LADY BARKER ON COOKING.
LADY BARKER has recently appealed, in an unpretending but invaluable little work,* to the imagination of two classes of readers, as well as to the common-sense of the community ; they are those who do not know anything about cooking — how large and helpless a body need hardly be said — and those who do know something about it. In the minds of the first, the reasoning and the revelations of her surprising book will arouse a decent sense of shame, and at the same time produce deep despondency, for the vistas of human ignorance which it opens up are truly awful ; in the minds of the second, a gentle satisfaction will be made to glow that at length there is a chance for their fellow-creatures. If there be a subject in the world upon which to be ignorant is to be helpless, that subject is cooking. If a justifiable source of pride exists, it is that knowledge which enables a human being to cook his dinner properly, or, if it be improperly cooked for him, to know the reason why. How few of us can truly make that proud boast ! Take a very simple test. How many to the thousand of Lady Barker's readers have perused her Station Life in New Zealand without an inward conviction that the cooking was the worst part of it, and that if he or she had been in Lady Barker's place, the little party would have run no inconsiderable risk of starvation, notwithstanding the meal and the mutton on the premises ? What young (and old) house- keepers have to suffer from cooks is proverbial—did not a well-known personage once head a list of causes which might be held to justify suicide by the heads of families with the horrid monosyllable?—and their sufferings are mostly increased by Cookery Books, with their exasperating taking for granted of • First Lessons in the Principles of Cooking. In Three Parts. By Lady Barker. London: Macmillan and Co.
everything in the way of utensils, their calm assumption of unlimited heterogeneous stores in the house, and their easy sug- gestion of combinations which require to be arranged ever so much in advance of the actual day to which its dinner is frequently so lamentably insufficient. How often, if one dared to intrude upon the tender reverie of blue eyes but just unclosed from slumber, to question the fresh morning thoughts of young hearts, with life all fair and bright before them, we should find that " What shall we have for dinner ? " is their engrossing theme. The rabbit in a corner of the cage of the serpent who is about to eat him (uncooked), is hardly an exaggerated image of the helplessness of the ordinary young matron in the presence of the ordinary middle-class cook ; and the ignominy of the situation is increased by the pretence of each party of know- ing all about it. "I wish, I wish, I had married into a vegetarian
family !" said a mourning bride, whose fondest illusions were- going to pieces on the rock of dinner, "they can't possibly make
such an awful mess of vegetables. It's the meat that's so horri- ble." There was some truth in that remark, but even vegetarians have their troubles, boiled caterpillars among their cauliflowers being not absolutely unknown. It is useless to dwell upon the extent and ubiquity of this universal grievance ; everybody will admit that dinner is a dreadful thing, sometimes to eat, and always, except in the case of lofty and indisputable vocations, to order. But what is it to cook ? Lady Barker knows, and though she is most persuasive in her admonitions, and throws in the daintiest flavour of coaxing, especially where the cleanliness of the kitchen department is concerned—reminding us, with her charming appeals to "everyone's good-sense," of mamma's unfailing conviction that " Katey is going to be such a good girl, as she always is l"—she does not try to persuade us that cooking is easy, or pleasant, or anything but an onerous and important branch of human industry, to whose exercise a certain amount of knowledge concerning the human frame and the components of its food is indispensable. Serious and simple as every line of the wise little book is, there lurks in it a humorous sense that the people she most hopes to benefit will learn the facts which she presses upon their attention against their will, like the young lady who, having been taken to hear a lecture by a distinguished professor of chemistry, declared she was very sorry that she had gone, because the horrid man said people were chemical combinations ; and if her Edwin was nothing better than that, she could only say she would rather not know it.
It is quite clear that the continuance of the almost universal ignorance on the subjects of which Lady Barker treats, would be an evil of such enormous magnitude that it must be combated by every means. She has taken what ought to be a most efficient one, and which will undoubtedly prove a valuable auxiliary to the National School of Cookery at South Kensington, an institution which deserves public gratitude and energetic support. Her book is not exactly a cookery book, though it contains some valuable, because quite simple and practical instructions for the cooking of certain articles of food, but it is a plain summary of the chemical composition and the relative nutritive value of the various sorts of food within our reach, and the first principles of their preparation for use. She goes about her teaching admirably, calling on people to make up their minds that the "good old times," with their good old prices, will never came back again, and that their true wisdom is to learn how cheerfully and bravely to face the increased cost of the necessaries of life :—
"If food and fuel cost nearly twice as much at present," she says, "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 materials for warmth and cooking go twice as far as they have done hitherto. Nor, in making such an 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 those 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 utilise their information as to make our available material go a great deal further. Let us try a few grains of science and a few more of common-sense, and see what the practical result will be."
The writer's object is to persuade 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. She takes up her parable against waste of the material for human food, and begins by explaining what waste really is, a subject
-upon which the general ignorance is profound. The plan of this book is admirable in its completeness and simplicity ; it is hardly possible that anyone who can read at all can fail to understand the practical lessons on bread and beef, fish and vegetables, while the explanation of the chemical composition of our food must be intelligible to all who possess sufficient education to follow the argu- ment, in which the fewest possible technical terms are used. When Lady Barker is dealing with the general question of the urgent need of reform in our national habits of domestic expenditure, and of the substitution of popular knowledge for popular ignorance on the great subject of Food, and how to prepare it, she is most emphatic in urging that that reform must begin in the higher classes, that rich people must lead the way, in practice at home, and in an active forwarding of the movement by which amelioration may in time reach the poorest homes. Girls who are taught in the houses of the rich, or in those of persons in easy circumstances, the economical use of food and fuel, will carry their knowledge, as wives, into their own homes ; and women of the middle-classes —whose incomes, which a few years ago would have been good, are now barely sufficient to maintain a family—who are taught household economy as a necessary branch of their -education, so that to say "I am no manager" shall be equivalent to saying "I am an ignorant creature, unfit for the responsi- bilities of my position," will be capable of teaching the "young persons "who become the wives of artisans how to make a working- -man's wages produce the maximum of comfort. The chapters on food are very valuable, if a little frightening, but it is a great relief to find that Lady Barker recommends beef and bread very strongly. it would be so easy, the wretched young housekeeper may think, to stick to beef and bread. Let her read on, and she will see that there is bread and bread, and beef and beef, and beef-tea. Beef-tea has always seemed to us a terrible difficulty, when somebody is ill, and every one has a special way of making it, upon which each insists, and it is so mysteriously Indispensable, and generally so very nasty. Let everybody read Lady Barker's brief essay on beef-tea. To parents and guardians we strongly recommend her remarks on the general insufficiency of animal food in the diet of schoolboys, which she illustrates by -some of her observations in New Zealand. The very place to acquire "faculty," as the Americans phrase it, is a young and =developed colony, where " damper" is still not quite forgotten.
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