Part 8

If Sybaris was the paradise of cooks, Lacedæmon was their purgatory. They were blamed if men grew fat on their diet, and plump children were legally condemned to get spare again upon their gruel. The Romans, again, restored the cook to his proper place in society. He might be still a slave, and so were greater men than he; but he was the confidant of his master, and there were not a few who would have exchanged their liberty for such a post and chains. And who dare affirm that the _coquus_ was not an officer of distinction? He who knows how to prepare food for digestion and delight, is a greater man, in one particular at least, than Achilles, who could go no farther in culinary science than turning the spit; than Ulysses, who could light fires and lay cloths with the dexterity of a Frankfort waiter; or than Patroclus, who could draw wine and drink it, but who knew no more how to make a stew, than he did how to solve the logarithms of Napier.

When it is asserted that it was Cadmus, the grandfather of Bacchus, who first taught men how to eat as civilized beings should, it is thereby further intimated that good eating should be followed by good drinking.

We have heard of cooks in monasteries who made dissertations on eternal flames by the heat of their own fires: so Timachidas, of Rhodes, made patties and poetry at the same stove, and both after a fashion to please their several admirers. Artemidorus was the Dr. Johnson of his own art, and wrote a Kitchen Lexicon for the benefit of students. Sicily especially was celebrated for its literary cooks, and Mithœcus wrote a treatise on the art; while Archestratus, the Syracusan, looking into causes and effects, meditated on stomachs as well as sauces, and first showed how digestion might be taught to wait on appetite. Then theoretical laymen came in to the aid of the practical cook, and gastronomists hit upon all sorts of strange ideas to help them to renewed enjoyments. Pithyllus, for instance, invented a sheath for the tongue, in order that he might swallow the hottest viands faster than other guests, who wisely preferred rather to slowly please the palate than suddenly satisfy the stomach. It is of Pithyllus the Dainty, that it is related how, after meals, he used to clean his tongue by rubbing it with a piece of rough fish-skin; and his taking up hot viands with his hand, like that of Götz von Berlichingen, encased in a glove, is cited as proof that the Greeks used no forks. The spoons of the Romans had a pointed end, at the extremity of the handle, for the purpose of picking fish from the shell.

Then came the age when, if men had not appetites of nature’s making, they were made for them by the cooks; and the latter, in return, were crowned with flowers by the guests who had eaten largely, and had no fears of indigestion. The inventor of a new dish had a patent for its exclusive preparation for a year. But ere that time it had probably been forgotten in something more novel discovered by a Sicilian rival; for the Greeks looked on Sicily as the Parisians of the last century used to look on Languedoc,--as the only place on earth where cooks were born and bred, and were worth the paying. The artists of both countries, and of the opposite ages mentioned, were especially skilled in the preparation of materials which were made to appear the things they were not; and a seemingly grand dinner of fish, flesh, and fowl, was really fashioned out of the supplies furnished by the kitchen-garden. The Greeks, however, never descended to the bad taste of which the diarists of the last century show the French to have been guilty; namely, in having wooden joints, carved and painted, placed upon their tables for show. Artificial flowers may be tolerated, but an artificial sirloin, made of a block of deal, would be very intolerable board indeed, particularly to the hungry guests, who saw the seemingly liberal fare, but who could make very little of the deal before them.

In Sicily, the goddess of good cheer, Adephagia, had her especial altars, and thence, perhaps, the estimation in which the Sicilian cooks were held, who prayed to her for inspiration. Her ministers were paid salaries as rich as the sauces they invented. Something like £800 _per annum_ formed the _honorarium_ of the learned and juicy gentleman. But he was not always to be had, even at that price; and the disgusted Languedocien who would not remain in the _cuisine_ of the Duke of Richmond, when Governor of Ireland, for the sufficient reason that there was no Opera in Dublin, had his prototype among his Sicilian predecessors. The jealousy of the culinary bondsman in Greek households against the free cook from Sicily, must have been sometimes deadly in its results.

