The Cult of the Chafing Dish

“What does cookery mean? It means the knowledge of Medea, and of Circe, and of Calypso, and of Helen, and of Rebekah, and of the Queen of Sheba. It means knowledge of all herbs, and fruits, and balms, and spices, and of all that is healing and sweet in groves, and savoury in meat. It means carefulness and inventiveness, watchfulness, willingness, and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your Great-grandmother, and the Science of modern chemistry, and French art, and Arabian hospitality. It means, in fine, that you are to see imperatively that every one has something nice to eat.”

The·cult·
of·the·
Chafing·
Dish·

BY·
FRANK·
SCHLOESSER·

LONDON
GAY·AND·BIRD
1905

Published	May 1904
Second Edition	March 1905

THE ONLY WOMAN

WHO COULD TURN

ME FROM

BACHELORDOM

[Pg 1]

THE·CULT·OF·THE·CHAFINGDISH···

CHAPTER·1·THE·CHAFING·DISH

“There does not at this blessed moment breathe on the Earth’s surface a human being that willna prefer eating and drinking to all ither pleasures o’ body or soul.”—The Ettrick Shepherd.

Every bachelor has a wife of some sort. Mine is a Chafing Dish; and I desire to sing her praises.

My better half—I love to call her Chaffinda, and to dwell upon the doubled consonant—is a nickel-plated dish on a wrought-iron stand, with a simple spirit-lamp wherewith to keep herself warm. I bought her at Harrod’s Stores for twelve shillings and ninepence—and she has sisters.

It has been borne in upon me that many quite nice folk may be glad to learn something of the possibilities of Chaffinda. Whether married or single, there are moments in the life of nearly every man and woman when the need of a quick, hot, and light little meal is worth much fine gold. To such I would politely address myself.

The ordinary domestic cook is a tireless enemy of the Chafing Dish. She calls it “fiddle-faddle.” Maybe. But inasmuch as it is clean, economical, speedy and rather simple, it would naturally not appeal to her peculiar sense of the culinary art.

To bachelors, male and female, in chambers, lodgings, diggings, and the like, in fact to all who “batch”; to young couples with a taste for theatres, concerts, and homely late suppers; to yachtsmen, shooting-parties, and picnickers; to inventive artists who yearn for fame in the evolution of a new entrée; to invalids, night workers, actors and stockbrokers, the Chafing Dish is a welcome friend and companion.

It has its limitations, of course, but they are few and immaterial, and its obvious[Pg 3] advantages and conveniences far outweigh its trivial drawbacks. At the same time it must be remembered that it is a serious cooking apparatus, and by no means a mere toy.

It is quite erroneous to imagine that the Chafing Dish is an American invention. Nothing of the sort. The earliest trace of it is more than a quarter of a thousand years old. “Le Cuisinier Français,” by Sieur François Pierre de la Varenne, Escuyer de Cuisine de Monsieur le Marquis d’Uxelles, published in Paris in 1652, contains a recipe for Champignons à l’Olivier, in which the use of a Réchaut is recommended. A translation of this work, termed “The French Cook,” was published in London in 1653, and the selfsame recipe of Mushrooms after the Oliver contains the injunction to use a Chafing Dish; moreover, the frontispiece, a charmingly executed drawing, shows a man-cook in his kitchen, surrounded by the implements of his art; and on the table a Chafing Dish, much akin to our latter-day variety, is burning merrily. This was in 1653. The Mayflower sailed in 1620.

So much for the antiquity of the Chafing[Pg 4] Dish. At the same time our mitigated thanks are due to America for its comparatively recent reintroduction, for until quite lately, in Great Britain, its use was practically limited to the cooking of cheese on the table. The Chafing Dish is much esteemed across the Atlantic, although one is forced to admit that it is sometimes put to base uses in the concoction of unholy stews, which have not the natural flavour of fish, flesh or fowl, or even good red herring. Still, if the Americans are vague in their French nomenclature, unorthodox in their sauces, eclectic in their flavourings, and over-lavish in their condiments, yet they have at any rate brought parlour cooking to a point where it may gracefully be accepted as an added pleasure to life.

When two or three are gathered together, and one mentions the magic word “Chafing Dish,” the second invariably chimes in with “Welsh Rabbit.” This is an error of taste, but excusable in the circumstances. Chafing Dishes were not created for the exclusive canonisation of Welsh Rabbits, although a deft hand may occasionally play with one in[Pg 5] a lightsome mood. There are other and better uses. All the same, a fragrant and delicate Rabbit is not to be despised, although it must not be made conceited by too great an elevation into the realms of high cookery.

My Chaffinda has at least seventeen hundred and four different charms, therein somewhat exceeding the average number appertaining to her sex, but it would require volumes to mention them separately, and it must suffice to indicate roughly a few of the more prominent.

I suppose that every nation has the cooks that it deserves, and, if this be accepted as an axiom, the general degeneration of the Plain Cook of the middle classes amply accounts for the growing cult of the Chafing Dish. The British school of cookery, in its mediocre form, is monotony exemplified. Too many broths spoil the cook; and hence we derive our dull sameness of roast and boiled.

Sweet are the juices of diversity, and whilst there is no reason for the Chafer to elaborate a sauce of thirteen ingredients, the cunning manipulation of three or four common articles[Pg 6] of the domestic store-cupboard will often give (intentionally or otherwise) surprising results. This I shall hope to explain more fully later on.

Imagination and a due sense of proportion are as necessary in cooking as in any other art—more so than in some, for Impressionism in the kitchen simply means indigestion. Digestion is the business of the human interior, indigestion that of the doctor. It is so easy to cook indigestible things that a savoury cunningly concocted of Bismuth and Pepsine would seem an almost necessary adjunct to the menu (or Carte Dinatoire, as the French Revolutionists called it) of the budding Chafist.

But the demon of indigestion may easily be exorcised with a little care and thought. Three great apothegms should be borne in mind. Imprimis: Never worry your food; let it cook out its own salvation. Item: Use as few highly spiced condiments as possible; and, lastly, keep to natural flavours, juices, and sauces.

Much modern depravity, for instance, I attribute to the unholy cult of Mayonnaise[Pg 7] (or Mahonnaise, or Bayonnaise, or Magnonaise, according to different culinary authorities). At its best it is simply a saucy disguise to an innocent salmon or martial lobster, reminding the clean-palated of an old actor painted up to look young. I once knew a man who proposed to a girl at a dance-supper simply because he could not think of anything else to say, and suddenly discovered that they both hated Mayonnaise. I have no reason to suppose that they are unhappy.

At the same time I am in no wise against trying new dishes, new combinations of subtle flavours, if they do not obliterate the true taste of the basis. An experimental evening with Chaffinda, when one is not sure how things are going to turn out, is, I find, most exhilarating, and a sure cure for the blues. But I am fain to admit that on such occasions I always provide a chunk of Benoist pressed beef as a stand-by in case of emergency.

Another point about having a wife in the shape of a Chafing Dish is somewhat delicate[Pg 8] to explain. Coarsely indicated, it amounts to this. Continuous intercourse with such a delicious, handy and resourceful helpmeet tends to a certain politeness in little things, a dainty courtesy which could not be engendered by the constant companionship of a common kitchen-range. Chafing-Dish cookery bears the same relation to middle-class kitchen cookery that the delightful art of fencing does to that of the broadsword. Both are useful, but there is a world of subtle differentiation between the two. The average rough and tumble of the domestic saucepan contrasts with the deft manipulation of the miniature battery of tiny pans.

And politeness always pays; moreover, it is vastly becoming. I gave a little tea-party recently to some dear children. Some of them were twins. Edith, a female twin of nine, asked me to help her to some more blackberry jam. “Certainly, Edith,” I said; “but why don’t you help yourself?” The maid was even politer than she was hungry: “Because I was afraid I should not take enough.” And thus we learn how things work among manikinkind.

There are some who delight in the flavour of onions. I do myself—but then I am a bachelor. Politeness and onions form one of life’s most persistent inconsistencies. His Most Gracious Majesty King George IV., it is recorded, attempted to kiss a royal housemaid, who said: “Sir, your language both shocks and appals me; besides which, your breath smells of onions!” And again, in a Cambridge dining-room, a framed notice on the wall stated: “Gentlemen partial to spring onions are requested to use the table under the far window.”

Nevertheless, the benefits of onions toward the human race are probably not less than those attendant on the discovery of steam. It is a vegetable whose manifold properties and delights have never been properly sung. As a gentle stimulant, a mild soporific, a democratic leveller of exaggeration in flavour, a common bond between prince and peasant, it is a standing protest of Nature against Art.

On my wall, as I write, hangs a delightful oil study of a clump of onions in flower, which the deft artist aptly dubs Le Fond de la Cuisine. Dr. William King said that[Pg 10] “Onions can make even heirs or widows weep”; and the “Philosopher’s Banquet,” written in 1633, seems to meet the case excellently:

I would not go quite as far as the poet, but I confess to a weakness for chives. A judicious touch to many salads and made dishes is very desirable. Chives are to onions as the sucking-pig is to pork, a baby scent, a fairy titillation, an echo of the great Might Be.

Charles Lamb had a friend who said that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings. In the plural, mind you, not the singular. Appetites have vastly changed since then, probably not for the better, but the test even to-day seems adequate and noteworthy. I do not propose to recommend either onions or apple dumplings as Chafing-Dish experiments, but merely[Pg 11] adduce them as worthy examples of the toothsomeness of simplicity.

