"FIRST CATCH YOUR HARE..."

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 241, 4 February 1944, Page 19

"FIRST CATCH YOUR HARE..."

Not In Mrs. Beeton-But Worse Is

(Written for "The Listener" by "1944")

N a recent article in The Listener the phrase "First catch your hare" seemed to be attributed to Mrs. Beeton, I searched several editions without finding it. Then I came on this in a book of quotations: "First catch your hare-make sure of the preliminaries before you begin to consider the next step." The phrase is attributed to Mrs, Hannah Glasse, author of The Art of Cookery (1747), but it is not to be found there, The basis is probably the instruction "take your hare when it is cased, ie., skinned." Where are we? Lost, of course, but I do not regret my return to Mrs. Beeton -a pathetic figure whom our grandmothers would not let die when she did die, in 1865, at the age of 29, but endowed with a most embarrassing immortality. Listen to this, which is listed under Home Influence in Mrs. Beeton’s book: "The tired man of business returning home after a harassing day, maybe one in which he has had no time to snatch a meal, sorely needs a pleasant, wellcooked, comfortable one to await him. If this be delayed, if hungry, and as a natural consequence. (unless he be superior to masculine failings) cross, small wonder is it if he makes those around him suffer for the fault of the one whose duty it should have been to have provided for his needs. . . . Worse still, it often happens that a hard-working man thus tried goes from his home to his club, or, in a lower social scale, to a public-house, there to get what he should have had in comfort at home, only for the drawback of unpunctuality, A little fault it may be deemed, but oh, housewives, beware of it. Its approaches are

so insidious that it forms a dangerous foe, and one that we should combat with at once and for ever." And with to-day’s prices of furniture in your mind, read how to furnish a small kitchen on £9/12/9:

Then take that recipe for marmalade in which she instructs us to strain the marmalade, add sugar to whatever is left, and use it for jam for the nursery. What a Victorian! The best for those who did not need it, the second-best for those whose future depended on the quality of the food they ate now. Mrs. Beeton has no recipes for children; cooking for them was too unimportant to be considered by people so deeply involved in the mysteries of trussing and cooking game, The greater part of her book is, in fact, filled with meat recipes. The best that can be said for her is that she did not, like Anne Cobbett (1842), recommend "plain rice without egg or butter, made with skim milk and suet or dripping, an excellent food for children;" and then add: "But rice costs something, and my object is to point out to young housekeepers how they can assist the poor with ease to themselves; therefore, I do not urge the use of barley, rice, sugar, curfants, etc., etc." Yet no bride of those days was considered properly married unless a copy of Mrs. Beeton was included among the wedding presents.

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