Part 2

The _gormand_, or epicure, unites theory with practice.

The _gourmet_ is merely theoretical.

IMPORTANCE OF THE ART OF COOKERY.

As man differs from the inferior animals in the variety of articles he feeds upon, so he differs from them no less in the preparation of these substances. Some animals, besides man, prepare their food in a

## particular manner. The racoon (_ursus lutor_) is said to wash his roots

before he eats them; and the beaver stores his green boughs under water that their bark and young twigs may remain juicy and palatable.

The action of fire, however, has never been applied to use by any animal except man; not even monkies, with all their knacks of imitation, and all their fondness for the comforts of a fire, have ever been observed to put on a single billet of wood to keep up the fuel.

Domesticated animals, indeed, are brought to eat, and even to relish, food which has been cooked by the action of heat.

The variety of productions introduced by our different modes of preparing and preserving food is almost endless; and it appears

## particularly so when we compare the usages, in this respect, of various

countries.

The savage of New South Wales is scarcely more knowing in the preparation of food, by means of fire, than his neighbour, the kangaroo, if the anecdote told by Turnbull be true, that one of these savages plunged his hand into boiling water to take out a fish.

Some writers have humorously designated man to be “_a cooking animal_,” and he really is so. It is one of the leading distinctions which Providence has seen meet for wise purposes to establish, when it was said that he might eat of the fruit of every tree, and the flesh of every clean beast.

When we contemplate the aliments used by men in a civilized state of existence, we soon become convinced that only a small part of our daily food can be eaten in its natural state. Many of the substances used as aliments, are disagreeable, and some even poisonous until they have been cooked. Few of them are to be had at all seasons, although produced at others in greater abundance than can be consumed.

The importance of a proper and competent knowledge of the true and rational principles of cookery, must be obvious, when it is considered that there is scarcely an individual, young or old, in any civilized country, who has not some time or other suffered severely from errors committed in the practice of this art.

“A skilful and well directed cookery abounds in chemical preparations highly salutary. There exists a salubrity of aliments suited to every age. Infancy, youth, maturity, and old age, each has its peculiar adapted food, and that not merely applicable to the powers in full vigour, but to stomachs feeble by nature, and to those debilitated by excess.”[11]

[11] Ude’s Cookery, p. 25.--Ibid, 23.

Without abetting the unnatural and injurious appetites of the epicure, or the blameable indulgences of the glutton, we shall not perhaps be far out in our reckoning, if we assert, that almost every person is an epicure in his own way.

There are amateurs in boiling potatoes, as particular in the details, as others in dressing beaf-stakes to the utmost nicety of a single turn. Lord Blainey, still more nice, informs us, that hams are not fit to be eaten unless boiled in Champaign. _Helluos_ are not confined to salmon’s bellies, but are to be found among the rudest peasants who love porridge or frumenty--

A salmon’s belly, _Helluo_, was thy fate; The doctor call’d, declares all help too late; “Mercy!” cries _Helluo_, “mercy, on my soul! Is there no hope?--Alas! then bring the jowl.”

_Pope’s Moral Essays._

Precision in mixing ingredients is as often and as closely laid down for the coarsest dish of the peasant as for the most guarded receipe of the Lady Bountiful of the village. The pleasures of the table have always been highly appreciated and sedulously cultivated among civilized people of every age and nation; and, in spite of the Stoic, it must be admitted, that they are the first which we enjoy, the last we abandon, and those of which we most frequently partake.

“Cookery is the soul of every pleasure, at all times and to all ages. How many marriages have been the consequence of a meeting at dinner; how much good fortune has been the result of a good supper, at what moment of our existence are we happier than at table? there hatred and animosity are lulled to sleep, and pleasure alone reigns.”

Pythagoras, in his golden verses, gives complete proof, that he was

## particularly nice in the choice of food, and carefully points out what

will occasion indigestion and flatulency. He is precise in commanding his disciples to “_abstain from beans_.” Apicius, declares that he never knew a philosopher who refused to partake of a feast.

In later times, Dr. Johnson is well known to have been exceedingly fond of good dinners, considering them as the highest enjoyment of human life. The sentiments of our great moralist are a good answer to those who think the pleasures of the table incompatible with intellectual pursuits or mental superiority. “Some people,” says the Doctor, “have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat; for my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully, and I look upon it that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind any thing else.” Boswell, his biographer, says of him, “I never knew a man who relished good eating more than he did: and when at table, he was wholly absorbed in the business of the moment.” It was one of the objects which displeased him so much in his Northern tour, that the Scots were rather ignorant of the more refined arts of cookery. A lady in the Isle of Mull, anxious to gratify him for once in a dinner, had an excellent plum-pudding prepared, at some expense, and with the utmost care; but, to her great mortification, the doctor would not taste it, because, he said, “it is totally impossible to make a plum-pudding at all fit to eat in the Isle of Mull.”

