Common-Sense Papers on Cookery

dinner he may expect? No cooking is so good as the French, none so bad as a certain style of English. Compare the smell of a good French restaurant, or outside the kitchen of a first-class hotel, like the “Pavilion” at Folkestone, an hour before the table d’hôte, with the smell of an ordinary cook-shop, with its steam-pipes keeping warm large flabby joints and greasy Yorkshire pudding, the whole being impregnated with that peculiar smell of greens in which one can almost fancy he detects the flavour of caterpillars. I think it may be laid down as a rule that if, on entering a house, you smell greens, you may make up your mind for a bad dinner. On the other hand, a gamey smell, with perhaps just a dash of garlic in it, is favourable, especially if mingled with the smell of rich pastry. It would, however, require many volumes to enter into a minute description of a good and a bad dinner. We would rather be practical, and, if possible, useful. The natural resource of young housekeepers is the cookery-book. After the pathetic statement with which our article commences, David Copperfield proceeds as follows:— “In search of the principle on which joints ought to be roasted—to be roasted enough and not too much—I myself referred to the cookery-book, and found it there established as the allowance of a quarter of an hour to every pound, and say a quarter over. But the principle always failed us by some curious fatality, and we never could hit any medium between redness and cinders.” Here is the old story, and one that, probably, happens every day, and will happen—viz., reference to a cookery-book; the directions followed; the result—failure. Who is most to blame—the cook, or the book? That the book is often in fault there can be no doubt. So long as we meet with such absurdities as “and flavour to taste,” or “add seasoning,” &c., we shall continue to maintain that recipes that contain these directions might just as well have never been written. But in the present article we