Part 9

Still one more tale bearing upon a member of the clergy who would set out more “blackburdes” than “tharchbishop” is told by Holinshed. It has within it somewhat of the flavor of the odium theologicum, but an added interest also, since it turns upon a dish esteemed in Italy since the time of the imperial Romans--peacock, often served even nowadays encased in its most wonderful plumage. The Pope Julius III., whose luxurious entertainment and comport shocked the proprieties even of that day, and who died in Rome while the chronicler was busy in London, is the chief actor.

“At an other time,” writes Holinshed, “he sitting at dinner, pointing to a peacocke upon his table, which he had not touched; Keepe (said he) this cold peacocke for me against supper, and let me sup in the garden, for I shall have ghests. So when supper came, and amongst other hot peacockes, he saw not his cold peacocke brought to his table; the pope after his wonted manner, most horriblie blaspheming God, fell into an extreame rage, &c. Whereupon one of his cardinals sitting by, desired him saieng: Let not your holinesse, I praie you, be so mooved with a matter of so small weight. Then this Julius the pope answeringe againe: What (saith he) if God was so angrie for one apple, that he cast our first parents out of paradise for the same, whie maie not I being his vicar, be angrie then for a peacocke, sithens a peacocke is a greater matter than an apple.”

In England at this time controlling the laity were sumptuary laws, habits of living resulting from those laws, and great inequalities in the distribution of wealth. On these points Holinshed again brings us light:

“In number of dishes and change of meat,” he writes, “the nobilitie of England (whose cookes are for the most part musicall-headed Frenchmen and strangers) do most exceed, sith there is no daie in maner that passeth over their heads, wherein they have not onelie beefe, mutton, veale, lambe, kid, porke, conie, capon, pig, or so manie of these as the season yeeldeth; but also some portion of the red or fallow deere, beside great varietie of fish and wild foule, and thereto sundrie other delicates wherein the sweet hand of the seasoning Portingale is not wanting; so that for a man to dine with one of them, and to taste of everie dish that standeth before him ... is rather to yeeld unto a conspiracie with a great deale of meat for the speedie suppression of naturall health, then the use of a necessarie meane to satisfie himselfe with a competent repast, to susteine his bodie withall. But as this large feeding is not seene in their gests, no more is it in their owne persons, for sith they have dailie much resort unto their tables ... and thereto reteine great numbers of servants, it is verie requisit and expedient for them to be somewhat plentifull in this behalfe.

“The chiefe part likewise of their dailie provision is brought before them ... and placed on their tables, whereof when they have taken what it pleaseth them, the rest is reserved and afterwards sent downe to their serving men and waiters, who feed thereon in like sort with convenient moderation, their reversion also being bestowed upon the poore, which lie readie at their gates in great numbers to receive the same.

“The gentlemen and merchants keepe much about one rate, and each of them contenteth himselfe with foure, five or six dishes, when they have but small resort, or peradventure with one, or two, or three at the most, when they have no strangers to accompanie them at their tables. And yet their servants have their ordinarie diet assigned, beside such as is left at their masters’ boordes, and not appointed to be brought thither the second time, which neverthelesse is often seene generallie in venison, lambe, or some especiall dish, whereon the merchant man himselfe liketh to feed when it is cold.”

“At such times as the merchants doo make their ordinarie or voluntarie feasts, it is a world to see what great provision is made of all maner of delicat meats, from everie quarter of the countrie.... They will seldome regard anie thing that the butcher usuallie killeth, but reject the same as not worthie to come in place. In such cases all gelisses of all coleurs mixed with a varitie in the representation of sundrie floures, herbs, trees, formes of beasts, fish, foules and fruits, and there unto marchpaine wrought with no small curiositie, tarts of diverse hewes and sundrie denominations, conserves of old fruits foren and homebred, suckets, codinacs, marmilats, marchpaine, sugerbread, gingerbread, florentines, wild foule, venison of all sorts, and sundrie outlandish confections altogither seasoned with sugar ... doo generalie beare the swaie, beside infinit devises of our owne not possible for me to remember. Of the potato and such venerous roots as are brought out of Spaine, Portingale, and the Indies to furnish our bankets, I speake not.”

“The artificer and husbandman make greatest accompt of such meat as they may soonest come by, and have it quickliest readie.... Their food also consisteth principallie in beefe and such meat as the butcher selleth, that is to saie, mutton, veale, lambe, porke, etc., ... beside souse, brawne, bacon, fruit, pies of fruit, foules of sundrie sorts, cheese, butter, eggs, etc.... To conclude, both the artificer and the husbandman are sufficientlie liberall and verie friendlie at their tables, and when they meet they are so merie without malice and plaine, without inward Italian or French craft and subtiltie, that it would doo a man good to be in companie among them.

