WANTED,—A GOOD COOK.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume II, Issue 127, 26 June 1863, Page 3

WANTED, —A GOOD COOK.

(From the (Canterbury) Press, June 1.) The relation between cooks and doctors is muck the same as that between jackals and lions: the cook creates the disease on which the doctor fattens. If the little doses which a doctor recommends us to put down our throats are supposed to have such a magical effect on the human frame, shall we say that those ingredients which we supply to our insides morning, noon, and night, day by day, week by week, and year by year, have no important influence on the economy of humau'dife. t Not long ago we were woke from a profound sleep on an exceedingly frosty morning with the intelligence that our machinery would not work and the publication of the paper was stopped. On sending for the machine doctor he discovered that the oil in one of the bearings had thickened and clogged, some iron fragments had got separated from the surface and had cut into the bearing, and so the whole mass had become immovable. This is a good illustration of what takes place in the human frame. We put food into our stomachs ; the machine within us has to melt it down with acids, analyse it, assimilate it into the system, manufacture it into blood, bone,muscle, nerve, flesh, or what not, and cast off the portions not required for use. Now if we put stuff into us which resists the alchemy of the

stomach, we give the machine double the work to do. We not only compell it to leave its work incomplete, but we injure the machine itself, so that it becomes more and more incapable of getting through its functions, and then there is exhibited the commonest form of disease— indigestion. It is not one tough beef steak or half boiled potatoe which does the mischief, bat the habitual long-continued compulsion which we exercise over our stomachs to do that which our stomachs can’t do, which as in the case of the printing machine, gradually increases the friction, until the additional force put on to get the work done any how, finally injures somepartof the organism. If this were impressed on the public belief, would it be consistent with common sense that we should put our lives, our health, the happiness of existence, the welfare of our families, into the custody of a class for the most part wholly uneducated in their duties ?

The physician looks on his profession as an honorable and glorious one. The power of relieving human suffering must always be one of the most gratifying to a generous mind. But how many cooks regard their profession in the same light ? How many look on themselves as entrusted with the health of those whose food they prepare? How many think of their labors as of noble and honorable work: quite as noble, if they only knew it, as those of the physician.

Men who live lives of hard labor out of doors, and w r ho are gifted with mighty capaciey of digestion and with large stores of vital power, do not feel the evil as those of feebler frame ; but we speak in behalf of the poor; those who lead sedentary lives, needlewomen and house-servants, and men who work with hand and brain in quiet and skilful occupations. There were multitudes of these who cannot digest coarse and ill prepared food, who turn from it with disgust, who do not eat enough for health, because they have no appetite, as it is called—in other words, who obey the instinct of nature not to swallow what they cannot digest. To all these good cooking is so many years of life added ; coarse food is the bad oil which clogs the machine and brings it to a stop before its time.

Cooking is a science: and more—a medical science. It is but one branch of medicine, and in any country which deserves the name of being civilised, it ought to be so regarded. In the curious and mysterious construction of the human frame we have an especial power given—we call it taste —to enable us to distinguish what is nice from what is nasty. As in all other of our capacities this taste is capable of education, of refinement, or of abuse. A crude and cynical morality teaches us to neglect the education of this power ; we are told as children not to cave so much for eating, whereas a true estimate of the gifts of Providence would teach us to care in the highest degree for eating. A truly educated taste in food would be a taste which taught us to eat, in quantity and quality, what was wholesome, aud to reject what was deleterious. A really civilised man would see ever reflected from his plate so much more life, so much more work, energy, strength, will, success. We appeal to the drunkard, that he is depriving himself of the means of doing the task he has been sent into the world to do, by enfeebling his frame and degrading bis mind. Extend the same reasoning to all food; and if headaches, spleen, ill-temper, feverishness, restlessness, incapacity for work as well as for rest, general uselessness and uncomfortableness, be things to be avoided by men who desire to realize the highest ideal of human life, let ns be sure of this — we must make cooking a science, and put an end to the idea that an uneducated person is fit to be entrusted with the sources of human existence.

If this is true everywhere—and though some may think it an exaggerated mode of stating a truth, yet truth it must he—what shall we say here? How many of these young ladies (we believe we must call the dear creatures so) who come out here to fake service, as it is called, have any acquaintance whatever in the art of cooking ? They will tell you in an oft’ hand manner that they can cook “ in a plain way,” whilst at the same time the manner in which they “ make broad their phylacteries” below, and carry the feathers in their pork pie hats may suggest that doing anything in “ a plain way ” is hardly in their line; but how many can really cook a wholesome dinner? Good cooking does not consist in sending up a number of dishes with Gallic names, which the cook understands as little as the guests, or concealing honest meat in greasy, ill-com-pounded sauces. A woman who can send up a common batter pudding as light as a

souffle or a plain mutton chop, done throughout, succulent with gravy without grease, in color a rich brown, entirely unhurnt, and as tender as a sucking pig, that woman is a firstrate cook if she never made a French dish in her life. We have heard of a woman who hired herself out as a “good plain cook” in this colony proceeding to put a fowl down to roast with the feathers on. That enlightened young woman no doubt pursued her career, scattering indigestion on all sides, and laying the seeds of disease with all the courage of ignorance and all the fatality of a cholera patient.