The late lamented Joseph, of the Savoy and elsewhere, once said in his wisdom, “Make the good things as plain as possible. God gave a special flavour to everything. Respect it. Do not destroy it by messing.” These are winged words, and should be inscribed (in sugar icing) above the hearthstone of every artist in pots and pans.

The Chafing Dish is a veritable Mephistopheles in the way of temptation. It is so alluringly easy to add just a taste of this or that, a few drops of sauce, a sprinkling of herbs, a suggestion of something else. But beware and perpend! Do not permit your culinary perspective to become too Japanesque in the matter of foreground. Remember your chiaroscuro, take care of the middle distance, and let the background assert its importance in the whole composition. “I can resist anything—except temptation” is the cry of the hopelessly weak in culinary morality.

Lest I should be hereafter accused of contradicting my own most cherished beliefs, let[Pg 12] me hasten here and now to assert that condiments, esoteric and otherwise, were undoubtedly made to be used as well as to be sold; and I am no enemy of bolstering up the weak and assimilative character of—say—veal, “the chameleon of the kitchen,” with something stronger, and, generally speaking, of making discreet use of suave subtleties to give completeness to the picture. But the watchword must always be Discretion! To those who muddle their flavours I would commend the words of the Archbishop in Gil Blas: “My son, I wish you all manner of prosperity—and a little more taste!”

Sidney Smith thought Heaven must be a place where you ate pâté de foies gras to the sound of trumpets. There is a late Georgian ingenuousness about this which is refreshing. The liver of the murdered goose and the scarlet sound of brass! Nowadays a Queen’s Hall gourmet would compare the celestial regions to a continuous feast of Cailles de Vigne braisées à la Parisienne to the accompaniment of Tschaikowsky’s “Casse Noisette” suite, which is more complicated, but perchance not less indigestible.

The typical crude British cookery, if carelessly performed, is a constant menace to its disciples. If well cooked there is nothing more wholesome, save perhaps the French cuisine bourgeoise, but—“much virtue in your If.” As a matter of fact, in nine households out of ten, in the middle-middle classes (and the upper too) the fare is well-intentioned in design, but deadly in execution, with a total absence of care and taste.

There is a curious old book, probably out of print nowadays, which deals tenderly, if severely, with the shortcomings of British cookery. It was published in 1853, and is called “Memoirs of a Stomach, written by Himself.” A typical passage runs: “The English system of cookery it would be impertinent of me to describe; but still, when I think of that huge round of parboiled ox-flesh, with sodden dumplings floating in a saline, greasy mixture, surrounded by carrots, looking red with disgust, and turnips pale with dismay, I cannot help a sort of inward shudder, and making comparisons unfavourable to English gastronomy.”

This is fair comment, and brings me back[Pg 14] to the advantages of the Chafing Dish. An old German fairy tale, I think one of Grimm’s, says: “Nothing tastes so nice as what one eats oneself,” and it is certain that if one cooks so as entirely to satisfy oneself (always supposing oneself to be a person of average good taste), then one’s guests will be equally satisfied—if not more so.

In dealing with Chaffinda we may, after a minimum of practice, be almost certain of results. If one is naturally clean, neat and dainty in one’s tastes, then one’s cooking should display the same characteristics. One’s individuality shines forth in the Chafing Dish and is reflected in one’s sauces. Chaffinda conveys a great moral lesson, and, as a teacher, should not lack in honour and reverence.

The late Prince Consort, being on a visit, wrote to a friend: “Things always taste so much better in small houses”; if one substitutes small dishes for small houses the Prince predicted the Chafing Dish.

The kitchen is the country in which there are always discoveries to be made, and with Chaffinda on a neat white tablecloth before[Pg 15] one, half a dozen little dishes with food in various stages of preparation, a few select condiments, an assortment of wooden spoons and like utensils—and an inventive brain—there are absolutely no limits to one’s discoveries. One is bound by no rule, no law, no formula, save those of ordinary common sense, and though it might be too much to expect to rediscover the lost Javanese recipe for cooking kingfishers’ or halcyons’ nests, the old manner of treating a Hocco, or the true inwardness of “the dish called Maupygernon”; yet there are illimitable possibilities which act as incentives to the enterprising.

There is a Chinese proverb to the effect that most men dig their graves with their teeth, meaning thereby that we all eat too much. This is awfully true and sad and undeniable, and avoidable. The late Lord Playfair asserted that the actual requirements of a healthy man for a seven-day week were three pounds of meat, one pound of fat, two loaves of bread, one ounce of salt, and five pints of milk. What a contrast to the chop-eating, joint-chewing, plethoric individual who averages five meals a day, and does[Pg 16] justice to them all! Sir Henry Thompson says: “The doctors all tell us we eat too fast, and too often, and too much, and too early, and too late; but no one of them ever says that we eat too little.”

The proper appreciation of Chaffinda may ameliorate this, for in using her one speedily becomes convinced of the beauty of small portions, an appetite kept well in hand, and the manifold advantages of moderation. It is easy to feed, but nice eating is an art.

Bishop Wilberforce knew a greedy clergyman who, when asked to say grace before dinner, was wont to look whether there were champagne glasses on the table. If there were, he began: “Bountiful Jehovah”; but if he only espied claret glasses he contented himself with: “We are not worthy of the least of Thy mercies.”

Of course growing children and quite young grown-up folks require proportionately more food than real adults, for they have not only to maintain but to build up their bodies. But to such the Chafing Dish will not appeal primarily, if at all, and they may even be[Pg 17] found impertinent enough to look upon it as a culinary joke, which it is not.

Chaffinda hates gluttons, but takes pleasure in ministering to the modest wants of the discerning acolyte, fostering his incipient talent, urging him to higher flights, and tempting him to delicate fantasies.

“Do have some more; it isn’t very good, but there’s lots of it.” So said a friend of mine to his guests about his half-crown port. This is the sentiment of the man who knows not the Chafing Dish. “Lots of it” is the worst kind of hospitality, and suggests the quantity, not quality, of the cheap-jack kerbstone butcher. Little and good, and enough to go round, is the motto of the tactful house-husband. A French cook once said that it was only unlucky to sit down thirteen at table if the food were but sufficient for twelve.

There is such a deal of fine confused feeding about the ordinary meals of even a simply conducted country house that imagination boggles at the thought of the elaboration of the daily menus. With four, or possibly five, repasts a day, few of them chaste, most[Pg 18] of them complicated, a careful observer will note that the cook has been listening to the pipings of the Great God Sauce, and covers natural flavours with misnamed concoctions which do nothing but obliterate nature and vex the palate.

There are some few houses, great and small, town and country, where the elemental decencies of the kitchen are manfully preserved, where wholesome mutton does not masquerade as Quartier d’Agneau à la Miséricorde, and the toothsome lobster is not Americanised out of all knowing. To such establishments, all honour and glory.

But to those whose means or opportunities do not permit of a carefully trained cook, a home-made artist, I would in all diffidence recommend the cult of the Chafing Dish, whose practical use I now propose to discuss.

[Pg 19]

CHAPTER II·PRELIMINARIES·

Chaffinda’s cooking battery is small, but select. The Chafing Dish proper comprises the stand and lamp, and the dish, called the “Blazer,” which has an ebony handle; and there is an ingenious spirit diminisher which enables one to reduce the flame to a minimum, just enough to keep the flame simmering, or to put it out altogether. A second, or hot water pan, belongs to the outfit, and an asbestos toast-making tray may be bought for a trifle. In addition, a couple of green or brown dishes of French fireproof china, an egg-poacher, a marmite, and[Pg 20] perhaps a casserole, all of which are best from Bonnet in Church Street, Soho, will come in very usefully. To these may be added the usual complement of plates and dishes and several wooden spoons of different sizes; a fish-lifter is also desirable, so is a strainer, and a pair of graters come in very handily. This practically completes the gear of the budding Chafist, though additional items may be added from time to time as occasion demands.

The makers of the Chafing Dish sell a useful methylated spirit can, with a curved spout to fill up the asbestos wick. It will be found that a good filling will burn for thirty to forty minutes, which is ample for all ordinary purposes. Much of course depends on the quality of the spirit used, and, further, the wick will only become thoroughly saturated after half a dozen usings, and will subsequently require rather less spirit. I have found that water boils in the “Blazer,” or handled Chafing Dish, in about ten minutes, and instructions on bottled or preserved food, soups and the like, must be slightly discounted. Thus if one is told to boil for twenty minutes, it will be found that[Pg 21] fifteen minutes in the Chafing Dish will be ample in nearly all cases.

As this is mainly a true story of my own personal adventures among the pots and pans, I can hardly do better than describe the first dish I tried my ’prentice hand upon, with the devout wish that all neophytes may be as successful therewith as I was.

The experiment, the preliminary exercise, if I may so term it, has no name, although it savours somewhat of the Resurrection Pie, unbeloved of schoolboys. Let us call it Beef Strips. Cut three thick slices from a rather well-cooked cold sirloin of beef, cut these again into strips a quarter of an inch wide and about three inches long. Take care that they are very lean. Chop up half a dozen cold boiled potatoes (not of the floury kind) into dice. Put the beef and the potatoes into the Chafing Dish. Light the lamp and see that the heat is steady, but not too strong. Add at once a good-sized walnut of butter, a teaspoon of Worcester sauce, salt[Pg 22] and pepper. For at least ten minutes turn over the mixture continually with a wooden spoon until it is thoroughly heated. Turn it out on to a hot dish, and garnish with half a dozen tiny triangles of toast.