“With us the nobilitie, gentrie and students doo ordinarilie go to dinner at eleven before noone, and to supper at five, or betweene five and six at after-noone. The merchants dine and sup seldome before twelve at noone, and six at night, especiallie in London. The husbandmen dine also at high noone as they call it, and sup at seven or eight.... As for the poorest sort they generallie dine and sup when they may, so that to talke of their order of repast it were but a needlesse matter.”

“The bread through out the land,” continues Holinshed, “is made of such graine as the soil yeeldeth, neverthelesse the gentilitie commonlie provide themselves sufficientlie of wheat for their owne tables, whilst their houshold and poore neighbours in some shires are inforced to content themselves with rie, or baricie, yea and in time of dearth manie with bread made either of beans, or peason, or otes, or of altogether and some acornes among.... There be much more ground eared now almost in everie place than hath beene of late yeares, yet such a price of come continueth in each towne and market without any just cause (except it be that landlords doo get licenses to carie come out of the land onelie to keepe up the prices for their owne private games and ruine of the commonwealth), that the artificer and poore laboring man is not able to reach unto it, but is driven to content himselfe with horsse corne--I mean beanes, peason, otes, tarres, and lintels.”

* * * * *

Books had been written for women and their tasks within--the “Babees Booke,” Tusser’s[5] “Hundrethe Good Pointes of Huswifry,” “The Good Husive’s Handmaid”--the last two in the sixteenth century; these and others of their kidney. A woman who thought, spoke, and wrote in several tongues was greatly filling the throne of England in those later times.

Cook- and receipt-books in the following century, that is in the seventeenth, continued to discover women, and to realize moreover that to them division of labor had delegated the household and its businesses. There were “Jewels” and “Closets of Delights” before we find an odd little volume putting out in 1655 a second edition. It shows upon its title-page the survival from earlier conditions of the confusion of duties of physician and cook--a fact made apparent in the preface copied in the foregoing “forme of cury” of King Richard--and perhaps intimates the housewife should perform the services of both. It makes, as well, a distinct appeal to women as readers and users of books. Again it evidences the growth of the Commons. In full it introduces itself in this wise:

“The Ladies Cabinet enlarged and opened: containing Many Rare Secrets and Rich Ornaments, of several kindes, and different uses. Comprized under three general Heads, viz. of 1 Preserving, Conserving, Candying, etc. 2 Physick and Chirurgery. 3 Cooking and Housewifery. Whereunto is added Sundry Experiments and choice Extractions of Waters, Oyls, etc. Collected and practised by the late Right Honorable and Learned Chymist, the Lord Ruthuen.”

The preface, after an inscription “To the Industrious improvers of Nature by Art; especially the vertuous Ladies and Gentlewomen of the Land,” begins:

“Courteous Ladies, etc. The first Edition of this--(cal it what you please) having received a kind entertainment from your Ladiships hands, for reasons best known to yourselves, notwithstanding the disorderly and confused jumbling together of things of different kinds, hath made me (who am not a little concerned therein) to bethink myself of some way, how to encourage and requite your Ladiships Pains and Patience (vertues, indeed, of absolute necessity in such brave employments; there being nothing excellent that is not withal difficult) in the profitable spending of your vacant minutes.” This labored and high-flying mode of address continues to the preface’s end.... “I shall thus leave you at liberty as Lovers in Gardens, to follow your own fancies. Take what you like, and delight in your choice, and leave what you list to him, whose labour is not lost if anything please.”

In turning the leaves of the book one comes upon such naïve discourse as this:

“To make the face white and fair.

“Wash thy face with Rosemary boiled in white wine, and thou shalt be fair; then take Erigan and stamp it, and take the juyce thereof, and put it all together and wash thy face therewith. Proved.”

It was undoubtedly the success of “The Ladies Cabinet” and its cousins german that led to the publication of a fourth edition in 1658 of another compilation, which, according to the preface, was to go “like the good Samaritane giving comfort to all it met.” The title was “The Queens Closet opened: Incomparable Secrets in Physick, Chyrurgery, Preserving, Candying, and Cookery, As they were presented unto the Queen By the most Experienced Persons of our times.... Transcribed from the true Copies of her Majesties own Receipt Books, by W. M. one of her late Servants.” It is curious to recall that this book was published during the Cromwell Protectorate--1658 is the year of the death of Oliver--and that the queen alluded to in the title--whose portrait, engraved by the elder William Faithorne, forms the frontispiece--was Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I., and at that time an exile in France.

