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Introduction: England

It is well to be particular in receipts; but it is idle to put out of sight the fact that particulars vary every day, in every country, and in every household. The sugar of England is a good deal sweeter than the sugar of France. The salt of France is much more salt than that of England. Introduction The quantities to be used therefore must continually vary. Again, everybody knows that vegetables are not alike in flavour. Some apples are comparatively tasteless; so are some carrots; and one lemon is sharper than another. Therefore in one kitchen a lemon, an apple, or a couple of carrots will go further to flavour a sauce than double the number in another kitchen. Carême praised the beef of England: he said it was perfectly beautiful, tender, delicious to taste, pleasant to behold; but he also said that it wanted the unctuosity of the French beef, and would not lend itself to sauces and rich consommés without using up far more than would be required in France. What does this mean, but that the quantities of beef used for soup in one country will not do for the same soup in another country? It depends on the butcher. It is the same with ham, the flavour of which is not to be measured by weight. A hundred pounds of French ham will not yield the flavour contained in ten pounds of Spanish, German, or English hams. It would be easy to multiply such examples, showing that quantities are deceptive, because they are unintelligible apart from quality. When the reader comes to the article on Soups, he will find that the very highest authorities differ widely on the grand point as to the quantity of water with which beef broth should be made. Some tell us to make it with equal quantities of beef and water; others tell us to use four times as much water as beef. The broth which results varies prodigiously in strength; so that the simple broth of one cook is often as good as the double broth or consommé of another. Add to this the uncertainty of the heat of fires, on which some flavours greatly depend, and it must be evident that the attempt to attain precision of detail in receipts is wholly illusive. We can at best give indications and approximations, but numerical accuracy is out of the question. In one point, however, accuracy is well within our reach; and nearly all the cookery books-even those produced under I2 Introduction the eyes of great artists-make a mock of it: we can be accurate in language. In the whole range of literature and science, there is nothing to be found comparable to the inaccuracy and corruption of culinary language. It is something astounding. It seems as if all the ignorances in the world had conspired together to darken speech and to stupefy cooks. There is no science of cookery possible without a correct phraseology. Science is but another name for clear and classified knowledge; and the first step to it is precision of speech. It is for this reason that in the following pages the reader will find more than usual attention paid to the naming of dishes and to their history. At the present moment the vocabulary of dinner is a mass of confusion and ridiculous mistakes, which is every day becoming worse and worse through the ignorant importation of French names (originally themselves bad enough) into English bills of fare. It comes of abominable pretension. A leg of good English mutton-the best in the world-will be entered as a Gigot of Pré Salé. What on earth has become of the English Southdowns that they should be described as a French Salt Marsh? I have seen a filletsteak served with tomatos entered as "Filet de Bœuf à l'Orientale," under a notion that tomatos came originally from the East and not from the West, and that the people of the East are given to beef. This is not merely pretension: it is perfidy. You order the Oriental fillet expecting one thing, and you get something quite different.