comes from the French point of view, it sets, ty-four hours, imposes the condition that forth one of the great laws of cooking. everything shall be in small quantities; To put the case quite clearly, it is essen- that is the basis of the entire question. tial to recall the fact that wealth is the ex- Next comes the fitness of each object for ception in France, that poverty is the the form of cookery to which it is to be rule; that prudent thrift is generally subjected. No Frenchwoman, be she cook practised, even when it is not imposed by or mistress, would dream of buying the irresistible necessity; and that economy same chicken for a fricassée as she would of housekeeping consequently stands first select if she meant to roast it; the same amongst domestic duties. Now, economy vegetables for a soup or to serve alone; means privation, to some extent at all the same meat for stewing and for a rôti. events; but though the French generally She would always choose an inferior and live very cheaply though, with few ex- cheaper article in one case than in the other, ceptions, their outlay is within their in- knowing that it is useless to spend money though they do without what in good looks when she has a sauce to dethey think they ought not to pay for, they pend upon which will cover ugliness. The do not suffer as others would from this difference of expense resulting from the want of money, because they possess the application of this principle may certainly priceless faculty of making the best of be averaged at a tenth, but the additional what they have. This capacity extends to economy which is produced by the exclualmost every detail of home organization, sive use of little quantities is considerabut it comes out with conspicuous dis- bly more important. Here, however, the tinctness in their management of food. effect is complex: it is not limited to the The eating in middle-class French houses, direct diminution of waste in the ordinary inexpensive as it is, is certainly far su- sense of that word; it extends in two or perior to that of the majority of the richer three directions, and brings about various classes in other countries. It consists of consequences which remain invisible until fewer dishes, of smaller quantities it is they are closely looked for. Those consecomposed of low-priced articles-its hab-quences, however, form one of the great itual range is limited; but the execution elements of the subject, and it is well! of each dish is perfect in itself, and the worth while to bring them clearly into variety of the forms of preparation makes light. up for the relative absence of variety in First of all, less fuel is required to cook. the substances employed. The French a small dish than a large one. French are too poor and too wise to waste money kitchen-ranges do not resemble those in the purchase of fish, flesh, or fowl, when which are still so generally in use in Engany of them cost more than their regular land, where the same vast mass of coal. current value. These extravagances are goes on blazing itself away, whether its left to people who are really wealthy, and heat be employed to boil a kettle or to to the faster elements of society in Paris roast a sheep. In France, especially in and a few other towns. The nation never the country, cookery is carried on with perpetrates them. But the nation, poor wood or charcoal fires, kept down to a low and saving as it is, requires that each dish smoulder when not needed for the moment, shall be itself, with its full aroma, its full and roused np to activity in five minutes essence, its own character. It knows, by when the time comes to use them. The long experience, that poverty does not same exact adaptation of means to the end, prevent the exercise of skill: it sets the the same diligent pursuit of small economies, latter off against the former - it replaces is discovered here as in all other details of money by intelligence. the subject: a fire to roast a chicken is The first step towards the end in view is made just big enough to serve the purto so employ the sum allotted for the kitch- pose; the combustion of a pennyworth of en that it shall produce its utmost value, charcoal boils or stews the contents of not only in quantity and quality, but, two saucepans at the same time; directly what is even more important, in suitability. the operation is complete the fire is covGoing to market does not simply mean ered up with ashes, or is put right out. clever buying; it involves the far higher Small quantities do not take so long to talent of adapting the choice of the pro- cook as big ones do, so they need heat for visions bought to the use which it is pro- a shorter period; and even in the case of posed to make of them. The law- so soups, and of the few other dishes which absolute is the habit that it may be called require hours of gentle simmering to bring a law-which limits each day's purchases them to the point, the very nature of the of food to what can be consumed in twen-process prohibits strong flame and accom LIVING AGE. VOL. XXIV. 1145 panying loss of fuel. "Cuisinez douce-ing in little quantities that is to say, of ment" is the first counsel given to a be- lessened fuel, suppression of waste, and ginner; and that means, amongst other the setting off of cheap food against highthings, never have a bigger or a hotter er-priced articles. At a guess, however, fire than you really want; for if you it may be put at about a third; which do, you will waste money, and will burn means that, under the French system— your casseroles and their contents. The next consequence of the French system is that everything is eaten up. As there is only just enough, nobody has a chance of leaving anything; waste is suppressed because it cannot exist without a surplus, because its very possibility depends on an excess of supply