The best-feed cook on record is the happy mortal to whom his master Antony gave a city, because he had cooked a repast which had called forth encomium from that dreadful jade, Cleopatra.

But money was the last thing thought of by the wearied epicures of Rome, especially when what they gave belonged to somebody else. When Lucullus spent £1,000 sterling on a snug dinner for three,--himself, Cæsar, and Pompey,--he doubtless spent his creditors’ money; at least, extravagant people generally do. Claudius dined often with six hundred guests, and the Roman people paid the cooks. The dinners of Vitellius cost that sacrilegious feeder upwards of £3,000 each, but the bills were discharged by a levy on the public pocket. When Tiberius ordered several thousands sterling to be bestowed on the author of a piece wherein every thing eatable was made to speak wittily, the author was really paid out of the popular pocket; and when Geta insisted on having as many courses at each repast as there were letters in the alphabet, and all the viands at each course so named that their initials should be the same as that of the course itself, he was the last person who troubled himself about the payment for such extravagance.

The cooks of such epicures must necessarily, however, have been as despotic in the kitchen as their lord was in the saloon. The slaves there, who hurried to and fro, bearing their tributes of good things from the market-place, or distributing them according to his bidding, obeyed the cook’s very nod, nay, anticipated his very wishes. They were, in fact, the ministers of an awful Sovereign. The cook was their Lord paramount. The stewards possessed no little power; but when the fires were lighted, and the dinner had to be thought of, the head cook was the kitchen Jupiter; and when he spoke, obedience, silence, and trembling followed upon his word.

From his raised platform, the _Archimagirus_, as he was called, could overlook all the preparations, and with his tremendous spoon of office he could break the heads of his least skilful disciples, and taste the sauces seething in the remotest saucepans. The effect must have been quite pantomimic; and to complete it, there was only wanted a crash of discordant music to accompany the rapid descent of the gigantic spoon upon the skull or ribs of an offender. The work was done in presence of the gods, and scullions blew the fires under the gaze of the _Lares_,--sooty divinities to whom, the legend says, inferior cooks were sometimes sacrificed in the month of December. “But,” as Othello says, “that’s a fable!”

Great Roman kitchens were as well worth seeing, and perhaps were as often inspected by the curious and privileged, as that of the Reform Club. “Order reigned” there quite as much as it did, according to Marshal Sebastiani, at Warsaw, amid the most abject slavery. Art and costliness were lavished upon the vessels, but the human beings there were exactly the things that were made the least account of.

No doubt that the triumph of the art of the cook consisted in serving up an entire pig at once roasted and boiled. The elder Disraeli has shown from Archestratus how this was done. “The animal had been bled to death by a wound under the shoulder, whence, after copious effusion, the master-cook extracted the entrails, washed them with wine, and hanged the animal by the feet. He crammed down the throat the stuffings already prepared. Then, covering the half of the pig with a paste of barley thickened with wine and oil, he put it in a small oven, or on a heated table of brass, where it was gently roasted with all due care. When the skin was browned, he boiled the other side, and then, taking away the barley paste, the pig was served up, at once boiled and roasted.” And such was the way by which the best of cooks spoiled the best of pigs.

According to Plautus, cooks alone were privileged in the old days to carry knives in their girdles. In the “_Aulularia_,” old Euclio says to Congrio, the cook, “_Ad tres viros jam ego deferam tuum nomen_,”--“I’ll go and inform against you to the Magistrates.” “Why so?” asks Congrio. “Because you carry a knife,”--“_Quia cultrum habes._” “Well,” says the artist, standing on his rights, “_cocum decet_,” “it is the sign of my profession.” From another of the many cooks of Plautus we learn, in the “_Menæchmei_,” that, when a parasite was at table, his appetite was reckoned as equivalent to that of eight guests; and when Cylindrus is ordered to prepare a dinner for Menæchmus, his “lady,” and the official parasite, “Then,” says the cook, “that’s as good as ten; for your parasite does the work of eight:”--

