not an idea how it should be cooked.
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