Common-Sense Papers on Cookery

“Dinorah.” And yet many of these persons are good honest souls, who mean well and do their best, but somehow or other it is not in them, and what is more, it never will be. They have been born in an uncongenial clime. For instance, contrast the dress of an English workman’s wife whose husband earns, say, £2 a week, with that of a Frenchwoman in a similar station of life, and yet probably the latter spends less in dress than the former. We have already compared a French pastrycook’s window with an English one, but if there is ever a time in which we feel that Waterloo is indeed avenged, it is when we contrast a French salade with the ordinary English specimen. It is somewhat strange, too, that the generality of cookery-books intended for household use signally fail to explain how to make dishes look nice. For instance, “garnish with beetroot and hard-boiled eggs,” is a very poor direction to give to one of the above-mentioned good _plain_ cooks. Some again give the lucid direction—“garnish prettily.” Other works, too, are at times extremely tantalising to young housekeepers with plenty of natural good taste, yet without the faintest knowledge of the principles of cookery; they of course consult the cookery-book, which has perhaps been made attractive by some beautiful coloured engravings of dishes. We can well imagine a young wife in deep consultation with her next sister a week before her first dinner-party, the cookery-book between them. “Oh! what a pretty-looking dish,” exclaims one; “let’s have that.” Alas! the index is hunted over in vain, no description of how to make the dish appears at all; the next pretty-looking dish determined on shares a similar fate; and at last they give it up in despair, and either fix on dishes of which they have no idea what the appearance will be when done, or more probably leave it to the cook to do as she likes, with one or two little things from the pastrycook’s—an expensive way of going to work, it should be borne in mind. I have