over consumption. A very short experience will show a cook how much total weight of food she has to serve each day; and, the measure once acquired, she invariably acts upon it, and provides just that much and no more. The whole house knows that it will never be offered more than it can use; and that if the dinner of to-day should seem to go beyond immediate wants, it is solely because to-morrow's breakfast is included in the estimate. supposing prices to be exactly equal in both cases-a sovereign will go as far as thirty shillings would in England. This is the material result of kitchen manage ment in France, and no one will deny its grave importance. But when we come to see that this vast economy of expense is aecompanied by extraordinary superiority in the nature of the food itself, we ought to regard our own food arrangements with stupefaction, and to ask ourselves when we are going to have sense enough to profit by the example set us across the Channel. 66 In England, taking the people as a whole, and excluding the special cases, there are but three known national ways of dressing food, roasting, boiling, and that inconceiv able horror known as "hash." Roasting is not badly done by us, and we fry soles fairBut the great source of economy lies in ly; but there end our faculties: what we call the diminished use of the dearer articles, boiling" is one of the most senseless acts and in the correspondingly increased em- to which human intelligence can descend: ployment of the cheaper ones. If a great it is an inexcusable, unjustifiable, wanton piece of meat, costing twelvepence a-pound, folly. To people who have been boiling" is placed at the disposal of a hungry fam- all their lives, these adjectives may seem ily, it will naturally be eaten at until strong; but have they ever really asked everybody is content; but if a far smaller themselves what this boiling means? joint, which only partially satisfies their Have they ever reflected for one instant appetites, is put before them with a sup- over the operation they are performing? plementary allowance of soup, and bread, To boil food, be it meat or be it vegand vegetables, representing, at the out-etable, is to extract from it, first, its side, an average price of three-pence a- volatile aroma, then its essences and pound, it follows that the latter elements juices, and, finally, its power of nutriof the dinner will be consumed in large tion; aroma, essence, juice, and strength, proportions, and that the total cost will be go out into the hot water, leaving behind diminished in the exact ratio in which them the fibre which they have quitted. three is substituted for twelve. This ex- Now in France this process is called makample is, however, far too simple; it ex-ing soup; the water becomes excellent, but presses the arithmetic of the case, but it gives no idea at all, either of its infinitelyvaried applications, or of the ease with which such substitutions are carried out in France without any lessening of the attractive qualities of dinner. But as, for the moment, we are considering only the money side of the matter, such an illustration is sufficient, because it shows distinctly how the adoption of small dishes of each sort of food enables French housekeepers to economize on the dearer articles. It is scarcely possible to form any reliable calculation of the total comparative saving which is brought about by the union of these three consequences of buy the materials which have imparted their nature to it are considered, with some few exceptions, to have lost all claim to be considered as real food, and are only used as inferior aliments. So thoroughly is this principle applied, that even the water in which white haricots or cauliflowers have been boiled, is always kept to serve as a basis for vegetable soups. Every liquid which has received the extracted flavour of a boiled substance, is looked upon as precious, and is employed again in some special form, so as not to waste the proper ties which it has acquired. In England. on the contrary, when we have carefully abstracted from turkey, or from beef, from chicken, ham, legs of mutton, green peas or beans, all that steady red-hot boiling of what we eat, as if it were the right thing can take out of them, we eat the tasteless, to do. azoteless relics of our work, and we diligently throw away the "dirty water" which contains all the nutrition that we have distilled. This may be worthy of a great nation, but it is not easy to see how. Scotland, at all events, uses mutton broth, but no right-minded English man will condescend to swallow any such "stuff," or if he does, he calls it "hot water stirred with a tallow candle." If ever prejudice and ignorance were thorough synonyms (as they almost always are), it is surely in their application to British cooking. Excepting the harder vegetables the French boil absolutely nothing, in our meaning of the word at least. From Dunkerque to Bayonne, from Nice to Strasbourg, not one ounce of anything goes into the pot unless it be to make soup: but then the nation lives on soup. Roast meat costs too much for the everyday consumption of a population whose earnings average eighteenpence a head: so they feed on a copious stew of bacon, sausage, cabbage, potatoes, and bread-and very good indeed it is, provided one is hungry. This aspect of the case, of course, excludes all idea of serious cookery; it means feeding and nothing else; but it is feeding in which everything is food, where what has been stewed out stops in the stew, where not one scrap is lost, where every centime spent produces its full result in the stomach. Now, look at France and see what is done by the people who, according to our lofty convictions, live contemptibly on "kickshaws." Their dogma is, that everything which is in food ought to be left in it by the cook and