This is a simple luncheon or supper dish which takes little time, and—to my taste at least—is appetising and satisfying. Like all Chafing-Dish preparations, it can be cooked on the table, with no more protection than a tray under the wrought-iron stand, and a square of coloured tablecloth upon your white one to receive possible splashes or drops.

Now for exercise number two, which I have christened Jellied Ham, and commend as a dish very unlikely to go wrong in the manipulation.

Get your flame steady and true, and put a small walnut of butter in the dish. When it is fluid, add a good dessert-spoonful of red currant jelly, a liqueur glass of sherry, and three drops of Tabasco sauce. Drop into[Pg 23] this simmering mixture a few slices of cold boiled ham cut thin and lean, and let it slowly cook for six to eight minutes. If you wish to be extravagant, then instead of the sherry use a full wine-glassful of champagne. It is by no means necessary to eat this with vegetables, but if you insist on the conjunction, I would recommend a purée of spinach, directions for which appear hereafter.

This Jellied Ham is an agreeable concoction, which I find peculiarly soothing as a light supper after having seen an actor-manager playing Shakespeare. This is, however, after all only a matter of taste.

It has always seemed to me that different forms of the drama require, nay demand, different dinners and suppers, according to the disposition in which one approaches them. For instance, before an Adelphi melodrama, turtle soup (mock if necessary), turbot and rump steaks are indicated, whereas a musical comedy calls for an East Room menu, and an Ibsen or G. B. Shaw play for an A.B.C. shop or a vegetarian restaurant respectively. But I only hint at the broad outline of my idea,[Pg 24] which is capable of extension to an indefinite limit.

Vegetarian meals do not appeal to me. There is a sense of sudden and temporary repletion followed shortly afterwards by an aching void, which can only be assuaged by a period of comparatively gross feeding. Besides, judging from the appearance of my vegetarian friends (in whom maybe I am unfortunate) they often seem so much to resemble some of the foods they eat as to render themselves liable to be dubbed cannibals. But this is probably mere prejudice.

To resume the cult of Chaffinda. Here is another dish which I recommend to the beginner. It is a simple mince. Take any remains of chicken or game, pheasant for choice, and mince it (or have it minced) small, but not too small. Never use a mincing machine. Put the mince aside, and mix in the Chafing Dish the following sauce: a full walnut of butter, a tablespoon of flour, and a pinch of salt and pepper; add gradually[Pg 25] about a tumblerful of milk. Keep continually stirring this and cook it well for five minutes, adding three drops of Tabasco sauce and half a tablespoon of Worcester sauce, also a squeeze of a lemon. When it is thoroughly amalgamated throw in the mince and let it get hot without burning. Serve it with toast or very crisp biscuits.

The only objection I know to this mince is that all cold birds, especially cold pheasant, are so excellent that it seems almost superfluous to hot them up. But there are occasions when the gamey fumes from Chaffinda are very alluring, and, after all, it is poor work eating cold cates at midnight, however tempting they might be at breakfast.

Our forebears were unanimous in their praise of the lordly long-tail. In a letter from Sidney Smith to “Ingoldsby” Barham, the worthy cleric says: “Many thanks, my dear Sir, for your kind present of game. If there is a pure and elevated pleasure in this world, it is that of roast pheasant and bread sauce; barndoor fowls for Dissenters, but for the Real Churchman, the Thirty-Nine times articled clerk, the pheasant! the pheasant!”

It should perhaps be mentioned that the making of toast on the Chafing Dish is the easiest of functions. The asbestos tray, already referred to, is placed over the flame, and on the metal side the bread in rounds, triangles, or sippets; a few minutes serve to toast the one side adequately, and on being turned over it can easily be browned through. Mrs. Beeton is loquacious on the art of toast-making, and lays down divers rules, but she knew not Chaffinda. A modern essayist who discourses learnedly and most sensibly on toast, makes a remark in his chapter on breakfasts, which although not entirely germane to my subject, is so true and, to my thinking, so characteristic, that I cannot refrain from quoting it. He is referring to marmalade. “The attitude of women to marmalade,” he says, “has never been quite sound. True, they make it excellently, but afterwards their association with it is one lamentable retrogression. They spread it over pastry; they do not particularly desire it at breakfast;[Pg 27] and (worst) they decant it into glass dishes and fancy jars.”

But this is wandering from the point, which is cookery, not casuistry. Women are never out of place in connection with the good things of the table, although they do not often aspire to the omni-usefulness of the well-meaning, if ill-educated, lady who applied for the position of nurse to one of the field hospitals during the Boer war, and mentioned as her crowning qualification that, “like Cæsar’s wife, I am all things to all men.”

After this little digression it will be well to turn to more serious things—cutlets, for instance. Obtain from the butcher a couple of well-trimmed mutton cutlets, and from the greengrocer sufficient green peas that, when shelled, you will have a breakfast-cupful. Melt a walnut of butter in the Chafing Dish. Into the melted butter drop a tablespoonful of flour and a sprinkling of chopped chives. A teaspoonful of Worcester sauce and three[Pg 28] drops of Tabasco, together with salt at discretion, will suffice for flavouring, and care must be taken that the mixture does not boil. Put in the cutlets, and when they begin to turn brownish add the peas, and half a cupful of milk. About fifteen minutes should cook the meat through if your spirit flame be strong, otherwise it may take somewhat longer. A very good substitute for Worcester sauce, in this connection, is Sauce Robert, which it is unnecessary to manufacture, as it can be bought ready made, and well made too, of the Escoffier brand. With certain meats it is an excellent condiment.

By the way, in some very old cookery books Sauce Robert was termed Roe-Boat sauce, an extraordinary orthographic muddle. An omelette was likewise known as a “Hamlet.”

This suggests the somewhat too sophisticated schoolboy’s description of Esau as “a hairy, humpbacked man, who wrote a book of fables and sold the copyright for a bottle of potash.”

It may be deemed superfluous, and in that case I apologise beforehand, to insist on the[Pg 29] most scrupulous cleanliness in dealing with the Chafing Dish and its adjuncts. Not only should the dish itself be kept spotless and thoroughly scoured, but the stand, the lamp, the implements, and the glass and china should be immaculate. Servants are easily persuaded to look after the cleaning process, and do it with a certain amount of care, but it can do no harm to understudy their duties and add an extra polish all round oneself. It gives one, too, a personal interest in the result, otherwise lacking. I recommend the use of at least three dishcloths, which should be washed regularly and used discreetly. The Chafist who neglects his apparatus is unworthy of the high mission with which he is charged, and deserves the appellation of the younger son of Archidamus III., King of Sparta. Cleanliness is next to all manner of things in this dusty world of ours, and absolutely nothing conduces more to the enjoyment of a mealet that one has cooked oneself than the knowledge that everything is spick and span, and that one has contributed oneself thereto by a little extra care and forethought.

A word of warning here. Never use “kitchen butter,” or “kitchen sherry,” or “kitchen eggs,” or “kitchen” anything else; use the very best you can afford.

An armoury of brooms, brushes, scrubbers, soap and soda is in no way necessary. A couple of polishing cloths and a little, a very little, of one of the many patent cleaners is all that is required. A clear conscience and plenty of elbow-grease does the rest.

The British equivalent of the continental charcutier is of inestimable service to the Chafist. At his more or less appetising emporium, small quantities of edibles can be purchased which are excellently well adapted for the cult of Chaffinda, especially if one be inclined towards the recooking of cold meats, instead of the treatment of them in a raw state. Both have their advantages—and their drawbacks. It is a general, but totally inaccurate, belief that meat once cooked needs only to be hotted up again. Nothing could be more fatal to its flavour and nutriment. A certain amount of the good juices of the meat must inevitably have been lost during the first process, and therefore great care[Pg 31] must be taken in the second operation to tempt forth, and, in some cases, to restore the natural flavour. Cold cooked meat needs long and gentle cooking, a strong clear flame, without sudden differences in temperature, and it may be taken as a general rule that cold meat needs practically as long to cook as raw meat.

For example, take half a dozen slices of cooked tongue, spread on each of them a modicum of made mustard, and let each slice repose for about two minutes in a little bath of salad oil (about enough to cover the bottom of a soup plate). Put the slices one on top of another until they make a compact little heap. Put the heap of tongue between two plates, so as to expel the superfluous oil. Let it remain thus for half an hour. Then put a nutmeg of butter in the blazer, dismember the heap of tongue, and put the slices into the frizzling butter and turn them until they are brown. A little sauce, Worcester, Robert, or Piquant, may be added to[Pg 32] suit individual taste. Serve very hot, with sippets of toast.

I have ventured to christen this dish Browned Tongue, which is simple and descriptive, but every Chafist is entitled to call it what he likes. There is little, if any, copyright in Chafing-Dish titles. Alexandre Dumas, author and cook, protests against the mishandling of names: “Les fantaisies de saucer, de mettre sur le gril, et de faire rôtir nos grands hommes.”

Personally I object to cooking simple fare and then dubbing it à la Quelque chose. Outside the few score well-known, and, so to say, classic titles of more or less elaborate dishes, which are practically standardised, there seems to me to be no reason to invent riddles in nomenclature when the “short title,” as they say in Parliamentary Bills, is amply descriptive.

It has been my ill-fortune to be introduced, at an otherwise harmless suburban dinner, to a catastrophe of cutlets, garnished with tinned vegetables, and to be gravely informed, on an ill-spelt menu, that it was “Cutelletes d’Agneau à la Jardinnier,” which would be[Pg 33] ludicrous, were it not sad. Then how often does the kind hostess, without a punitive thought in her composition, write down Soufflet when she means Soufflé?

