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The very first morning after the expiry of the fortnight, when I was in the kitchen with Sarah, giving her instructions about a certain dish as if I had made it twenty times, whereas I had only just learned how from a shilling cookery-book, there came a double knock at the door. I guessed who it must be. "Run, Sarah," I said, "and show Mrs. Morley into the drawing-room."
My Lady Gower and her husband were of independent tastes. Each had their own receipts. It must be remembered that Dr. Johnson said no woman could write a cookery-book; and he threatened to write one himself. And Sir Kenelm had many serious rivals among his own sex. I had thought of Saint-Evremond as warrior and wit, delightful satirist and letter-writer.
"Well, perhaps it is a great deal to expect at your age; but if you read your cookery-book, as I have often said, when you were reading those novels, and learned how to toss up little dishes out of nothing, and make entrées, and so forth, at next to no expense " The tears came into Ursula's eyes at this unjust assault. "Papa," she said, "you ought to know better at your age.
"Oh, I don't think I will this time," said Patty, with that assured little toss of her head which always meant perfect confidence in her own ability. Mancy said nothing, but grunted somewhat doubtfully as Patty went on to describe the beautiful things she intended to have. "I want rissoles," she said, as she turned over the cookery-book, and looked in the index for R. "They're awfully good."
An acquaintance is in possession of an old cookery-book which exhibits the gamut of the fish as it lies in the frying-pan, reducing its supposed lament to musical notation. Here is an ingenious refinement and a delicate piece of irony, which Walton and Cotton might have liked to forestall. The 15th century Nominale enriches the catalogue of dishes then in vogue.
The highest praise which the ancient Romans could express of a noble matron was that she sat at home and span "DOMUM MANSIT, LANAM FECIT." In our own time, it has been said that chemistry enough to keep the pot boiling, and geography enough to know the different rooms in her house, was science enough for any woman; whilst Byron, whose sympathies for woman were of a very imperfect kind, professed that he would limit her library to a Bible and a cookery-book.
I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would. But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn't add up, she said. So she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets.
Other names are given at will by the help of a cookery-book and a French dictionary; but all these soups, at bottom, are attempts to be Julienne soup. The idea of looking on soup "as a vehicle for applying to the palate certain herbal flavours," is remote indeed from the Plain Cook's mind.
And Polly read Mrs. Beaton's Cookery-book with such assiduity, and Maggie carried out her directions with such implicit zeal and good faith, that really most remarkable meals began to grace the Doctor's board.
She had advanced the imaginary omelette to the last stage of culinary progress; and she was now rehearsing the final operation of turning it over with the palm of her hand to represent the dish, and the cookery-book to impersonate the frying-pan. "I've got it," said Mrs. Wragge, nodding across the room at Magdalen. "First put the frying-pan on the dish, and then tumble both of them over."
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