During this century, which saw such publications as Rose’s “School for the Officers of the Mouth,” and “Nature Unembowelled,” a woman, Hannah Wolley, appears as author of “The Cook’s Guide.” All such compilations have enduring human value, but we actually gain quite as much of this oldest of arts from such records as those the indefatigable Pepys left in his Diary. At that time men of our race did not disdain a knowledge of cookery. Izaak Walton, “an excellent angler, and now with God,” dresses chub and trout in his meadow-sweet pages. Even Thomas Fuller, amid his solacing and delightful “Worthies,” thinks of the housewife, and gives a receipt for metheglin.

And a hundred years later Dr. Johnson’s friend, the Rev. Richard Warner, in his “Personal Recollections,” did not hesitate to expand upon what he thought the origin of mince pies. Warner’s Johnsonian weight in telling his fantasy recalls Goldsmith’s quip about the Doctor’s little fish talking like whales, and also Johnson’s criticism upon his own “too big words and too many of them.”

Warner wrote, “In the early ages of our country, when its present widely spread internal trade and retail business were yet in their infancy, and none of the modern facilities were afforded to the cook to supply herself ‘on the spur of the moment,’ ... it was the practice of all prudent housewives, to lay in, at the conclusion of every year (from some contiguous periodical fair), a stock sufficient for the ensuing annual consumption, of ... every sweet composition for the table--such as raisins, currants, citrons, and ‘spices of the best.’

“The ample cupboard ... within the wainscot of the dining parlour itself ... formed the safe depository of these precious stores.

“‘When merry Christmas-tide came round’ ... the goodly litter of the cupboard, thus various in kind and aspect, was carefully swept into one common receptacle; the mingled mass enveloped in pastry and enclosed within the duly heated oven, from whence ... perfect in form, colour, odour, flavour and temperament, it smoked, the glory of the hospitable Christmas board, hailed from every quarter by the honourable and imperishable denomination of the Mince-Pye.”

In the eighteenth century women themselves, following Hannah Wolley, began cook-book compiling. So great was their success that we find Mrs. Elizabeth Moxon’s “English Housewifry” going into its ninth edition in the London market of 1764. All through history there have been surprises coming to prejudiced minds out of the despised and Nazarene. It was so about this matter of cook-books--small in itself, great in its far-reaching results to the health and development of the human race.

Women had been taught the alphabet. But the dogmatism of Dr. Johnson voiced the judgment of many of our forebears: a dominant power is always hard in its estimate of the capacities it controls. “Women can spin very well,” said the great Cham, “but they can not make a good book of cookery.” He was talking to “the swan of Lichfield,” little Anna Seward, when he said this, and also to a London publisher. The book they were speaking of had been put forth by the now famous Mrs. Hannah Glasse, said to be the wife of a London attorney.

The doctor--possibly with an eye to business, a publisher being present--was describing a volume he had in mind to make, “a book upon philosophical principles,” “a better book of cookery than has ever yet been written.” “Then,” wisely said the dogmatic doctor, “as you can not make bad meat good, I would tell what is the best butcher’s meat, the best beef, the best pieces; how to choose young fowls; the proper seasons of different vegetables; and then how to roast and boil and compound.” This was the plan of a poet, essayist, lexicographer, and the leading man of letters of his day. His cook-book was never written.

But good Mrs. Glasse had also with large spirit aimed at teaching the ignorant, possibly those of a kind least often thought of by instructors in her art. She had, forsooth, caught her hare outside her book, even if she never found him in its page. “If I have not wrote in the high polite style,” she says, with a heart helpful toward the misunderstood and oppressed, and possibly with the pages of some pretentious chef in mind, “I hope I shall be forgiven; for my intention is to instruct the lower sort, and therefore must treat them in their own way. For example, when I bid them lard a fowl, if I should bid them lard with large lardoons, they would not know what I meant; but when I say they must lard with little pieces of bacon, they know what I mean. So in many other things in Cookery the great cooks have such a high way of expressing themselves, that the poor girls are at a loss to know what they mean.”

Mrs. Glasse’s book was published in 1747--while Dr. Johnson had still thirty-seven years in which to “boast of the niceness of his palate,” and spill his food upon his waistcoat. “Whenever,” says Macaulay, “he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins swelled and the moisture broke out on his forehead.” But within forty-eight years of the December his poor body was borne from the house behind Fleet Street to its resting-place in Westminster Abbey, a thin volume, “The Frugal Housewife,” written by our American Lydia Maria Child, had passed to its ninth London edition, in that day sales being more often than in our own a testimony of merit. This prevailing of justice over prejudice is “too good for any but very honest people,” as Izaak Walton said of roast pike. Dogmatism is always eating its own words.

