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Introduction: Acquired

Some people may innocently argue, -" What harm is there in a wrong word so long as the dish is good? We eat the food and not the name." But this is to mistake human nature. A hungry taste is apt to be querulous, and resents disappointment. Also there is a peculiar fastidiousness in what has never yet been thoroughly analyzedthat peculiar condition known as Acquired taste. Perhaps there is no such thing in persons who are grown up as a perfectly pure and natural taste. The taste may be sound Introduction and even fine, but it is always more or less influenced by custom and by association, until it breeds an Acquired taste which is not to be reasoned with and which will not be denied. The Greenlander takes to tallow; the southern Frenchman glories in garlic; the East Indian is mighty in pepper. No force of reasoning can prove to them that other tastes are better; they have an Acquired taste which insists on being pampered. And precisely the same phenomenon occurs, though in a less marked way, when we get a dish which we know, which we expect, and which does not correspond to its name. A very pleasant Julienne soup can be made without sorrel; but those who look for the sorrel always feel that without it the Julienne is a failure. An acquired taste has been created, which suffers under disappointment as cruelly as when the Greenlander is deprived of his whale-blubber, the Gascon of his garlic, and the East Indian of his curry.

Bad as it is, however, it is not on the perfidy or the pretension of wrong names that it is most necessary to insist. The great wrong about them is that they are a bar to all chance of science and of progress in cookery. An idea has got abroad and has been much fostered by French authorities, that cookery as practised by the great artists is perfect, and that there is nothing more to be done except to ring the changes on what these artists have achieved. It is probable enough that we shall not get many more new foods or combinations of savour; but it is quite certain that with the progress of science we ought to attain our results by simpler and shorter processes, with aim more precise and with success more assured. But nothing at all is possible until we first of all understand each other by agreeing upon terms about which there shall be no mistake. It is for this reason that in the following pages I have dwelt so much upon the mere grammar and vocabulary of the kitchen. Till we have settled our definitions there is no use in talking. And therefore, while in the receipts which Introduction are to follow I have done my utmost to simplify processes, to discard mere subtleties and variations, and to cut down useless expenses and tedious labour, I have gone first and foremost on the principle that the greatest waste of all in the kitchen is the waste of words. It is a simple fact of which I undertake to produce overwhelming evidence, that the language of the kitchen is a language "not understanded of the people." There are scores upon scores of its terms in daily use which are little understood and not at all fixed; and there is not upon the face of this earth an occupation which is carried on with so much of unintelligible jargon and chattering of apes as that of preparing food. Not only cooks but also the most learned men in France have given up a great part of the language of the kitchen as beyond all comprehension. We sorely want Cadmus among the cooks. All the world remembers that he taught the Greeks their alphabet. It is well-nigh forgotten that he was cook to the king of Sidon. I cannot help thinking that cooks would do well to combine with their cookery, like Cadmus, a little attention to the alphabet.

Although cookery is not to be excused for its want of science and still less for its deficiency in letters, it is essential to add that the chemistry of food is, at least in point of science, nearly as backward as its cookery. Of course the chemists are extremely scientific in their methods and dogmatic in their conclusions; but if the object of science be knowledge, and not mere show, I should like to ask, what has chemistry with all its paraphernalia done for the science of food? Here is its last result, embodied in a little table, which is borrowed from Dr. Henry Letheby's book On Food. It is a table of what is called "Nutritive Equivalents-calculated according to the amounts of Nitrogen in the dry substances-human milk being 100." There never was a greater farce than the following table of Nutritive Values :- Introduction