But mistakes are easily made, as witness that popular sign of a French cabaret, particularly in the provinces, Au Lion d’Or. If you look carefully at the signboard, you will find a man asleep, the punning name of the hotel implying Au lit on dort.

But the whole question of Menus (Bills of Fare, if you please), and their mistranslation, is too vast to enter upon here, alluring though the subject may be. The language of the restaurant cook, save in especial instances, is as bad, although in a quite different sense, as that of the Whitechapel Hooligan. At the same time, it is absurd to insist upon the literal translation of the untranslatable. “Out of works” for “Hors d’œuvres”; “Soup at the good woman” for “Potage à la bonne femme”; “Smile of a calf at the banker’s wife” for “Ris de veau à la financière”; and, lastly, “Anchovies on the sofa” for “Anchois sur canapé,” are all well enough in their way, but hardly an example to be[Pg 34] followed, although they make “very pretty patriotic eating.”

It would be ridiculous to run away with the idea that because certain folk misuse the language, French should be henceforward taboo at our dinner-tables. Such a notion is ignorant and impossible. But the Gallic tongue should be used with discretion and knowledge, and if the enterprising Chafist invent a new dish of eggs, there is no law to forbid his naming it Œufs à la Temple du Milieu. It would only show the quality of his erudition and his taste. There seems no particular reason why we should not replace Rôti by Roast, Entrée by Remove, and Entremet by Sweet—except that it is not done; it is an affectation of humbug, of course, but the greatest humbug of all humbugs is the pretending to despise humbug.

On revient toujours à son premier mouton—that is to say, let us get back to Chaffinda. The next dish on the experimental programme is “The Alderman’s Walk,” a very old English[Pg 35] delicacy, the most exquisite portion of the most exquisite joint in Cookerydom, and so called because, at City dinners of our grandfathers’ times, it is alleged to have been reserved for the Aldermen. It is none other than the first, longest and juiciest longitudinal slice, next to the bone, of a succulent saddle of mutton, Southdown for choice, and four years old at that, though this age is rare. Remove this slice tenderly and with due reverence from the hot joint, lay it aside on a slice of bread, its own length, and let it get cold, thoroughly cold. Then prepare in the Chafing Dish a sauce composed of a walnut of butter, a teaspoon of Worcester, three drops of Tabasco, three chopped chives, and an eggspoon of made mustard. Stir these ingredients until the amalgamation is smooth and complete. Then take the bread, which should have absorbed a good deal of the juice from under the Alderman’s Walk, cut it into strips, and lightly toast the strips. Drop the meat into the sauce, and let it cook for eight minutes, turning it once, that is, four minutes for each side. Slide it out on to a hot dish, put the toast round it, eat it in a hurry, and[Pg 36] thank your stars that you are alive to enjoy it. This is a dish which has few equals and no superiors. It is simple, innocent, toothsome, satisfying, and several other things.

Something like it, but lacking its artistic severity, may be found in Alexandre Dumas’ Great Dictionary, but it is complicated with eccentric accessories; there is a turbulent confused foreground to it which effectually conceals the mutton, but then, of course, poor Dumas, although he knew and appreciated, could rarely obtain the real Southdown.

At the time that the great author was overwhelmed with commissions for novels, after the enormous success of “The Three Musketeers” and other masterpieces, he was commonly understood to put books in the market which were written by Auguste Maquet, and merely signed by himself. Dumas, as is well known, was a great amateur cook, and in fact prided himself more on his dishes than on his novels. One day he invited the famous Aurelien Scholl to dinner, and put before him a salmon mayonnaise which he—Dumas Père—had made with his own hands. “Taste that, Scholl,” he said, “and tell me how you like it.”

Scholl tasted it and made a wry face. “Really, Dumas,” he replied, “I think it must be by Maquet.”

Having been thus trained by the recipes here given, it seems reasonable to suppose that the Chafist is able, after a profound study thereof, to appreciate the possibilities of the Chafing Dish, and may therefore be permitted to dip as he listeth into the various recipes which follow, none of which are complicated or expensive, and most of which require little, if any, previous preparation. At the same time I would most earnestly beg the Chafist carefully to rehearse all his impromptu effects, and never to leave anything to chance. Always have your condiments, your garnishings, your “fixings,” as the Americans say, ready to hand. Let the manipulation of the Chafing Dish partake of that Art which conceals Art—simply because everything is foreseen, and nothing postponed till the last moment. Let your parsley be ready chopped, your toast ready cut, your lemon duly cleaned, your spare dishes hot and ready, and, lastly, your apparatus in thorough working order. You may then proceed in all good faith and earnestness.

[Pg 38]

CHAPTER·III SOUPS·

“Soup is to a dinner what a portico is to a palace, or an overture to an opera.”

Grimod de la Reynière.

“While there’s life there’s soup,” said an irreverent parodist, but as a matter of fact the reverse of the proverb would be more true, for, of a verity, while there’s soup there’s life. There can be no complaint of having dined badly, or even insufficiently, if one has begun with a plateful of good soup; good, mind you, with some strength and body to it, for the coloured hot water that masquerades too often as soup is unworthy and despicable. But soup that has character, individuality, and belies not its name, is to the nice eater almost a meal in itself.

There are practically no soups beyond the scope of the Chafing Dish, albeit some of the more elaborate bisques, a bouillabaisse (an that be a soup), and a pink Bortsch, have not come within my experimental experience. The ordinary French consommé, which may be likened to our gravy soup, is practically the foundation of most clear soups. One meets on different bills of fare with a score of variations on the theme, such as Printanier, Brunoise, Paysanne, Julienne, Mitonnage, Croûte au Pot, Faubonne, Macédoine, Chiffonade, Flamande, and many more, but they are really only a matter of flavouring and vegetable decoration upon a foundation of good stock. An old French cookbook, dated 1822, lies before me, which contains one hundred and two recipes for soups, but the first one mentioned, the Potage au Naturel, is the Mother Soup of all the rest.

The veritable chef has his store of Mother Soup, and that is his kitchen Stock Exchange whence practically all his varieties emanate.

The Chafing Dish votary cannot construct his own Mother Soup and keep up his own stock-pot, but he can use the many excellent[Pg 40] preserved soups, in bottles and boxes, which nowadays are absolutely equal to those which are self-manipulated or home-made.

I have tried many brands, and really think that there is not very much to choose between them. For ordinary use I lean to the Maggi preparations, the “Cross-Star Soups.” They are in tablets, each sufficient for two persons, and the White Haricots, Onion, Tapioca, Chervil, Sago, Semolina, Lentil, Parmentier, Sorrel, Barley, Rice and Julienne are quite excellent.

The method of procedure is simplicity itself. The tablet is broken into fragments in a cup or a bowl and mixed into a thin paste with a little cold water. Then heat a pint of water in the Chafer to boiling, pour in the mixture, and let it cook gently, not boiling, for fifteen to twenty minutes. Each tablet has its own particular directions on the wrapper, and I have found that they apply equally to the Chafing Dish, except that the time required is rather shorter than that mentioned, owing to the greater heat. The flavour of the soups can be enhanced by a few drops of sauce, a sprinkling of Paprika[Pg 41] pepper, half a wineglass of sherry, or a dash of Tabasco; but this is a matter of individual taste. The tapioca, sago, and semolina soups are particularly good, and I do not find that they require the addition of any salt, although this again is a purely personal affair. A beaten-up raw egg put into the soup and well stirred up just before serving makes it richer and suaver, but is by no means necessary.

By the way, in cooking soups, as indeed in all Chafing-Dish cookery, I cannot too earnestly insist upon the use of wooden spoons for all stirring manipulations. Metal spoons, even silver, are abhorrent to the good cook. Wooden spoons are clean, cheap, and thoroughly efficient. The fancy-dress-ball cook (“Cordong blew” he generally calls himself) always wears one in his apron, but if he only knew it, the wooden spoon (apart from examination awards) is his surest title to honour as a true maître de bouche. The Spanish Estudiantina also wear a wooden spoon in their black tricorne hats, but this, I understand, only means that they are poor and hungry, and glad to dip their spoon in[Pg 42] any one’s mess of Puchero, in order to enjoy a square meal.

Pea soup is a great invention. Not the Purée aux Petits Pois (good as that may be) of the chefiest of chefs, but the plain, good, thick, flavoursome pea soup which is as nourishing as it is soothing and satisfying. I find that Chaffinda’s favourite is Brand’s Consolidated Pea Soup, which sounds like a gold mine, but is really a sort of Erbswurst, only better. It is sold in dainty little tins at an absurdly cheap price. One little tin makes two good platesful. It is prepared by mixing the contents to a thick paste with water. To this paste add a pint of cold water, put it all in the Chafing Dish, and boil it for about twelve to fifteen minutes until it gets thick. To make it even better, add a sprinkling of dried mint and a handful of toast dice, browned with butter, and you have a feast for hungry gods on a cold day.

Another way: instead of using mint and toast, cut half a dozen thin slices from a[Pg 43] Brunswick sausage, peel off the rind and drop them in the soup when it is half cooked. The mixture is very toothsome.

From small things to great: from the common and strictly garden pea to the Aldermanic and luscious turtle. Most turtle importers make their own preserved turtle, which is sometimes good and always expensive. For Chafing-Dish purposes I prefer the Concrete Turtle Tablets made by Levien and Sherlock, of 68 Harbour Street, Kingston, Jamaica. They are to be had at the Army and Navy Stores. Each little cake is enough for two moderately greedy people, and costs one shilling.