to be found in it by the eater. The entire theory of French cooking, both in form and in result, is contained in that one article of faith; its consequence is, that the whole nutritive elements of every substance employed pass into the stomach, instead of being partially poured down the sink or sent out to the pigs, as is the case in this free and eminently great country. Yet we despise the eating of those miserable French, with all our hearts. and look scornfully down upon it from the glorious summit of our boiling. The ex-ing at French hotels and restaurants, which planation of this insanity-though the word explanation is miserably misemployed in such a sense-is, that we imagine that because we buy more meat than they do we are necessarily better fed. So perhaps we should be if we swallowed it all, though even then a good deal might be said against so needless a use of flesh; but as, on an average, we take out of it, by what we call cooking, at least a fourth of its alimentary value, we do not in reality get any more chemical result out of the sixty pounds of meat (beef, mutton, veal, and pork) which each inhabitant of Great Britain (babies included) devours every year, than the Frenchman does out of the forty-five pounds of the same nature which he consumes. He, at all events, extracts the uttermost from what he digests, for the simple reason that it is all there to be digested; not a grain of it has gone into the sewers or the sty—it is all in the dish, either in solid or in liquid. We should think it folly to throw away the gravy which exudes during the act of roasting; but not only do we take it as quite natural to fling to waste the entire product of the far more exhausting process of boiling, but we resolutely apply that process to the larger part The same law applies everywhere, in every rank. As we rise in the scale of outlay, and, consequently, of types of nour|ishment, we find no change; the principle is the same throughout the land - eat everything, waste nothing. But the details become vastly more interesting when skill comes into play, for then we see what art can do to adorn economy. The cook is all that most travellers know anything about, gives but a faint idea of the feeding in use in families; for not only are the quantities and the expense much larger in one case than the other, but the flavours are stronger, coarser, less varied, and less true. It is inside real homes that French eating should be studied, for it is there alone that it can be examined in reality and in perfection. The nation- whatever we may think does not dine at cafés; such a plan would break up the affectionate habits which the French so fondly cherish; it would be nasty and too dear. The nation takes its nourishment within its own four walls, so as to get it better and cheaper, and to retain, in all its force, the eminently social character of the act. And this applies to every class, without exception; for the great dinners in Paris private houses are as superior, in delicacy and refinement of execution, to what the best restaurants can produce, as is the home feeding of the peasants to what they could get in the country wine-shops. Café cookery employs even in its highest forms, too many artifices; it seeks too much to attain effect and vigour; it is not natural; its sauces are too powerful - they hide the intimate essence of the food: in one word, keeping, the difficulty is to choose & it does not realize the fundamental princi- thoroughly fair example which honestly ple of carefully preserving unimpaired the and truthfully sets forth an average case particular aroma, the special perfume, without exaggeration either way. Twen which should inherently belong to every ty years ago it would have been impossible dish, and which gives to it its own distinc- to even attempt to do so, because the cost tive nature. And furthermore, the res- of food then varied widely all over France, taurants never offer to their customers cer- certain places being about twice as dear as tain well-known dishes which form part of others. But railways have now changed the regular daily list for home use, and all that; they have levelled prices almost which stand so high in French apprecia- everywhere, and have suppressed those tion, that they are ordered several times singularly cheap residences in which Enga-week in moderate houses. Such are the lish people used to seek refuge, like St. more ordinary vegetable soups (whose Malo and St. Omer. There are still a few name is legion), the endless shapes of stews outlying villages, fifty kilometres from the and of the simpler ragouts, the hundred nearest station, where a chicken can be forms of preparing eggs, the infinite variety got for eighteenpence; but with those exof cheap plats sucrés. It is useless to at- ceptions a chicken is now worth about the tempt to describe such products, or even same all over France: and the same may to give a list of them, especially as they be said, in substance, of every other artiare to be found in all the cookery-books; cle of food. The towns are dearer than but their number is so great, and their merit is so real, that they alone suffice, without including the high-class cookery, to place French feeding above that of the whole world outside. the country, because of the octroi dues which are levied on all provisions which enter them, but that difference can be allowed for with tolerable exactness; and it may be estimated, without much fear of error, that the cost of food in France is now about 10 per cent higher in the towns, and 20 per cent higher in Paris, than it is in the rural districts. Of course this calculation is not intended to apply to every case; it shows only a general mean, but that mean is near enough to the reality to enable us to work upon it. It must, however, be added, that during the last few