178 FOOD AND COOKERY 



versation with your hostess, you find that she knows nothing 

 whatever about even the simplest elements of the prepara- 

 tion of food. She tells you she avoids roasting because it 

 necessitates a large fire and an extra expenditure of ,$ a 

 year on coal, and she also purchases those mouldy, frost- 

 bitten potatoes instead of the best, because they cost half 

 as much as sound ones and she herself does not care 

 for potatoes. They are fattening ! 



Sometimes at a restaurant or club, served by a foreign 

 " chef," a Yorkshire pudding, as hard as a stale loaf of 

 bread, is handed round in slabs with the so-called " roast " 

 beef. It is not roasted : it is baked beef, and the pudding 

 is an ill-tasting baked mess, also. Nowhere in London in 

 public or private house do I ever see the properly cooked 

 article. True Yorkshire pudding can only be made by 

 placing it under the reasting joint, which drips digestion- 

 promoting essences into the pudding whilst itself rotating, 

 hissing and spluttering as did the joints roasted in the 

 caves long ago by the prehistoric Reindeer men. The 

 scientific importance of good roasting and grilling is that 

 a savour is thereby produced which sets the whole gastric 

 and digestive economy of the man who sniffs it and tastes 

 it, at work. Possibly our successors, a generation or two 

 hence, will have learnt to do without it, and will have 

 acquired as intimate and happy a gastronomic relation to 

 what now are for us the nauseous flavours of super-heated 

 fat (rarely renewed), and of the all-pervading gravy fabri- 

 cated by chemical treatment of yeast, as that which 

 we ourselves have acquired in regard to the old-established 

 and painstaking cookery of the early Victorian and many 

 preceding ages. 



Medical men who are occupied as specialists with the 

 study of very young children have clearly demonstrated 

 that the implanting of tastes, tendencies and habits in 

 infants of from two to eight years of age has an immense 