Another instance of this philosopher’s illiberal prejudice against Scotch cookery, may also be mentioned. A lady, at whose table the Doctor was dining, enquired how he liked their national dish, the _hotch potch_, of which he was then partaking. “_Good enough for hogs_,” said the surly philosopher. “Shall I help _you_ to a little more of it?” retorted the lady. To Dr. Johnson we can add the names of two distinguished physicians, Darwin, and Beddoes, both of whom were most outrageous in their published works against the pleasures of good living; they followed however a very different practice, from what they prescribed to others, as none were more fond of good dinners than these guardians of health.

Cardinal Wolsey, we should have thought, would have had something else to mind than cooking and good eating. But no person was more anxious than he, even in the whirl of the immense public business which he had to transact, to have the most skilful cooks; for all Europe was ransacked, and no expense spared, to procure culinary operators, thoroughly acquainted with the multifarious operations of the spit, the stew-pan, and the rolling-pin.

Sir Walter Scott, has been most happy in the illustration of our ancient manners with respect to good eating, in the character of Athelstan, in the Romance of Ivanhoe.

Count Rumford has not considered the pleasure of eating, and the means that may be employed for increasing it, as unworthy the attention of a philosopher, for he says, “the enjoyments which fall to the bulk of mankind, are not so numerous as to render an attempt to increase them superfluous. And even in regard to those who have it in their power to gratify their appetites to the utmost extent of their wishes, it is surely rendering them a very important service to shew them how they may increase their pleasures without destroying their health.”

In the olden time, every man of consequence had his _magister coquorum_, or _master cook_, without whom he would not think of making a day’s journey; and it was often no easy matter to procure _master cooks_ of talent.

By a passage of Cicero[12] we are led to understand, that among other miseries of life, which constantly attended this consular personage and eloquent orator, he laboured under the disappointment of not having an excellent cook of his own; for, he says, “_coquus meus, præter jus fervens, nihil potest imitari_.” _Except hot broth, my cook can do nothing cleverly._

[12] _Fam._ ix. 20.

The salary of the Roman cooks was nearly £1000.[13] Mark Antony, hearing Cleopatra, whom he had invited to a splendid supper, (and who was as great a _gormand_ as she was handsome,) loudly praise the elegance and delicacy of the dishes, sent for the cook, and presented him with the unexpected gift of a corporate town.--_Municipium._

[13] Tabella Cibaria, ps. 19 and 20.

Even in our own times great skill in cookery is so highly praised by many, that a very skilful cook can often command, in this metropolis, a higher salary than a learned and pious curate.

His Majesty’s first and second cooks are esquires, by their office, from a period to which, in the lawyer’s phrase, the memory of man is not to the contrary. We are told by Dr. Pegge, that when Cardinal Otto, the Pope’s Legate, was at Oxford, in the year 1248, his brother officiated as _magister coquinæ_, an office which has always been held as a situation of high trust and confidence.

We might defend the art of cookery on another principle, namely--on the axiom recognized in the Malthusian Political Economy, that he who causes two blades of grass to grow where only one grew before, is a benefactor to his country and to human nature. Whether or not Malthus is quite right in this, we are not competent to decide; we leave that to Say, Godwin, Ricardo, and[14] Drummond. But certainly it must in many cases be of the utmost consequence, for families in particular, when embarrassed in circumstances, to make food go twice as far as without the art and aid of rational cookery it could do. We would particularly press this remark, as it is founded on numerous facts, and places the art of cookery in a more interesting point of view than any of the other circumstances which we have been considering.

[14] Principles of Currency, and Elements of Political Economy--1820.

Cookery has often drawn down on itself the animadversions of both moralists, physicians, and wits, who have made it a subject for their vituperations and their ridicule.

So early as the time of the patriarch Isaac, the sacred historian casts blame upon Esau for being epicurean enough to transfer his birth-right for a mess of pottage.

Jacob is blamed for making savoury meat with a kid for his father, with a view to rob Esau of the paternal blessing.

Diogenes, the Cynic, meeting a young man who was going to a feast, took him up in the street and carried him home to his friends, as one who was running into evident danger had he not prevented him. The whole tribe, indeed, of the Stoics and Cynics, laughed at cookery, pretending, in their vanity and pride, to be above the desire of eating niceties. Lucian, with his inexhaustible satire, most effectually and humourously exposed these their pretences.

In our own times, we have had writers of eminence who have attacked the use of a variety of food as a dreadful evil. “Should we not think a man mad,” says Addison, “who at one meal will devour fowl, flesh, and fish; swallow oil, and vinegar, salt, wines, and spices; throw down sallads of twenty different herbs, sauces of an hundred ingredients, confections, and fruits of numberless sweets and flavours? What unnatural effects must such a medley produce in the body? For my part, when I behold a table set out in all its magnificence, I fancy, that I see gouts and dropsies, fevers and lethargies, and other innumerable distempers, lying in ambuscade among the dishes.”