Put in the Chafing Dish a good pint of water, which bring to the boil; add salt and pepper (Paprika for choice) to taste. Cut the turtle tablet into pieces, or if it is too hard, as is often the case in winter, break it up into eight or ten lumps. Throw these into the boiling water and keep on stirring until they dissolve and the soup becomes[Pg 44] clear. This takes some little time, but it is worth waiting for. Add a squeeze of lemon juice, a wine-glass of sherry, and a teaspoon of Worcester sauce. Give a final stir to these ingredients, and serve it up steaming hot.

There is extraordinary reviving power about a basin of good turtle soup, and, as I think I have shown, it is quite a mistake to deem it an expensive luxury. Abraham Hayward, Q.C., in his inimitable book, “The Art of Dining,” which were originally Quarterly Review articles on Police Magistrate Walker’s “Original” (1835), says that “Turtle Soup from Painter’s in Leadenhall Street is decidedly the best thing in the shape of soup that can be had in this or perhaps in any other country.” And if an Alderman, a Queen’s Counsel, a Police Magistrate—and Chaffinda—agree on this point, who shall say them nay?

The student of mid-Victorian ballads will remember, too, the touching allusion to turtle soup in “Ferdinando and Elvira,” by one Bab, where the hero searches for the cracker-motto poet, and at last unearths him at a confectioner’s where he has ordered soup:

But this was, on reflection, probably mock turtle soup, no bad thing either, vide Alice’s interview with the Gryphon. It lives, when cold, in a basin, and is set hard and is therefore wavable.

American soups are not to be despised. On the contrary, they make most excellent good eating—or drinking; which is it? do we eat or drink soup? An American book of etiquette says, “Never chew your soup, always swallow it whole.”

Anyhow I have tried, and found good, Clam Chowder, Clam Broth, Chicken Gumbo, Okra, Terrapin, and Vegetable Soups. They are in tins, against which I confess I am prejudiced, but as yet I am totally unpoisoned, and I am told that there is a possibility of their being shortly put up in bottles. Each tin has full instructions, and these are quite applicable to the Chafing Dish, care always being taken not to boil the soup, but to heat it gently and continuously. The Clam Chowder and Clam[Pg 46] Broth are both quite excellent, of a distinct individual flavour, cheering, and, I opine, wholesome. They have a peculiar cachet of their own, and lend a certain Transatlantic originality to an otherwise banal Chafing-Dish luncheon.

These and other American provisions I procure from Jackson’s in Piccadilly. They are well “packed,” and adapt themselves excellently to unexpected calls on a limited larder. Their variety is infinite, and their flavour remains good and true. Tinned Broadway in London is a pleasant experience. There are other American delicacies, to which reference will be made in due course, which adapt themselves admirably to Chafing-Dish idiosyncrasies. Columbus’ patent egg is not the only culinary innovation from the New World, but the average British cook is so ignorantly conservative and abhorrently Chauvinistic that she dreads novelty as she dreads the Devil.

Poor Man’s Soup, as the French call it, is[Pg 47] a very restorative dish after a bad day on the Stock Exchange, although there is little of the Poor Man about it save the name.

Put a finely-shredded onion and a walnut of butter in the Chafing Dish and fry to a light brown colour, then add a heaped teaspoonful of flour and stir well; pour in a pint of stock, add pepper and salt to taste. Peel and slice a potato and scatter it in the soup; let the mixture come to a boil, and then allow it to simmer for ten minutes. Just before serving stir into it the yolk of an egg, well beaten up, and a dozen sippets of dry toast. This is a soothing and easy soup, but it requires the stockpot, unless you make use of one of the many varieties of concentrated bouillon or beef-tea, which certainly save a lot of trouble.

Another simple soup, which moreover has the advantage of not requiring stock, is Palestine or Jerusalem Artichoke soup. By the way, we misname this vegetable strangely. It was imported into Great Britain from[Pg 48] Italy, and being the tuber of a variety of sunflower, is there termed Girasole, because the flower turns to the sun. We, in our insular ignorance, corrupted Girasole to Jerusalem, and then, wishing to refine the latter word, committed a further solecism by calling the soup made therefrom Palestine soup. Could any little exercise in culinary etymology be more ridiculous, or more typical?

Pick out six good-sized Jerusalem artichokes, boil them in the Chafing Dish with a pinch of salt; when quite soft, put them through a fine sieve and place the extract on one side. Then put a pint of milk in the dish and boil it with a teaspoonful of Paprika pepper, two cloves and a dash of nutmeg, and a couple of sprigs of parsley. Let it boil up for a minute and then strain it, and also put it aside. Melt a walnut of butter in the dish and stir into it a dessert-spoonful of corn-flour, to which add the strained milk, and, lastly, the artichoke extract, keeping the spirit-lamp flame low, so that the mixture shall not boil. When it has simmered for five minutes and become thoroughly amalgamated the soup is ready to serve, and very good it is,[Pg 49] or ought to be, if the cooking has been artfully and carefully carried out.

Carrot Soup is not only excessively nice and nourishing, but it has also a curious historical interest. The best French carrots come from the neighbourhood of Creçy, and Carrot Soup is therefore generally known as Creçy Soup. Now the famous battle of that name, where Edward the Black Prince won his three-feather badge and motto of Ich Dien, was fought on Saturday, August 26, 1346, and Court gossip relates that to this day the Prince of Wales has Creçy Soup for dinner every 26th of August. I am unable to verify the statement, but trust that it may be true; anyway it is a pretty fable.

To make Carrot Soup, cut up three or four fair-sized carrots into thin round slices, put them in the Chafing Dish with a wineglass of sherry, two cloves, a sprinkling of nutmeg, and a good bunch of parsley; pour over it a cupful of stock and let it nearly boil, but not quite. When the carrots are[Pg 50] quite soft and almost pulpy, mash them well in a soup-plate and, discarding anything hard in the mixture, replace it in the Chafer with two more cups of stock, a teaspoon of sugar, and just before it boils drop in a walnut of butter, and take it off the flame. Toasted dice are the usual accompaniment, and the soup, if well concocted, is very hard to beat for honest, toothsome fare.

The menus of three Buckingham Palace dinners tell me that his Majesty the King partook of Bisque d’Ecrevisse on May 30, 1902, of Clear Turtle or Cold Consommé on June 2, and of Consommé Riche on June 13. The second of these quotations is from the interesting programme of the fare offered to the members of the Jockey Club at the King’s Derby Dinner, one item of which was Cassolettes à la Jockey Club, presumably a creation of his Majesty’s chef, Monsieur Ménager.

President Loubet was less lucky when he went on his visit to Algiers in April 1903. After a review of ten thousand native horsemen at Krieder, he was tendered a native banquet by the chiefs, which began with[Pg 51] Locust Soup. But even this is not so unappetising as the recipe of a Monsieur Dagin, an entomologist, for Cockroach Soup. It is made thus: “Pound your cockroaches in a mortar; put them in a sieve and pour in boiling water or beef-stock. Connoisseurs prefer this to real bisque.” Possibly; but I do not recommend it for the Chafing Dish.

On the other hand, real bird’s-nest soup is a great luxury. As Consommé aux Nids d’Hirondelles it occasionally appears on a menu; and the Chinese, I understand, call it Yen-War-Gung. There is a subtle taste of the sea in the gelatinous lining of the swallow’s nest, which is exquisite and delicate. The Japanese make a soup from black seaweed, but I cannot speak of it from experience. There lies before me a curious Latin menu of a feast given by, or to, certain German professors whose culinary Latin seems to me to be a trifle canine. Two lines of it read “Sorbitio cum globulis jecoralibus et lucanicis,” and “Jus et linguis bovinis factum cum panificio.” These I take to mean liver soup with sausage, and ox-tongue soup with bread.

But esoteric food-stuffs are more interesting for their quaintness than for any intrinsic merit, and I prefer to turn to the degustation of a Potage Germiny, for instance. This is the invention of the great Casimir, of the Maison d’Or, who has placed it on record that “the happiest day of my life was the day on which I invented the Potage Germiny. It is made of sorrel, the yolks of eggs, and cream. It was for a dinner given by the Marquis de Saint-Georges, the author of ‘Les Mousquetaires de la Reine.’ I had racked my brains to discover something wonderful, unique; and finally I evolved the potage. When the Marquis had tasted it he sent for me. I never saw a man more moved. He threw his arms around me and exclaimed in unutterable accents: ‘Casimir, this is not a soup; it is a masterpiece!’”

William the Conqueror had a cook called Tezelin, who one day served him with a white soup called Dillegrout. His Majesty was so pleased that he made Tezelin Lord of the Manor of Addington. Good cooks[Pg 53] were appreciated thenadays. But we have lost the recipe for Dillegrout.

Attempts have often been made to cook according to ancient recipes, but rarely with success. The curious in these matters may be referred to Smollett’s observations in “Peregrine Pickle” on certain experiments to cook practically according to the recipes of Apicius. They ended disastrously.

A last word on soup. The French cuisine bourgeoise (the best in the world) believes in good strong meat for its soups, and not, as we erroneously suppose, makes shift—and good shift too—out of any odds and ends; “any old thing,” as the Americans say. On the contrary, pour faire sourire le pot-au-feu (delightful expression!) you must have good material, and plenty of it.

