LADY BARKER ON COOKING.

Globe, Volume I, Issue 75, 27 August 1874, Page 4

LADY BARKER ON COOKING.

[From the Spectator .] Lady Barker has recently appealed, in an unpretending but invaluable little work, to the imagination of two classes of readers, as well as to the common sense of the community ; they are those who do not know anything about cooking—how large and helpless a body need hardly be said—and those who do know something about it. In the minds of the first, the reasoning and the revelations of her surprising book will arouse the decent sense of shame, and at the same time produce deep despondency, for the vistas of human ignorance which it opens up are truly awful ; in the minds of the second a gentle satisfaction will be made to glow that at length there is a chance for their fellow-creatures. If there be a subject in the world upon which to bo ignorant is to be helpless, that subject is cooking. If a justifiable source of pride exists, it is that knowledge which enables a human being to cook his dinner properly, or, if it be improperly cooked for him, to know the reason why. How few of us can truly make that proud boast ? Take a very simple test. How many of the thousand of Lady Barker’s readers have perused her “ Station Life in New Zealand” without an inward conviction that the cooking was the worst part of it, and that if he or she had been in Lady Barker's place, the little party would have run no inconsiderable risk of starvation, notwithstanding the meal and the mutton on the premises! What young (and old) housekeepers have to suffer from cooks is proverbial did not a well-known personage once head a list of causes which might be held to justify suicide by the heads of families with the horrid monosyllable ?—and their sufferings are mostly increased by cookery books, with their exasperating taking for granted of everything in the way of utensils, their calm assumption of unlimited heterogeneous stores in the house, and their easy suggestion of combinations which require to be arranged ever so much in advance

of tho actual day to which its dinner is frequently so lamentably insufficient. How often, if one dared to intrude upon the tender reverie of blue eyes but just unclosed from slumber, to question the fresh morning thoughts of young hearts, with life all fair and bright before them, we should find that “What shall we have for dinner 7” is their engrossing theme. The rabbit in a corner of the cage of the serpent who is about to eat him (uncooked) is hardly an exaggerated image of the helplessness of the ardinary young matron in the presence of the ordinary middle-class cook; and the ignominy of the situation is increased by the pretence of each party of knowing all about it. “ I wish, I wish, I had married into a vegetarian family I” said a mourning bride, whose fondest illusions were going to pieces on the rock of dinner ; “ they can’t possibly make such an awful mesa of vegetables. It’s the meat that’s so horrible.” There was some truth in that remark, but even vegetarians have their troubles, boiled caterpillars among their cauliflowers being not absolutely unknown. It is useless to dwell upon the extent and übiquity of this universal grievance ; everybody will admit that dinner is a dreadful thing, sometimes to eat, and always, except in the case of lofty and indisputable vocations, to order. But what is it to cook. Lady Barker knows, and though she is most persuasive in her admonitions, and throws in the daintiest flavour of coaxing, especially where the cleanliness of the kitchen department is concerned —reminding us, with her charming appeals to “ everyone’s good sense,” of mama’s unfailing conviction that “ Katey is going to be such a good girl, as she always is ! ” —she does not try to persuade us that cooking is easy, or pleasant, or anything but an onerous and important branch of human industry, to whose exercise a certain amount of knowledge concerning the human frame and the components of its food is indispensable. Serious and simple as every line of the wise little book is, there lurks in it a humorous sense that the people she most hopes to benefit will learn the facts which she presses upon their attention against their will, like the young lady who, having been taken to hear a lecture by a distinguished professor of chemistry, declared she was very sorry that she had gone, because the horrid man said people were chemical combinations; and if her Edwin was nothing better than that, she could only say she would rather not know it. It is quite clear that the continuance of the almost universal ignorance on the subjects of which Lady Barker treats, would be an evil of such enormous. magnitude that it must be combated by every means. She has taken what ought to be a most efficient one, and which will undoubtedly prove a valuable auxiliary to the National School of Cookery at South Kensington, an institution which deserves public gratitude and energetic support. Her book is not exactly a cookery book, though it contains some valuable, because quite simple and practical instructions for the cooking of certain articles of food, but it is a plain summary of the chemical composition and the relative nutritive value of the various sorts of food within our reach, and the first principles of their preparation for use. She goes about her teaching admirably, calling on people to make up their minds that the “ good old times,” with their good old prices, will never come back again, and that their true wisdom is to learn how cheerfully and bravely to face the increased cost of the necessaries of life ;—“lf food and fuel cost nearly twice as much at present,” she says, “as they did ten years ago, then surely it becomes our imperative duty to see how we can, each of us, according to our possibilities, make the materials for warmth and cooking go twice as far as they have done hitherto. Nor, in making such an attempt, are we blindly groping in the dark, feeling our way step by step along the unaccustomed paths of scientific experiment. It has all been done for us whilst we were stupidly spending our capital, by men whose clear sight could discern the dark days ahead, men who have, many of them, gone to their rest, before the dawn of those dark days, but who have left behind them clear instructions how to make the most of certain necessary substances whose increasing value they foresaw twenty or thirty years ago. If, therefore, we have the common sense to avail ourselves of the results of these researches and experiments, which are still carried on day after day by worthy successors of the great practical chemists I speak of, it is quite possible we may so utilise their information as to make our available material go a great deal further. Let us try a few grains of science and a few more of common sense, and see what the practical result will be.”