Practical gastronomy and culinary dictionary

Ude spoke out, but he spoke for himself, and his w^ords were noble concerning the art of cookery, so far as he and a few others were concerned. Ude was a florid writer, but he made himself felt, and he has probably not been surpassed in self-confidence b}'" any other writer in any other profession. He felt his importance, and acted upon it ; but in the eyes of many he was "only a cook " after all. Ude, however, maintained, and there is much reason in his argument, that to compose an oratorio or opera was an easier feat than to invent a new enlrce, and that a man of the requisite natural endowments could sooner qualify himself to compete wath the Royal Academicians than with the chief operators in cookery. " I shall," he observes, " demonstrate the difficulty of the art by some observations in other arts. Music, painting, and mechanics in general possess professors under twenty years of age, whereas in the iirst line of cooking pre- eminence never occurs under thirty. We see daily at the concerts and academies young men and women who displa}' the greatest abilities, but in our line nothing but the most consum- mate experience can elevate a man to the rank of Chief Professor." The precise age when Ude served his apprenticeship in cooker}- is difficult to state; but this is certain: he was not a youth when he definitively fixed upon the culinary art for his living. Again : " Prescriptions, we must admit, are dispensed by weight and measure ; but dishes owe their virtue to sympath}-, tact, nervous sensibility, and momentary inspirations." "The pharmacist," he continues, with that bombast that rendered him comparatively uninfluential, " is obliged to weigh every ingredient that he employs, as he does not like to taste it ; the cook, on the contrary, must taste often, as the reduction increases the flavour. It would be blind work, indeed, without tasting ; the very best soups in which you have omitted to put salt are entirely without flavour ; seasoning is in cookery what 856 PRACTICAL GASTRONOMY chords are in music ; the best instruments in the hands of the best professors, without their being in tune, are intolerable." Speaking of Gonthier d'Andernach, whom he designates " the Father of Cookery in France," and " a star which shone in the Reformation," Ude exclaims with emotion, "What Bacon was to philosophy, Dante and Petrarch to poetry, Michael Angelo and Raphael to painting, Columbus and Gama to geogTaphy, Copernicus and Galileo to astronomy, Gonthier was in France to the art of cooker3^" That was pretty good for praise ; but he continued, " Gonthier appeared to raise the culinary edifice, as Descartes, a century after him, raised that of philosophy. Both introduced doubt — the one in the moral (or should it be ' social ' 1) and the other in the political world."