[Pg 54]

CHAPTER·IV·FISH·

“In a restaurant, when a waiter offers you turbot, ask for salmon, and when he offers you a sole, order a mackerel; as language to man, so fish has been given to the waiter to disguise his thoughts.”—P. Z. Didsbury.

The fish of Great Britain is, beyond all manner of doubt, the very best in the world. It is, therefore, only right and proper that its original flavour should be preserved by simply boiling or frying it, and eating it with what some of the old cook-books call its “Analogies,” which presumably means its traditional accompaniments: lemon, brown bread and butter, and so much as may be of its own liquor, or a Court Bouillon of the simplest. There are so many ways of spoiling fish that the Chafer can never go[Pg 55] far wrong if he rejects all but the most primitive, although it is not necessary to revert to the aboriginal braising upon the hot ashes of a nearly extinct wood fire, without the intervention of any implement of stone or earthenware whatever. This method is, however, still in practice to-day in many parts of Portugal (and possibly elsewhere) before the doors of the houses of the wage-earners, and in the taverns of the commoner folks.

Without going to extremes, there is a decent self-respecting kind of cookery, to the value and charm of which the great Carême refers in his “Cuisinier Français” (1828), and which he calls, appropriately enough, le genre mâle et élégant.

The genius of Carême, however, occasionally led him to a state of self-appreciation which is supreme in its bathos. He says, for instance, in a kind of retrospect of his contributions to the culinary art: “I contemplated from behind my ovens the kitchens of India, China, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, and I felt their ignoble fabric of routine crumbling[Pg 56] under my critical blows.” These are, indeed, “prave ’orts!”

Herrings are extraordinarily healthy—and cheap. They are caught by the million—who also eat them; and whether fresh or dried, raw or salted, they are one of Nature’s delicacies. Fresh herrings offer the largest amount of nutriment for one penny of any kind of animal food. A fresh herring weighing 4½ ozs. contains 240 grains of carbon and 36 grains of nitrogen; and a dried herring weighing 3 oz. contains 269 grains of carbon and 41 grains of nitrogen. It is obvious by this what smoking will do by decreasing weight and increasing nutriment.

Red herrings are by no means to be despised, though it is a mistake to imagine that they are caught in a state of redness. In that fine old book, “The Yarmouth Fisherman,” which is not much read nowadays, piscator says to the tourist: “Sir, we lay ourselves out to oblige all the gents that come from London, but we cannot make a red herring swim.”

Thereanent is a quaint signboard outside[Pg 57] the Schifferhaus in the old Hanseatic town of Lübeck, one of the most beautiful taverns in the world, and the haunt of old sea-dogs since the sixteenth century. The signboard represents a fisherman and two amateurs angling from a boat; the former has caught a fine kipper and the latter are looking supremely disgusted. The legend under the picture runs: “One Cannot Please Everybody.”

Kippers and their kin have never lacked admirers, and it is on record that the Emperor Charles V. made a pilgrimage to the tomb of the venerable Dutchman who is supposed to have invented pickled herrings.

To come from herrings in the abstract to herrings in the concrete, try this in Chaffinda: Two very fresh herrings, very clean and dry. Fry them in three tablespoons of oil or two of butter, with a squeeze of lemon, salt, pepper, six peppercorns and a tablespoon of vinegar. After they have cooked for eight minutes put the fish aside in a hot dish.[Pg 58] Then cut a good-sized Spanish onion into rings, fry these in the oil left by the herrings till they are of a dark brown colour, taking great care not to burn them. When ready, which should be in about six minutes, heap them round the herrings and serve with quarters of lemon. This is a lordly dish, and if properly concocted it leaves you in that state that you will love all mankind—and even tolerate the Chinese.

Dean Nowell, or Noel, a clerical Izaak Walton, and Dean of St. Paul’s (1507-1602) said that the only thing wrong with the herring was that it preferred the sea to the river. The Dean angled much in the Ash at Hadham; he wrote the Church Catechism, invented bottled beer (by accident), and fished for perch and souls. Peace be to his!

There are as many ways of cooking the herring as there are days in the year; even Bismarck invented one, but there are other fish in the sea which demand Chaffinda’s attention, and however enticing the subject may be, it will not do to linger over it.

The lordly salmon was not always so[Pg 59] honoured in its exclusiveness as it is to-day. In our grandfathers’ time it was still frequenting the Thames, and London servants, when engaged, used to stipulate that they were not to be fed on it more than twice a week.

Put two tablespoonsful of butter in the pan and when it is melting stir in gradually a tablespoon of flour, and keep on stirring till it is smooth; add a wineglass of water, the juice of a whole lemon, a small onion cut in rings, and the yolks of two eggs, hard-boiled and mashed up. When all these ingredients are well mixed, put in a thick slice of previously boiled cold salmon, simmer it for eight minutes. Tinned salmon, of the very best brands only, may also be used, and the result is fairly satisfactory, but tinned goods are of course only a pis aller at best.

They do say that the Devil never goes to[Pg 60] Cornwall because they put everything into a pie down there, and he is afraid he might be put into one too. I heard of Stargazer Pie in Cornwall, and imagined that it referred to the Riviera fish which is not succulent—indeed, barely edible. But I learned that Stargazer Pie is really Pilchard Pie, the heads of the fish popping up through the crust.

A good Cornish way of cooking cod is to make a pudding of it, which is quite chaffable. Use a thick slice of cold cooked cod. Remove skin and bones and flake it up smallish with a couple of forks. Put it in the Chafing Dish with two tablespoons of butter and one of chopped onions; hot it up, and whilst heating (lower the flame before actual boiling) add gradually enough milk to make the fish of the consistency of mashed potatoes; add pepper and salt, and serve it with sippets of toast. It will like you much.

Now for sprats; a good supper dish, and eke for breakfast too, because they are so fat that no butter or oil is required, but plenty of salt and pepper. Buy a pint of fresh sprats, soak and dry them very carefully, handling them as little as possible. Cook them as a water souchet or Zootje, an old Dutch method, formerly much honoured at Greenwich fish dinners, and originally made of flounders. But flounders are not convenient for a Chafing Dish, so you must perforce fall back on sprats. Don’t slip!

Cut off the heads and tails of the sprats and put them into the pan with a cupful of thin bouillon, three sprigs of parsley, half a sliced carrot, and plenty of salt and pepper. Let this boil up for ten minutes. Take it off; strain the liquor, return the fish to the pan with three more sprigs of parsley and another sliced half carrot. Boil up again for five minutes this time. A squeeze of lemon and a glass of sherry to be added just before serving, of course with the sauce round the fish.

It has always been said, although it is scarcely provable, that fish, owing to the phosphorus, is good as a brainmaker. A visitor at a Devonshire fishing village asked the parson what was the principal diet of the villagers. “Fish mostly,” said the Vicar. “But I thought fish was a brain food, and these are the most unintelligent folk I ever saw,” remarked the tourist. “Well,” replied the parson, “just think what they would look like if they didn’t eat fish!”

In America the lobster is a frequent victim of the Chafing Dish, and there are many and diverse ways of torturing his succulent flesh therein. I will give three recipes of a more simple nature, all of which have been tried and proven not guilty of indigestion. I should premise, however, that to my individual taste a lobster is only really good in two ways. First, plain boiled and eaten cold with a vinaigrette sauce; and, secondly, as a simple salad with lettuce and perchance a stray tomato. However, there may be others with different tastes, and to such I commend the following:

First, Buttered Lobster. Beat up two egg yolks with two tablespoons of butter until it makes a smooth cream; add a wineglass of milk or cream, a pinch of black pepper, and half a teaspoon of Paprika. Put it in the Chafing Dish with the meat of a lobster cut into inch pieces, add the coral. Let it simmer for ten minutes, keeping the flame well under control.

The next recipe is called Polly Lobster, and it is toothsome. Cut up the lobster into inch lumps, put it in the dish with two or three tablespoons of salad oil, according to its size; add three or four whole onions, a small bunch of chives, pepper and salt, a wineglass of sherry, and three quartered tomatoes. Let it boil up for a couple of minutes, squeeze a lemon over it, and serve.

The last variation on the lobster theme is somewhat elaborate. It is termed Flattered Lobster, the reason being, I opine, because of the many added attractions to the crustacean’s native simplicity. It is not quite orthodox perhaps, but extraordinarily nice. Cut up the meat of a large lobster into cubes. Make a mixture of two tablespoons of Worcester sauce, the same of vinegar, a wineglass of claret, a dessertspoon of made mustard (French for choice), salt and Paprika to taste. Put the lobster in the Chafer and pour the mixture over it, adding a tablespoon of butter and the like of flour. Let it all heat up gently and slowly; that is, begin with a full flame and reduce after five minutes. Then pour in a liqueur glass of brandy, and heat it up again with full flame for eight minutes, stirring it all the time. The result is surprising.

A fish story which is not without charm is told of a seaside village school of very rough fishing lads. The teacher gave them this sum to do: “If two herrings cost three half-pence, what would thirty cost?” After ten[Pg 65] minutes’ hard work he noticed one of the boys had filled his copy-book full of figures. “Well, Jim, what’s your answer?” “Please, teacher, ’alf a crown.” “Wrong, Jim, try again. If two herrings——” “Wait a bit, teacher,” the lad interrupted, “’errings you said. ’Ow silly of me; I was a-reckoning of ’em like ’addocks.”

Prawns lend themselves most kindly to Chafing-Dish cookery, and can be treated in sundry appetising ways. Fresh prawns are of course quite the best, but the Barataria canned article is not to be despised, if they be carefully washed before using; and there are one or two brands of bottled prawns which cook excellently.