“_Jam isti sunt decem, Nam parasitus octo hominum munus facile fungitur._”

The musicians would appear to have lived as pleasantly as the parasites. Simo remarks to Tranio, in the “_Mostellaria_,” that he lives on the best the cooks and vintners can procure for him,--a real fiddler’s destiny:--

“_Musice hercle agitis ætatem: ita ut vos decet. Vino et victu, piscatu probe electili, Vitam colitis._”

Stalino complains in the “_Casina_,” that, clever as cooks are, they cannot put a little essence of love into all their dishes,--a sauce, he says, that would please everybody. Their reputation in Rome for stealing was much the same as that enjoyed by their Grecian brethren. The scene of the “_Casina_,” indeed, is in Athens; but Olympio utters a Roman sentiment when he says, that cooks use their hands as much for larceny as cookery, and that wherever they are they bring double ruin, through extravagance and robbery, upon their masters: “_Ubi sunt, duplici damno dominos multant._” This is further proved by the speech of _Epidicus_, in the comedy so called, where that slave-cook speaks of his master’s purse as if it were game, to disembowel which, he says, he will use his professional knife:--

“_Acutum cultrum habeo, senis qui exenterem Marsupium._”

We learn something of the pay of a cook from a speech of one of the craft, in the “_Pseudolus_.” Ballio, seeing a single practitioner remaining in the square to be hired, asks how it is that he has not been engaged. “_Eloquar_,” says the cook, “here is the reason:--

“He who, now-a-days, comes here to hire cooks, No longer seeks the best, that is, the dearest, But some poor spoil-sauce who for nothing works. Therefore you see me here alone to-day. A poor drachma hath my brethren purchased; But under a crown I cook a dish for no man. For ’twixt the common herd and me, you see, There is a diff’rence: they into a dish Fling whole meadows, and the guests they treat, Sir, As though they were but oxen out at grass. Herbs season they with herbs, and grass with grass; And in the mess, garlic, coriander, fennel, Sorrel, rochet, beet-root, leeks, and greens, All go together, with a pound of benzoin, And mustard ditto, that compels the tears From out the eyes of those that have to mix it.

* * * * *

“If men are short-lived now, the reason’s plain: They put death into their stomachs, and so Of indigestion and bad cookery die. Their sauces but to think of, makes me shudder; Yet men will eat what asses would not bend to.

* * * * *

“Who of _my_ dishes eats, obtains at least Two hundred happy years of life renew’d. I season Neptune’s fishes with a juice Made up of Cicilindrum, Muscadel, Sipolindrum, and Sancapatides. The odour of my mutton, nicely stuffed With Cicimandrum, Nappalopsides, And of Cataractaria a pinch, Feeds Jupiter himself, who, when I rest, Sleeps on Olympus, sad and supperless. As for my potions, he who deeply drinks, Gulps with the draught the gift of endless youth.”

Finally, after inventing the above names unpronounceable of sauces that do not exist, the boaster adds, that his fee is a crown, provided he is not overlooked; but that if there be supervision to check him in his perquisites, he is not to be hired under a mina:--

“_Si credis, nummos; si non, ne mina quidem!_”

I do not know if cooks more especially used different fingers in mingling their sauces, according as they were employed on wedding banquets, martial feasts, senatorial entertainments, _al-fresco déjeuners_, or commercial suppers; but certain it is, that the fingers were sacred to diverse deities. The thumb was devoted to Venus, the index finger to Mars, the longest finger to Saturn, the next to the Sun, and the little finger to Mercury.

