Part 10

"Beef, mutton, and pork, shred pies of the best, Pig, veal, goose, and capon, and turkey well drest, Cheese, apples, and nuts, joly carols to hear, As then in the country, is counted good cheer."

In these days we should draw less heavily on the meats, for in the three centuries we have gained greatly in the vegetable foods. Tusser did not have the potato. But nevertheless, these materials are of the very bone of the land. They grow up with the year and out of the conditions, and they have all the days in them, the sunshine, the rain, the dew of morning, the wind, the cold foggy nights, and the work of laborious hands. Every one of them means something to the person who raises them, and there is no impersonality in them. John's father drained the land when yet he was a boy; the hedges were set; long ago the place was laid out in its rotations; the old trees in the fields are a part of it; every stall in the stables and every window-seat in the old house hold memories; and John has grown up with these memories, and with these fields, and with the footpaths that lead out over brooks and amongst the herds of cattle. It is a part of his religion to keep the land well; and these supplies at Christmas time are taken with a deep reverence for the goodness that is in them, and with a pride in having produced them.

And Thomas Tusser, good husbandman, rejoiced that these bounties cost no cash:

"What cost to good husband, is any of this? Good household provision only it is. Of other the like, I do leave out a many That costeth a husbandman never a penny."

To farm well; to provide well; to produce it oneself; to be independent of trade, so far as this is possible in the furnishing of the table,--these are good elements in living. And in this day we are rapidly losing all this; many persons already have lost it; many have never known the satisfaction of it. Most of us must live from the box and the bottle and the tin-can; we are even feeding our cattle from the factory and the bag. The farmer now raises a few prime products to sell, and then he buys his foods in the markets under label and tag; and he knows not who produced the materials, and he soon comes not to care. No thought of the seasons, and of the men and women who labored, of the place, of the kind of soil, of the special contribution of the native earth, come with the trademark or the brand. And so we all live mechanically, from shop to table, without contact, and irreverently.

May we not once in the year remember the earth in the food that we eat? May we not in some way, even though we live in town, so organize our Christmas festival that the thought of the goodness of the land and its bounty shall be a conscious part of our celebration? May we not for once reduce to the very minimum the supply of manufactured and sophisticated things, and come somewhere near, at least in spirit, to a "Christmas husbandly fare?"

Yet, Thomas Tusser would not confine his husbandly fare to the Christmas time. In another poem, he gives us "The farmer's daily diet," in which the sturdy products are still much the same, secured and prepared by those who partake. All this may be little applicable literally in our present living, and yet I think it is easily possible, as certainly it is very desirable, to develop a new attitude toward the table fare, avoiding much unnecessary and insignificant household labor and lending an attitude of good morality to the daily sustenance.

Much of our eating and feasting is a vicious waste of time, and also of human energy that might be put to good uses. One can scarcely conceive how such indirect and uncomfortable and expensive methods could have come into use. Perhaps they originated with persons of quality in an aristocratic society, when an abundance of servants must be trained to serve and when distinctions in eating were a part of the distinction in rank. But to have introduced these laborious and unintelligent methods into hotels, where persons tarry for comfort and into homes that do not need to maintain an extrinsic appearance, is a vain and ludicrous imitation. The numbers of courses, with more service than food, that one often meets at the table d'hote of the frequented hotels abroad, are most exasperating to one who values time and has a serious purpose in travel and a rightful care for the bodily apparatus. Here is the performance--it was nothing more than a performance, consisting in repeated changing of all the dishes, the removing of every fragment of edibles, and in passing very small separate parcels of food--that it was my lot to endure on an otherwise happy day in a hotel that had little else to distinguish it:

Course 1. Dry bread (no butter). Removal.

Course 2. Soup (nothing else). Removal.

Course 3. Fish (very economical), with a potato on the side. Removal.

Course 4. Veal, macaroni. Removal.

Course 5. Spoonful of green beans (nothing else). Removal.

Course 6. Beef and salad (fragmentary). Removal.

Course 7. Charlotte Russe, bit of cake. Removal.

Course 8. Fruit (slight). Removal.

Course 9. Morsel of cheese, one cracker. Removal.

Course 10. Coffee. Relief.

The traveler knows that this species of time-wasting is not unusual; certainly the food is not unusual and does not merit such considerate attention, although it may profit by the magnification. All this contributes nothing to human efficiency--quite the reverse--and certainly nothing to the rightful gusto in the enjoyment of one's subsistence. It is a ceremony. Such laborious uselessness is quite immoral.

I am afraid that our food habits very well represent how far we have moved away from the essentials and how much we have misled ourselves as to the standards of excellence. I looked in a cookbook to learn how to serve potatoes: I found twenty-three recipes, every one of which was apparently designed to disguise the fact that they were potatoes; and yet there is really nothing in a potato to be ashamed of. Of course, this kind of deception is not peculiar to cookery. It is of the same piece as the stamping of the metal building coverings in forms to represent brick and stone, although everybody knows that they are not brick and stone, rather than to make a design that shall express metal and thereby frankly tell the truth; of the same kind also as the casting of cement blocks to represent undressed rock, although every one is aware of the deception, rather than to develop a form that will express cement blocks as brick expresses brick; of the same order as the inflating of good wholesome water by carbonic gas; and all the other deceits in materials on which our common affairs are built. It is, of course, legitimate to present our foods in many forms that we may secure variety even with scant and common materials; but danger may lie in any untruthfulness with which we use the raw materials of life.