Since the master in literature, Dr. Johnson, planned his cook-book many cooking men have dipped ink in behalf of instruction in their art. Such names as Farley, Carême, and Soyer have been written, if not in marble or bronze, at least in sugar of the last caramel degree--unappreciated excellencies mainly because of the inattention of the public to what nourishes it, and lack of the knowledge that the one who introduces an inexpensive, palatable, and digestible dish benefits his fellow-men.

The names of these club cooks and royal cooks are not so often referred to as that of the large and human-hearted Mrs. Glasse. A key to their impulse toward book-making must, however, have been that offered by Master Farley, chief cook at the London Tavern, who wrote in 1791, a hundred and fourteen years ago: “Cookery, like every other Art, has been moving forward to perfection by slow Degrees.... And although there are so many Books of this Kind already published, that one would hardly think there could be Occasion for another, yet we flatter ourselves, that the Readers of this Work will find, from a candid Perusal, and an impartial Comparison, that our Pretensions to the Favour of the Public are not ill-founded.”

Such considerations as those of Master Farley seem to lead to the present great output. But nowadays our social conditions and our intricate and involved household arrangements demand a specialization of duties. The average old cook-book has become insufficient. It has evolved into household-directing as well as cook-directing books, comprehending the whole subject of esoteric economies. This is a curious enlargement; and one cause, and result, of it is that the men and women of our domestic corps are better trained, better equipped with a logical, systematized, scientific knowledge, that they are in a degree specialists--in a measure as the engineer of an ocean greyhound is a specialist, or the professor of mathematics, or the writer of novels is a specialist. And specialists should have the dignity of special treatment. In this movement, it is to be hoped, is the wiping out of the social stigma under which domestic service has so long lain in our country, and a beginning of the independence of the domestic laborer--that he or she shall possess himself or herself equally with others--as other free-born people possess themselves, that is.

And closely allied with this specialization another notable thing has come about. Science with its microscope has finally taught what religion with its manifold precepts of humility and humanity has failed for centuries to accomplish, thus evidencing that true science and true religion reach one and the same end. There are no menial duties, science clearly enunciates: the so-called drudgery is often the most important of work, especially when the worker brings to his task a large knowledge of its worth in preserving and sweetening human life, and perfectness as the sole and satisfactory aim. Only the careless, thriftless workers, the inefficient and possessed with no zeal for perfection of execution, only these are the menials according to the genuine teachings of our day--and the ignorant, unlifted worker’s work is menial (using the word again in its modern English and not its old Norman-French usage) whatever his employment.

In verse this was said long ago, as the imagination is always forestalling practical knowledge, and George Herbert, of the seventeenth century, foreran our science in his “Elixir:”

“All may of thee partake: Nothing can be so mean, Which with this tincture _for thy sake_ Will not grow bright and clean.

“A servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine; Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, Makes that and th’ action fine.

“This is the famous stone That turneth all to gold: For that which God doth touch and own Cannot for less be told.”

Present-day, up-to-date books on housekeeping stand for the fact that in our households, whatever the estimates of the past and of other social conditions, all work is dignified--none is menial. For besides intelligent knowledge and execution, what in reality, they ask, gives dignity to labor? Weight and importance of that particular task to our fellow-beings? What then shall we say of the duties of cook? of housemaid? of chambermaid? of the handy man, or of the modest maid of all work? For upon the efficient performance of the supposedly humblest domestic servitor depends each life of the family. Such interdependence brings the employed very close to the employer, and no bond could knit the varied elements of a household more closely, none should knit it more humanly.

The human, then, are the first of the relations that exist between employer and employee, that “God hath made of one blood all nations of the earth.” It is a truth not often enough in the minds of the parties to a domestic-service compact. And besides this gospel of Paul are two catch-phrases, not so illuminated but equally humane, which sprang from the ameliorating spirit of the last century--“Put yourself in his place,” and “Everybody is as good as I.” These form the best bed-rock for all relations between master and servant. There is need of emphasizing this point in our books on affairs of the house, for a majority of our notably rich are new to riches and new to knowledge, and as employers have not learned the limitation of every child of indulgence and also polite manners in early life.

It is after all a difference of environment that makes the difference between mistress and maid, between master and man. The human being is as plastic as clay--is clay in the hands of circumstance. If his support of wife and children depended upon obsequiousness of bearing, the master might, like the butler, approximate Uriah Heep. If the mistress’s love of delicacy and color had not been cultivated by association with taste from childhood, her finery might be as vulgar as the maid’s which provokes her satire. It is after all a question of surroundings and education. And in this country, where Aladdin-fortunes spring into being by the rubbing of a lamp--where families of, for example, many centuries of the downtrodden life of European peasant jump from direst poverty to untold wealth--environment has often no opportunity to form the folk of gentle breeding. Many instances are not lacking where those who wait are more gently bred than those who are waited upon.