I conclude with a remark that I hope will be gratifying to all culinary artists who respect themselves and their calling, and who are anxious to prove that their vocation is of ancient and honourable descent. Cadmus, who introduced letters into Greece, had formerly been cook to the King of Sidon. Thus learning ascended to us from the kitchen; and to the ex-cook of the King of Sidon we perhaps owe all the epics that have ever been written. By this genealogy, even “Paradise Lost” may be traced to the patties of Cadmus. But cooks in England may boast of a _noblesse de cuisine_, which dates from the Norman Conquest. When William, who wooed his wife Matilda by knocking her down, had established himself in England, he gave a banquet, at which his cook, Tezelin, served a new white soup of such exquisite flavour, that William sent for the artist, and inquired its name. “I call it _Dillegrout_,” said Tezelin. “A scurvy name for so good a soup,” said the Conqueror; “but let that pass. We make you Lord of the Manor of Addington!” Thus modern cooks may boast of a descent from the landed aristocracy of the Conquest! Some of their masters cannot do as much; and this, perhaps, accounts for the pride of the one, and the simplicity of the other.

THE MODERN COOK, AND HIS SCIENCE.

If it were necessary that the cook of the ancient world should be a Sicilian, and that the _cuisinier_ of the ancient régime should be of Languedoc, (the native place of “_blanc manger_,”) so in these modern times he alone is considered a true graduate in the noble science _de la gueule_ who is a Gaul by birth, or who has gone through his studies in the University of French Kitchens. In England, it must be confessed that great cooks have formed the exception rather than the rule; and that our native culinary literature, however interesting in certain national details, is chiefly based upon a French foundation. And yet we may boast of some native professors who were illustrious in their way. Master John Murrel, for instance, wrote a cookery book in 1630, and dedicated it to the daughter of the Lord Mayor. He starts by asserting that cookery books generally mar rather than make good meats; and then shows what good meats were in his estimation, by teaching how to dress “minced bullock’s kidney, a rack of veal, a farced leg of mutton, an umble pie, and a chewit of stockfish.” He is succulently eloquent on a compound production, consisting of marrow bones, a leg of mutton, fowls and pullets, and a dozen larks, all in one dish.

The Duke of Newcastle, in the last century, had a female cook of some renown, named “Chloe.” General Guise, at the siege of Carthagena, saw some wild fowl on the wing, and, amid the din of war, he thought of “Chloe” and her sauces. She was famous for her stewed mushrooms, and there is an anecdote connected therewith that will bear repeating. “Poor Dr. Shaw,” writes Horace Walpole, “being sent for in great haste to Claremont, (it seems the Duchess had caught a violent cold by a hair of her own whisker getting up her nose, and making her sneeze,) the poor Doctor, I say, having eaten a few mushrooms before he set out, was taken so ill that he was forced to stop at Kingston; and, being carried to the first apothecary’s, prescribed a medicine for himself which immediately cured him. This catastrophe so alarmed the Duke of Newcastle, that he immediately ordered all the mushroom-beds to be destroyed; and even the toadstools in the park did not escape scalping in this general measure. And a voice of lamentation was heard at Ramah in Claremont, ‘_Chloe_’ weeping for _her_ mushrooms, and they are not!” But, let us turn to trace lightly the genealogy of the cooks of modern times.

The descent of the barbarians from the north was the ruin of cooks as well as of Kings, of kitchens as well as constitutions. Many of the cooks of the classic period were slain like the Druid Priests at the fire of their own altars. A patriotic few fled rather than feed the invader; and the servile souls who tremblingly offered to prepare a _fricassée_ of ostrich brains for the Northmen, were dismissed with contempt by warrior princes, who lived on under-done beef, and very much of it!