years, and especially since the war, prices have gone up enormously, and that the figures which express the present cost of living are certainly one-third higher than they were in 1855. With these explana tions before us, let us take a middle-class Paris family, living reasonably well, wisely economical, but in no way stingy, and let us see how its account-book stands. In order to provide fair ground of comparison with the outlay of an English household of corresponding rank, the example chosen is that of a cheery home, which includes nine people-three big ones, three little ones (who eat like big ones), and three servants. It should be added that there is somebody to dinner nearly every day, and a regular dinner-party once a-month, and that the service is performed with a tolerable amount of elegance. Here, however, habit and previous opinions may perhaps claim to have their say, and to protest against anything but "plain joints." There are many virtuous people who live and die in the intense belief that what they so oddly call "made dishes" as if everything they swallow were not "made" too-are unwholesome, and that "roast and boiled" are the sole manners of preparation worthy of British teeth. There is absolutely nothing to be said in reply to such ideas, for prejudice is so hard a master that it prevents all possibility of fair comparison, and blinds us to the most convincing proofs. It would therefore be quite useless to expect that for the reasons already given, any real Englishman will believe that these "made dishes" are quite as nutritive as roast meat, and are vastly more so than the same substances boiled. Even the strong arguments of economy and almost unlimitited variety which the French system supplies, might fail to produce any real effect on minds which are resolved beforehand, as so many are, that nothing is to be learnt across the Channel. But there are enough inquisitive people round us to make it well worth while to show in what this economy and this variety consist, so that they, at all events, may judge whether From the 1st September to 30th Nothey will try to begin the revolution which, vember 1871 (ninety-one days) that famisooner or later, must be enforced in Eng-ly expended 1801 francs, 10 centimes (£72, lish eating. Os. 10d.), in food of every kind, excluding only wine; so that the exact average per In giving details of the cost of house i week was 140 francs (£5, 12s.) As there were, including friends, ten people fed White soup, . 10 cailles au nid, . Timbale Milanaise, Salad, Green peas, Dessert (composed of wondrous every day, the cost per head per day Tunny, olives, and radishes, Deduct for economy on the expen- There remains for the cost of the 1 bottle of Montrachet, 2 bottles of Chapelle de Cham- 2 bottles of Gruaud Larose, Additional man to wait, Total cost of the entertainment, £ s. d. 048 017 6 9 0 16 2 052 0 10 2 006 020 0 25 0 1 7 0 11 4 £3 1 11 0 10 0 £2 11 11 Coffee and bread and butter began the day at eight o'clock. At half-past eleven came the breakfast, composed of two dishes of meat, one of vegetables, cheese, dessert, and coffee. The children had a small eating of their own at half-past three, made up of bread and jam, chocolate, or fruit. The dinner included soup, an entrée and a rôti, vegetables, sometimes plat sucré, cheese, dessert, coffee and liqueurs. At nine came tea or tilleul. And All these items are copied textually from do not let it be imagined that all this was the cook's book, excepting the wine, which simple cookery; a good deal of it was so, appears at its original cost when bottled but each day brought out at least one plat and laid down in the cellar years ago, but which required experience and execution, which now represents two or three times while the menus of the dinner-parties were the value shown. Two of the dishes in the little gems of delicate workmanship. This list merit explanation — the cailles au nid latter part of the subject is perhaps worthy and the fried cream. Each quail, when of detailed analysis, for English housewives cooked, is ornamented with his head, tail, may, not improbably, be curious to know and outspread wings; he is then placed on how much a Paris dinner costs the giver. his "nest," which is formed of the bottom In the case before us the servants are ex- of an artichoke, and is half filled with simceptionally intelligent, and do everything ulated eggs made of white stuffing. The without orders or surveillance; the mistress nests are arranged in a circle in a large has only to say to the man, "So many peo-round dish, and bathe in a dark brown ple to dinner to-morrow; the best service; sauce. A prettier combination to look uptell Marie to bring me her ideas;" and on, or a pleasanter one to eat, can scarcely when the cook has submitted her "ideas," be desired. Créme frite consists in balls of and the menu is settled, the lady troubles hot, liquid, creamy custard cased in a her head no more about it. Such a priv-diaphanous golden pellicale of frizzled ilege is, however, somewhat rare; the rule batter; in the mouth they burst and on these occasions is, that mistresses of the melt with a result that is fantastically middle class (it would be useless to talk of delicious. And the wages of the woman the very rich) are obliged to look about who created these impossibilities are £19 themselves a little, to order the dessert and a-year! to arrange the flowers. The programme which we will examine was for ten persons; every article in it, excepting the dessert, was executed at home by the cook alone; this is what it cost, all ingredients in-how is it that French peasant girls, at £19 cluded:a-year, can attain the talent necessary to Two questions present themselves here. What would such a dinner have cost in England, if indeed it could be produced here at all in any ordinary house? And |