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The chef here, who obligingly quitted the table and the company to cook our cutlets, was a strikingly handsome man, as so many head-cooks are. The connection between cookery as a fine art and personal beauty I leave to others to discover. I must say that after a considerable acquaintance with these officials I can hardly call to mind any of mean appearance.
It was probably Charles, Duke of Bolton (1698-1722), who was at one time Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and who in the beginning of his ducal career, at all events, resided in St. James's Street, that possessed successively as head-cooks John Nott and John Middleton. To each of these artists we owe a volume of considerable pretensions, and the "Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary," 1723, by the former, is positively a very entertaining and cyclopedic publication. Nott inscribes his book "To all Good Housewives," and declares that he placed an Introduction before it merely because fashion had made it as strange for a book to appear without one as for a man to be seen in church without a neckcloth or a lady without a hoop-petticoat. He congratulates himself and his readers on living in a land flowing with milk and honey, quotes the saw about God sending meat and somebody else sending cooks, and accounts for his omission of pigments by saying, like a gallant man, that his countrywomen little needed such things. Nott opens with Some Divertisements in Cookery, us'd at Festival-Times, as Twelfth-Day, etc., which are highly curious, and his dictionary itself presents the novelty of being arranged, lexicon-wise, alphabetically. He seems to have been a fairly-read and intelligent man, and cites, in the course of his work, many celebrated names and receipts. Thus we have: To brew ale Sir Jonas Moore's way; to make Dr. Butler's purging ale; ale of health and strength, by the Viscount St. Albans; almond butter the Cambridge way; to dress a leg of mutton
Ay, ay, replied Panurge, but the devil's cooks dote sometimes, and are apt to make horrid blunders as well as others; often putting to boil in water what was designed to be roasted on the fire; like the head-cooks of our kitchen, who often lard partridges, queests, and stock-doves with intent to roast them, one would think; but it happens sometimes that they e'en turn the partridges into the pot to be boiled with cabbages, the queests with leek pottage, and the stock-doves with turnips.
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