But as sure as the Saxon blood beats out the Norman, so does good cookery prevail over barbarous appetites. The old cooks were a sacred race, whose heirs took up the mission of their sires. This mission was so far triumphant, that, at the period of Charlemagne, the imperial kitchen recognised in its _chef_ the representative of the Emperor. The oriental pheasant and the peacock, in all the glories of expanded tail, took the place, or appeared at the side, of coarser viands. The dignity and the mirth of Charlemagne’s table were heightened by the presence of ladies. Brillat de Savarin states, that since that period the presence of the fair sex has ever been a law of society. But in this he errs; for the Marquis de Bouillé, in his admirable work on the Dukes of Guise, affirms that the good civilizing custom had fallen into disuse, but that a permanent improvement was commenced in the reign of Francis I., when the Cardinal of Lorraine induced that Monarch to invite ladies to be present at all entertainments given at Court. Society followed the fashion of the Sovereign; and as it used to be said, “No feast, no Levite,” so now it was felt that where there was no lady, there was no refined enjoyment.

At whatever period the emancipation of the ladies from their forced seclusion took place, from that period the tone of social life was elevated. They went about, like Eve, “on hospitable thoughts intent.” The highest in rank did not disdain to supervise the kitchen; they displayed their talents in the invention of new dishes, as well as in the preparation of the old; and they occasionally well-nigh ruined their lords by the magnificence of their tastes, and their sublime disregard of expense. All the sumptuary laws of Kings to restrain this household extravagance were joyously evaded, and banquets became deadly destructive to men’s estates.

The French Kings granted corporate rights to the different trades connected with the kitchen and the table; and perhaps the most valued privilege was that conceded by Charles IX. to the pastrycooks, who alone were permitted to make bread for the service of the Mass.

Montaigne, in his pleasant way, recounts a conversation he had with an Italian _chef_ who had served in the kitchen of Cardinal Caraffa, up to the period of the death of his gastronomic Eminence. “I made him,” says the great Essayist, “tell me something about his post. He gave me a lecture on the science of eating, with a gravity and magisterial countenance as if he had been determining some vexed question in theology. He deciphered to me, as it were, the distinction that exists between appetites:--the appetite at fasting; that which people have at the end of the second or third service; the means of awaking and exciting it; the general ‘police,’ so to speak, of his sauces; and then particularized their ingredients and effects. The differences of salads, according to the seasons, he next discoursed upon. He explained what sorts ought to be prepared warm, and those which should always be served cold; the way of adorning and embellishing them, in order to render them seductive to the eye. After this he entered on the order of table-services,--a subject full of fine and important considerations; and all this was puffed up with rich and magnificent terms; phrases, indeed, such as are employed by statesmen and diplomatists, when they are discoursing on the government of an empire.” We see by this what the “_art de la gueule_” was in the days of Charles IX., whose mother, Catherine de Medicis, had introduced it into France, as a science whereby men should enjoy life. The same lady introduced also poisoning, as a science whereby men might be deprived of life. Her own career was full of opposing facts like these,--facts which caused a poetic cook to write the epitaph upon her, which says:--

“Here lieth a Queen, who was angel and devil, Admirer of good, and a doer of evil; She supported the State, and the State she destroyed; She reconciled friends, and she friendships alloyed; She brought forth three Kings, thrice endanger’d the Crown, Built palaces up, and threw whole cities down; Made many good laws, many bad ones as well, And merited richly both heaven and hell.”

The mention of Cardinal de Caraffa, by Montaigne, reminds me that, for a gastronome, the Cardinal was singularly sanguinary in spirit. I know no one to compare with him, except Dr. Cahill, who is not averse to good living, and who has earned so gloomy a notoriety by his terrible sentiment of the massacre of Protestants being “a glorious idea.” Caraffa was enabled to enjoy both his propensities, of swallowing good things and slaughtering heretics. “Having obtained leave from the Pope to establish the Inquisition at Rome, at a time when the resources of the State ran low, he turned his private property to the use of his zeal, and set up a small Inquisition at his own expense.” Thus he could dine within hearing of the groans of his victims; his cook could inform him that the hares and heretics had both been roasted; and he _may_ have been occasionally puzzled to know whether that smell of burning came from the patties or the Protestants.