Shell two dozen prawns, put them in the Chafing Dish with half a pint of milk, half a teaspoon of Paprika, a pinch of salt, and a sprinkling of nutmeg. Keep stirring till near boiling-point, then lower the flame; add a glass of sherry and two beaten eggs; simmer for eight minutes, and then serve on toast.

The next is an American recipe and rejoices in the name of Prawn Wiggle. Melt three tablespoons of butter in the dish, and two tablespoons of flour mixed with a teaspoon of salt and a good pinch of pepper. Stir up and then pour in gradually half a pint of milk. As soon as the sauce thickens add a cupful of prawns and a cupful of cold cooked green peas. Mix up well and simmer for eight minutes. The pink and green form a delightsome colour blend, suggesting certain well-known racing colours, and the combined flavours are most delicate. But why “wiggle”? Well, why not?

Prawns on the Grass is recommendable, easy, and decorative for the supper-table. Butter lightly the bottom of the Chafing Dish, half fill it with carefully prepared cooked cold spinach; on this put a dozen prawns, two eggs, hard-boiled and cut in quarters; arrange these symmetrically, add[Pg 67] pepper, salt, and a cupful of milk. Cover up and let it simmer steadily for ten to twelve minutes. Serve in the Chafing Dish with sippets of toast.

It is impossible to treat here of the delectable crayfish, crawfish, and langouste; they are all cookable and easily digested. Best of all, perhaps, are the Oder Krebse, and the Swedish Kräftor, with their delightful and unique flavour and sweetness, but they must be eaten near where they are born in order to be appreciated.

In the company of chaste Chaffinda it is easy to enjoy a maigre day, for she deals so delicately with fish that one is almost tempted to envy the days of “Cecil’s Fast.” It will be remembered that Lord Burleigh introduced a Bill to enjoin the eating of fish only on certain days, on all creeds alike, in order to restore the fish trade.

It would be highly improper to devote a chapter to fish without referring to Vatel committing suicide on his sword (or was it a skewer?), but the story is as stale as the fish would be when it did arrive after all. A century ago his memory was rather painfully[Pg 68] honoured by roasted slices of cod on a spit, the dish being called à la Vatel.

To many worthy folk, painters in particular, the magic word trout immediately suggests Varnishing Day at the Paris Salon, and déjeuner at Ledoyen’s. Trout with green sauce is the staple traditional dish of the day. A couple of years ago I had the curiosity to inquire how much was eaten, and the maître d’hôtel gave me the following figures: 250 lbs. of trout; 15 gallons of green sauce; 120 chickens; 80 ducks; 40 saddles of lamb; 170 bundles of asparagus; and 100 baskets of strawberries. Besides this, the usual thousand and one odds and ends of a miscellaneous carte du jour. Painters have proverbially good appetites.

Purposely, and of malice prepense, I am carefully omitting all mention of the cooking of oysters in any shape or form. I consider it néfaste—almost sacrilegious. Our natives are so exquisitely succulent, so absolutely perfect in their delicacy, that to paint the lily[Pg 69] or to gild refined gold were pickaninny peccadilloes compared to the cooking of the oyster. It is different, I believe, in the United States of America, where there are various kinds of oysters, some requiring, almost demanding, cooking to render them palatable. Transatlantic cookery books are full of oyster recipes, in many of which the true oyster flavour must be entirely obliterated by the superadded condiments. This may be a question of gastronomic supply and demand. But my humble Chafing Dish shall not be defiled by the torture of the innocent bivalve. Dixi!

To return to trout. The fresh-water fish, the darling product of the stream, cannot be too respectfully approached, whether from an angling or a culinary point of view. Izaac Walton, in his inimitable charm and wisdom, has much to say thereon. Unfortunately his methods are impracticable in a Chafing Dish. I find the best way to treat a trout is with a Court Bouillon. This is how to make it:[Pg 70] Mix a glass of sherry, a tablespoon of vinegar, a glass of water, two bay leaves, a dozen peppercorns, a bunch of parsley, a sliced onion, and a pinch of salt. Amalgamate these materials thoroughly. Have your trout well cleaned and dried. Pop him into the Chafing Dish and cover him with the Court Bouillon. Let it cook slowly but steadily for twenty minutes. Then eat it with thanks and praise.

Here is a good way of preparing the remains of turbot. It is called Smothered Turbot, and is founded on an old Hastings fishwife’s recipe. Butter the inside of the Chafing Dish; spread thereon a layer of bread crumbs, chopped mushrooms, parsley, cut-up lemon peel, pepper and salt. Break up the cold cooked turbot small and make a second layer thereof. Add two tablespoons of butter, and then another layer the same as the first. Heat up and keep at a good heat for twelve minutes. Serve it in the Chafing Dish.

Sardines are one of the handiest of standbys for the Chafist. But get the best brands and smallish fish; the large ones are apt to suggest pilchards, which, although good in their way, are not sardines.

Sardines in a Hurry are done thusly: Take the sardines out of the box carefully on to a plate, pour boiling water over them, and drain it off at once. Take off all the skin, bone them, and cut off the tails. Prepare thin strips of hot buttered toast, put a sardine on each strip, pepper and salt it, pour over it a modicum of plain melted butter and a squeeze of lemon juice. Put them into the Chafing Dish and hot up for five minutes.

Another very good if not quite as simple a way of preparing them is Waldorf Sardines. Pour boiling water over a dozen sardines, wiping off the skin with a clean fish-cloth and removing the tails. Put them in the Chafing Dish with one tablespoon of olive oil and heat thoroughly for eight minutes. Put[Pg 72] them aside on a dish and keep them hot. Now put another tablespoon of olive oil into the pan, and when sizzling add a cupful of water. Stir until it gets thick, then add a teaspoon of Worcester sauce, half a teaspoon of Paprika, and a pinch of salt. Take the dish off the flame. Add the beaten yolk of an egg, one teaspoon of vinegar and the same of French mustard. Stir the sauce. Heat up the sardines again, and pour the sauce over them. As a supper dish, say after a Royal Institution lecture, or something equally improving, this gives one what the late George du Maurier called “a sense of genial warmth about the midriff.”

Clean and dry a dozen smelts in a cloth. Dip them one by one in thick cream, or, wanting that, in milk thickened with flour; then dredge them with flour so as to make a paste coating all over them. Put two tablespoons of butter in the Chafing Dish, and[Pg 73] when sizzling put in the fish with a squeeze of lemon and a glass of sherry. They will be ready in eight minutes. Sprinkle fried parsley over them before serving.

The delicate faint perfume of the smelt has been likened to that of the cucumber, violets and verbena. It is quite unique among fish, and has a charm that is all its own. This method of cooking preserves this peculiarity. Some other methods do not. Avoid buying sand-smelts (Atherines). They are very similar to the real thing, but lack the characteristic perfume, and they are neither as delicate in flavour or taste.

All Anglo-Indians, and many who have never been nearer India than South Kensington, know the virtues of kedgeree, kadgiori, kitchri, kegeree, kitcharee, kitchery, or even quitheri. It is spelt and made in forty-seven different ways, every one of which is strictly authentic, and, according to different authorities, the One and Only way. This is Martin Harvey Kedgeree.

Boil two cupfuls of rice, and strain it well. Mix in it two chopped cold hard-boiled eggs, any cold remains of cooked fish, flaked and salted; add a tablespoon of butter, the same of milk, a teaspoon of Paprika, and half a teaspoon of salt. Toss it all about in the Chafing Dish thoroughly, and then hot it up for ten minutes. Squeeze a lemon over it just before serving. Kedgeree is by no means solely a breakfast dish. It comes in handily at all times, but never argue about kedgeree with an Anglo-Indian. It is fatal to the kedgeree. It gets cold—and then vois que c’est triste pour vous, as Mephistopheles sings when he looks at Siebel’s hand.

Next to the Indian, the Chinese is one of the most inventive cooks in the world. I had one once who had been, amongst other things, a pirate, a prison-warder, an actor, and a judge. He had sudden inspirations, and therein lay his weakness. He knew that English folk ate jelly with mutton, so he tried strawberry jam with eggs and bacon, and following the principle of apple sauce with goose, he gave me hot cherry brandy with[Pg 75] roast fowl. He was a bad cook, but a most fluent and ingenious liar.

The best-flavoured eels are those that come from the Thames;, they are much better than the Dutch. There are four kinds: the Snig, the Grig, the Broadnosed, and the Sharp-nosed. The last are the best. Izaak Walton says: “It is agreed that the eel is a most dainty dish”—and who shall say him nay? The Greeks went further and called it “the Helen of the dinner-table,” because every guest strove, like Paris, to keep it for himself.

To make a water souchet of eels follow the directions for sprats, but cut the eels into inch chunks, and boil for half as long again in each case. Some folks think that eels are at their best in a souchet, which has the tendency of bringing out the best flavour of the fish.

Jellied eels and stewed eels, both East End and racecourse prime favourites, are somewhat too rich and coarse for any save the[Pg 76] very ravenous, but it is certain that there is a deal of rich, if perhaps somewhat heavy, nourishment in the eel, and its meat is a great delicacy in any form.

Nettled Eels are much esteemed in Normandy. They may be prepared in the same fashion as water souchet, with the addition of a handful of clean washed young nettles, which should be cooked with the fish but taken out before serving. They give a peculiar zest to the dish, which is quite pleasant.