All this, and the like is, no doubt, very plausible, and very fine, and, like many other fine speeches of modern reformers, it is more fine than just. It is indeed as good a theory as may be, that cookery is the source of most, or all, of our distempers; but withal it is _a mere theory_, and only true in a very limited degree. The truth is, that it is not cookery which is to blame, if we surfeit ourselves with its good dishes; but our own sensual and insatiable appetite, and gluttony, which prompt us to seek their gratification at the expense even of our health.

Savages, whose cookery is in the rudest state, are more apt to over-eat themselves than the veriest glutton of a luxurious and refined people; a fact, which of itself, is sufficient to prove, that it is not cookery which is the cause of gluttony and surfeiting. The savage, indeed, suffers less from his gluttony than the sedentary and refined gormand; for, after sleeping, sometimes for a whole day, after gorging himself with food, hunger again drives him forth to the chace, in which he soon gets rid of the ill-effects of his overloaded stomach. Surely cookery is not to blame for the effects of gluttony, indolence, and sedentary occupations; yet it does appear, that all its ill effects are erroneously charged to the account of the refined art of cooking.

The defence of cookery, however, which we thus bring forward to repel misrepresentation, applies only to the art of preparing good, nutritious, and wholesome food.

We cannot say one word in defence of the wretched and injurious methods but too often practised, under the name of cookery, and the highly criminal practices of adulterating food with substances deleterious to health. On this subject we have spoken elsewhere.[15]

[15] A treatise on adulterations of food, and culinary poisons, exhibiting the fraudulent sophistications of bread, beer, wine, spirituous liquors, tea, coffee, cream, confectionary, vinegar, mustard, pepper, cheese, olive oil, pickles, and other articles employed in domestic economy, and methods of detecting them.--Third edition, 1821.

“A good dinner[16] is one of the greatest enjoyments of human life; but the practice of cookery is attended with not only so many disgusting and disagreeable circumstances, and even dangers, that we ought to have some regard for those who encounter them for our pleasure.”

[16] The Cook’s Oracle.--Preface, p. xxxv.

DIETETICAL REMARKS ON THE CHOICE AND QUANTITY OF FOOD.

Almost every person who can afford it, eats more than is requisite for promoting the growth, and renewing the strength and waste of his body. It would be ridiculous to speak concerning the precise quantity of food necessary to support the body of different individuals. Such rules do not exist in nature. The particular state or condition of the individual, the variety of constitution, and other circumstances, must be taken into account. If, after dinner, we feel ourselves as cheerful as before, we may be assured that we have made a dietetical meal.

Much has been said of temperance. The fact is, that there is an absolute determined standard of _temperance_, the point of which must be fixed by every man’s natural and unprovoked appetite, while he continues _in a state of health_. As long as a person who pursues a right habit of life, eats and drinks no more than his stomach calls for and will bear, without occasioning uneasiness of any kind to himself, he may be said to live temperate. The stomach revolts against the reverse of it; indeed, the stomach is the grand organ of the human system, it is the _conscience_ of the _body_, and like that, will become uneasy if all is not right within; it speaks pretty plainly to those who lead an intemperate life.

“We may compare,” says Doctor Kitchener, “the human frame to a watch, of which the heart is the main _spring_, the stomach the _regulator_, and what we put into it, the _key_, by which the machine is set a-going; according to the quantity, quality, and proper digestion of what we eat and drink will be the action of the system: and when a due proportion is preserved between the quantum of exercise and that of excitement, all goes well. If the machine be disordered, the same expedients are employed for its re-adjustment, as are used by the watch-maker; it must be carefully cleaned and then judiciously oiled. To affirm that such a thing is wholesome, or unwholesome, without considering the subject in all the circumstances to which it bears relation, and the unaccountable idiosyncrasies of particular constitutions is, with submission, talking nonsense. Every man must consult his stomach; whatever agrees with that perfectly well, is wholesome for him, whilst it continues to do so whenever natural appetite calls for food.”

Celsus spoke very right when he said that a healthy man ought not to tie himself up by strict rules, nor to abstain from any sort of food; that he ought sometimes to fast, and sometimes to feast. When applied to eating, nothing is more true than the proverb--

“_Bonarum rerum consuetudo pessima est._--SYRUS.

“_The too constant use, even of good things, is hurtful._”

It is certainly better to restrain ourselves, so as to _use_, but not to _abuse_, our enjoyments; and to this we may add the opinion of doctor Fothergil, which the experience of every individual confirms, namely, that “the food we fancy most, sits easiest on the stomach.”