So cookery has come to be a process of concealment. Not only does it conceal the materials, but it also conceals the names of them in a ridiculous nomenclature. Apparently, the higher the art of cookery, the greater is the merit of complete concealment. I think that one reason why persons enjoy the simple cooking of farmers and sailors and other elemental folk, is because of its comparative lack of disguise, although they may not be aware of this merit of it. We have so successfully disguised our viands through so many years that it is not "good form" to make inquiries: we may not smell the food, although the odor should be one of the best and most rightful satisfactions, as it is in fruits and flowers. We may smell a parsnip or a potato when it grows in the field, but not when it is cooked.

We add the extrinsic and meaningless odors of spices and flavorings, forgetting that odor no less than music hath occasions; each of the materials has its own odor that the discriminating cook will try to bring out in its best expression. Were we to be deprived of all these exotic seasonings, undoubtedly cookery would be the gainer in the end; nor could we so readily disguise materials that in themselves are not fit to eat. There is a reason why "all foods taste alike," as we often hear it said of the cooking in public places.

Moreover, we want everything that is out of season, necessitating great attention to the arts of preserving and requiring still further fabrication; and by this desire we also lessen the meaning of the seasons when they come in their natural sequence, bringing their treasure of materials that are adapted to the time and to the place. We can understand, then, why it so happens that we neglect the cookery of the common foods, as seeming to be not quite worth the while, and expend ourselves with so much effort on the accessories and the frills. I have been interested to observe some of the instruction in cooking,--how it often begins with little desserts, and fudge, and a variety of dib-dabs. This is much like the instruction in manual training that begins with formal and meaningless model work or trivialities and neglects the issues of life. It is much like some of the teaching in agriculture not so many years ago, before we attacked very effectively the serious problems of wheat and alfalfa and forests and markets. Mastery does not lie in these pieces of play work, nor does the best intellectual interest on the part of the student reside in them.

Result is that one finds the greatest difficulty in securing a really good baked potato, a well-cooked steak, or a wholesome dish of apple-sauce that is not strained and flavored beyond recognition. It is nearly impossible for one to secure an egg fried hard and yet very tender and that has not been "turned" or scorched on the edges,--this is quite the test of the skill of the good cook. The notion that a hard fried egg is dangerously indigestible is probably a fable of poor cookery. One can secure many sophisticated and disguised egg dishes, but I think skill in plainly cooking eggs is almost an unknown art, perhaps a little-practised art.

Now, it is on these simple and essential things that I would start my instruction in cookery; and this not only for the gain to good eating but also for the advantage of vigor and good morals. I am afraid that our cooking does not set a good example before the young three times every day in the year; and how eager are the young and how amenable to suggestion at these three blessed epochs every day in the year!

Some unsympathetic reader will say that I am drawing a long bow; yet undoubtedly our cookery has prepared the public mind for the adulteration. Knowing the elaboration of many of the foods and fancy dishes, the use of flavoring and spice and other additions to disguise unwholesome materials, the addition of coloring matter to make things attractive, the mixtures, the elaborate designs and trimmings and concoctions, and various deceptions, one wonders how far is the step from some of the cookery to some of the adulteration and whether these processes are really all of one piece. I will leave with my reader a paragraph assembled from a statement made by a food chemist but a few years ago, to let him compare adulteration with what is regarded as legitimate food preparation and note the essential similarity of many of the processes. I do not mean to enter the discussion of food adulteration, and I do not know whether these sophistications are true at the present day; but the statement describes a situation in which we found ourselves and indicates what had become a staggering infidelity in the use of the good raw materials.

Hamburg steak often contains sodium sulphite; bologna sausage and similar meats until recently usually contained a large percentage of added cereal. "Pancake flour" often contains little if any buckwheat; wheat flour is bleached with nitric oxide to improve its appearance. Fancy French peas are colored with sulphate of copper. Bottled ketchup usually contains benzoate of soda as a preservative. Japanese tea is colored with cyanide of potassium and iron. Prepared mustard usually contains a large quantity of added starch and is colored with tumeric. Ground coffee has recently been adulterated with roasted peas. So-called non-alcoholic bottled beverages often contain alcohol or a habit-forming drug and are usually colored with aniline. Candy is commonly colored with aniline dye and often coated with paraffine to prevent evaporation. Cheap candies contain such substances as glue and soapstone. The higher-priced kinds of molasses usually contain sulphites. Flavoring extracts seldom are made from pure products and usually are artificially colored. Jams are made of apple jelly with the addition of coloring matter and also of seeds to imitate berries from which they are supposed to be made; the cheap apple jelly is itself often imitated by a mixture of glucose, starch, aniline dye, and flavoring. Lard nearly always contains added tallow. Bakeries in large cities have used decomposed products, as decayed eggs. Cheap ice-cream is often made of gelatin, glue, and starch. Cottonseed-oil is sold for olive-oil. The poison saccharine is often used in place of sugar in prepared sweetened products.

The attentive reader of the public prints in the recent years can greatly extend this humiliating recital if he choose. It is our habit to attach all the blame to the adulterators, and it is difficult to excuse them; but we usually find that there are contributory causes and certainly there must be reasons. Has our daily fare been honest?