ANCIENT COOKERY. 619 



Gi-aruin itself has dropped out of our legacies from this ancient cooker}-, 

 and from those impure times ; but not so all the principles that lay at the 

 foundation of its use. We find them still in the fermentation, the indigesti- 

 bility, and the artificiality of many of our food preparations. By fermenta- 

 tion we have prepared a great many poisonous drinks ; we have destroyed 

 much nutrition in bread and bread preparations ; spoiled many good fraits 

 and vegetables by making them indigestible, as pickles and sweet pickles, 

 and brandied fruits; but above all, we have inherited so artificial a style of 

 cooking that our cooks study the rules, the recipes, and the cook-books, 

 and never the nature of the materials, only so far as to ascertain their plas- 

 ticity with regard to shape. This tendency to artificiality is one of the 

 greatest misfortunes now in our cookery. It so dominates us that we have 

 very little thought of originality. Women who can invent fashions, trim up 

 or make their own bonnets out of old materials, and make over dresses to 

 look good as new, scarcely ever get up a new dish for their tables. If they 

 do chance to vary an old style, under the force of circumstances, and get a 

 good result, they seldom follow it up and perfect it until they make a new 

 and permanent dish. And this is largely because they do not understand 

 the principles of cookery or the harmonies of combination. These harmo- 

 nies are not recognized. They have scarcely seen the light since they were 

 pared into the grotesque shapes that disgraced the Eoman tables and 

 drenched into uniformity of taste with garum and kindred devices. 



A lady who has had long experience of "skilled" English cooks, remarked 

 to me that their dishes were usually attractive in appearance, but disap- 

 pointing to the taste. The French women are more apt in their study of 

 materials, and more enterprising in their combinations; but we have only 

 to look into books like that of Blot to see " two bay-leaves and a sprig of 

 thyme,"' repeated with a frequency that inevitably brings to mind the garum 

 of Apicius. If any thoughtful mind could fail to see the probability ol per- 

 petuating error in the unquestioning uniformity w.ith which v he daughte 

 follows the mother in her cookery, we might trace the descent of still other 

 preparations that have come down to us like the fattened geese livers, the 

 yeast, and other products of fermentation ; but we hope enough has been 

 said to awake a questioning sj^irit which shall refuse to take any recipe or 

 custom merel}' because it ha^s the sanction of age. Anj' abomination sanc- 

 tioned by age is doubly an abomination, and requires greater energy of 

 effort to contest its demands. We do not wish our government or people 

 to copy the excesses of the Eoman people, and certainly in their later days 

 their excesses had everything to do with their artificial and luxurious cook- 

 ery. The bare possibility that in our traditional recipes we may be drink- 

 ing from a fountain so defiled as the Eoman cookery, should lead us to seek 

 for fresher springs and for natural fountains. And if we can learn from all 

 this waywardness some reasons for naturalness and its advantages, it will 

 not be in vain that we have studied for a little while the artificiality of a 

 dominant phase of ancient cookery. — J^dia Coleman in PhrenologicalJournal. 