What has been so far stated on the choice and quantity of food to be taken at a time, of course, relates only to persons in a state of health; the diet of the delicate, the sickly, and the infirm, must be regulated by the physician, and even the aged require particular kinds of food.

“Experience[17] has fully convinced me, (says an eminent Physiologist), that the latter stages of human life, are often abridged by unsuitable diet.”

[17] Carlisle on the disorders of Old Age, ps. 2 and 27. This book exhibits an excellent view of the most suitable diet for aged, weak, and sickly people.

“The most numerous tribe of disorders incident to advanced life, spring from the failure or errors of the stomach, and its dependancies, and perhaps the first sources of all the infirmities of inability, may be traced to effects arising from imperfectly digested food.”

EXTRAORDINARY GREAT EATERS, AND OBSERVATIONS ON ABSTINENCE.

In some persons, an extraordinary great appetite seems to be constitutional.

_Charles Domery_, aged 21 years, when a prisoner of war, at Liverpool, consumed in one day

4lbs. of Raw Cow’s Udder. 10lbs. Raw Beef. 2lbs. Tallow Candles. ------ Total 16lbs.

and five bottles of porter; and although allowed the daily rations of ten men, he was not satisfied.

Another extraordinary instance has been recorded by Baron Percy:--A soldier of the name of _Tarare_, who, at the age of 17, could devour in the course of 24 hours, a leg of beef weighing 24lbs. and thought nothing of swallowing the dinner dressed for fifteen German peasants. But those men were remarkable not only for the quantity of food they consumed, but also for its quality, giving a preference to raw meat, and even living flesh and blood.

_Domery_, in one year, eat 174 cats, dead and alive; and _Tarare_ was strongly suspected of having eaten an infant.

Man can sustain the privation of food for several days, more or fewer in number, according to circumstances--the old better than the young, and the fat better than the lean. The absolute want of drink can be suffered only a short time, they have been strikingly described by Mungo Park and Ali Bey, as experienced in their own persons.

The narratives of ship-wrecked mariners also prove, with how very little food life may be supported for a considerable length of time; and the history of those impostors who pretend to live altogether without food or drink, display this adaptation of the wants of the body to its means of supply in a still more striking manner; for, even after the deception, in such cases as that of Ann Moore, is exposed, it will be found that the quantity of aliment actually taken was incredibly small.

Captain Woodard has added to his interesting narrative many instances of the power of the human body to resist the effects of severe abstinence. He himself and his five companions rowed their boat for seven days without any sustenance but a bottle of brandy, and then wandered about the shores of Celebes six more, without any other food than a little water and a few berries. Robert Scotney lived seventy-five days alone in a boat with three pounds and a half of meat, three pounds of flour, two hogsheads of water, some whale oil, and a small quantity of salt. He also used an amazing quantity of tobacco. Six soldiers deserted from St. Helena in a boat, on the 10th of June 1799, with twenty-five pounds of bread and about thirteen gallons of water. On the 18th, they reduced their allowance to one ounce of bread and two mouthfuls of water, on which they subsisted till the 26th, when their store was expended. Captain Inglefield, with eleven others, after five days of scanty diet, were obliged to restrict it to a biscuit divided into twelve morsels for breakfast, and the same for dinner, with an ounce or two of water daily. In ten days, a very stout man died, unable to swallow, and delirious. Lieutenant Bligh and his crew lived forty-two days upon five day’s provisions.

In the tenth volume of Hufland’s _Journal_, is related a very remarkable, and well-authenticated case of voluntary starvation. A recruit, to avoid serving, had cut off the fore-finger of his right hand. When in hospital for the cure of the wound, dreading the punishment which awaited him, he resolved to starve himself; and on the 2nd of August began obstinately to refuse all food or drink, and persisted in this resolution to the 24th of August. During these twenty-two days he had absolutely taken neither food, drink, nor medicine, and had no evacuation from his bowels. He had now become very much emaciated, his belly somewhat distended, he had a violent pain in his loins, his thirst was excessive, and his febrile heat burning. His behaviour had also become timid. Having been promised his discharge, unpunished, he was prevailed upon to take some sustenance, but could not, at first, bear even weak soup and luke-warm drinks. Under proper treatment, he continued to mend for eight days, and his strength was returning, when, on the 1st of September, he again refused food and got a wild look. He took a little barley-water every four or five days to the 8th; from that day to the 11th, he took a little biscuit with wine; but again from the 11th September to the 9th October, a period of twenty-eight days, he neither took food, drink, nor had any natural evacuation. From the 9th to the 11th he again took a little nourishment, and began to recruit; but, on the 11th, he finally renewed his resolution to starve himself, and persevered until his death, which took place on the 21st November, after a total abstinence of 42 days.

REMARKS ON THE ORIGIN OF THE CUSTOM OF EATING FLESH.