The classic form of the eel is as a Matelote, originally a marine dish, and quite within Chaffinda’s compass. Have your eel cut into inch-and-a-half lengths, about one pound in all; put a large walnut of butter, or two tablespoons of oil in the Chafing Dish, also a dozen small peeled onions; let them brown thoroughly and frizzle well; add a tablespoon[Pg 77] of flour, a teaspoon of Paprika, and half as much salt. Heat up and stir well until it is all thoroughly amalgamated, then put in six small mushrooms, flat or button (fresh of course), add a good squeeze of lemon, and if the mixture is thicker than cream, pour in a little water. Now put in a tumbler (half-pint) of good claret, a couple of cloves, a bay leaf, and a teacup of bouillon. Let the mixture simmer for eight minutes, after which put in the eel and a liqueur glass of brandy, and cook for another ten minutes; then serve very hot. An orthodox variation is to set light to the brandy before pouring it in and if the boiling wine catches fire it gives a peculiar savour. A well-made Matelote is a thing of joy, a combination of harmonies, culminating in one grand Amen. Izaak Walton designates such a dish a “Hogoo.”

Finally, here is a dish which is superlative in its simplicity. It is not a Chafing-Dish recipe, but is yet not altogether out of place. It is called Grandfather’s Bloaters. Put two[Pg 78] fine bloaters into a soup-plate, pour over them enough whisky just to cover them. Set light to the whisky, and let it burn itself out. The bloaters will then be done—and done exquisitely. The dish is attributed to Charles Sala, the father of the late George Augustus Sala. It reads much more bibulous than it really is. As a matter of fact, it is almost a temperance dish.

[Pg 79]

CHAPTER·V·FLESH·AND·FOWL

It has always been a puzzle to me why folks take flesh and fowl so much more seriously than fish and vegetables. Your fair neighbour at a dinner-party will prattle gaily through soup and fish, of polo or pantomime, according to the season, but as soon as meat or bird makes its appearance she, all unconsciously, dives into deeper topics, and talks of palæontology or premature burial. Why? Of course, if this had only happened to myself, I should know that I was a sepulchral bore, but I find, on inquiry, that it is the experience of nine men out of ten.

In W. H. Mallock’s “New Republic,”[Pg 80] some quite nice people find before them at dinner a menu of the conversation expected of them, as well as of the food to be eaten. It was arranged something after the fashion of the bill of fare of a great dinner where the wines are indicated against each course. Thus instead of Tortue Claire—Amontillado, something like this, Crême d’Asperges—Our Foreign Policy, was printed on the card. Mr. Mallock relates that the scheme was not found practicable, but the idea, in itself, seems alluring and full of possibilities. Anyhow, it is obvious to the most casual diner-out that there is a direct, if indefinable, link between cates and conversation, and that the tide of talk ebbs and flows through the menu according to a certain unascertained but more or less fixed law.

The great question of Sauce has broken up many Damon-Pythias friendships, and brought havoc into sundry happy homes. No two people think exactly alike on Sauces. There are so many schools. The Flamboyant, the Renaissance, the Simplicists, the Natural Flavourites, the Neo-Soho, and many others. The only way to gastronomic salvation is to[Pg 81] steer a careful course between extremes, and to take that which is best and most expedient from each and every school.

A very refined and intelligent cannibal once had the politeness to ask the future ornament of his stock-pot, “With what sauce would you like to be eaten?” “But I don’t want to be eaten at all,” was the reply. “That is entirely beside the question,” said the cannibal. This rather suggests the famous Green Sauce which La Coste offered to Sir Thomas Dundas, at the Duke of York’s table, with the whispered advice, “With this sauce you would enjoy eating your grandfather.”

Do what we will, we cannot get away from Sauce. It is a necessary if unobtrusive concomitant of the plainest meats. But it can be mitigated, assuaged; and from a loathly disguise it can be transformed into a dulcet accompaniment. “Les animaux se repaissent; l’homme mange: l’homme d’esprit seul sait manger,” said Brillat-Savarin, who achieved much of his literary success by gross flattery of the palates of his friends. Charles de Monselet, the author of “La Cuisinière Poétique,” and a very earnest advocate of[Pg 82] simplicity, as against rioting in the stewpans, wrote: “The man who pays no attention to the food he consumes can only be likened to a pig in whose trough the trotters of his own son, a pair of braces, and a box of dominoes are equally welcome.”

At the same time the affectation of simplicity is often grossly overdone. When Lord Byron first met Tom Moore at Samuel Rogers’ rooms in St. James’s Place, the noble lord affected a lack of appetite for anything except potatoes and vinegar, biscuits and soda water; but he made a very hearty meal at his club afterwards. Again, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was certainly not affected, but probably absent-minded, when he felt hungry would dash into the first baker’s shop, buy a loaf, and rush out again, breaking off pieces as he walked, and eating them there and then, his scanty meal being eked out by common raisins, a small stock of which he kept in his waistcoat pocket.

By way of contrast, it is related of George Frederick Handel, the great composer, a man of voracious appetite and exaggerated capacity, that he ordered dinner for three at a tavern,[Pg 83] and, being hungry, asked, “Is de tinner retty?” The waiter replied that he was waiting for the company to come. “I am de gompany,” said Handel, “bring up de tinner prestissimo.” This anecdote, probably unveracious, is often attributed to Papa Haydn—which is ridiculous.

Joints and whole birds, save very small ones, are of course out of the question with a Chafing Dish, but steaks, cutlets, disjointed birds, and a thousand varieties of treating flesh and fowl, raw and cooked, are well within its range.

Beef steak, or rump steak, is very palatable cooked in the following manner. Give a one-pound steak a thorough beating. Mallets are made for this express purpose, but if such an implement be not available, I have used the head of a poker, wrapped in cloth, with great effect. This drubbing makes the meat tender. Put the steak into the dish with two tablespoons of butter and three slices of lemon. Cook it slowly for twelve minutes.[Pg 84] Then pour over it a cupful of bouillon and a wine-glass of claret. Simmer it for ten minutes more with an added teaspoon of Worcester sauce, salt and pepper. Before serving the steak, which ought to be thoroughly tender, squeeze a lemon over it. Onions are, I venture to think, a great improvement, and two of them, cut in rings, may well be added, after the first twelve minutes’ cooking.

The Roast Beef of Old England which has done so much to maintain the reputation of Great Britain on the Continent, is strangely mistreated and man-handled in foreign parts. It is often served saignant or nearly raw, under the mistaken belief that we like it that way. Moreover, in very old French cookery books, roast mutton and roast lamb are gravely designated Rosbif de Mouton and Rosbif d’Agneau respectively. Was this sheer flattery, or ignorance, or both?

Devilled Beef can be highly recommended in this fashion: Three thick slices of cold[Pg 85] cooked roast beef, lean. Butter them as though they were slices of bread. Then dose them liberally with the following mixture: One teaspoon made mustard, half a teaspoon black pepper, same of salt, a teaspoon of Worcester sauce, and a tablespoon of vinegar. Cook them in this in the Chafing Dish, until the meat begins to curl up at the edges.

This, although very good, is mere journeyman work and not a “creation.” Did not Aristotle say that a man who eats a dinner is a better judge of it than the cook? That is judgment, however, not creation, and the French cook-artists call their dishes “creations”—like the dressmakers.

A chop, I contend, should only be cooked on a gridiron—grilled, that is to say, over an open fire. Any other treatment is an offence which, in a more enlightened age, would be made indictable. St. Lawrence would rise in his grave and object, were a chop put in a Chafing Dish—and quite right too! St. Lawrence is of course the patron saint of the grill, for is he not said to have been broiled alive on a gridiron? According to the[Pg 86] respectable authority of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, his dying words were:

One of the best things produced in America, besides buyers of spurious art works and donors of Free Libraries, is Chipped Beef. You can buy it in tins and treat it thus. Put three tablespoons of butter in the dish. When just melted add a tablespoon of flour; stir until smooth. Then add the Chipped Beef, which must have been previously soaked in cold water for ten minutes; let it simmer for eight minutes, then stir in the beaten-up yolks of two eggs, and serve very hot. Every day is Thanksgiving Day when one eats Chipped Beef, and it is a selfish dish to cook, because one wants to eat it all oneself; and the worst of eating is that it takes away one’s appetite—although there is a proverb to the contrary.

But it is always comfortable to be content (or nearly so) on good plain food, instead of on the misguided concoctions of addle-egged and-pated foreigners, which leave one in the position of the unfortunate vultures in the famous Oxford prize poem, who

This is how to make Polish Zrazy in a Chafing Dish. Buy the whole undercut (fillet) of a small sirloin. Cut it into inch slices. Brown two sliced onions in the Dish in a large walnut of butter. Add the meat, a teaspoon of Paprika, salt, and half a dozen cloves. Cover up, and let it hot up to boiling. Do not uncover, as the great thing is to let it steam in its own fumet. Shake the pan now and again, so that it shall amalgamate well. After once boiling up, let it simmer for fifteen minutes, add a good squeeze of lemon, a glass of claret, and serve with the accompaniment of potato salad.

“This dish of meat is too good for any[Pg 88] but anglers, or very honest men,” says Izaak Walton of a like concoction.

Do you think you would like Frizzled Ham? I do; and this is how I cook it. Start with half a pound of rather fat ham in thin slices. Put half a tablespoon of butter in the pan, and when very hot add the ham. As soon as it begins to curl at the edges, dust the slices with dry flour, which will soon turn brown. Turn the lamp down and keep simmering. Now mix in a bowl half a tablespoon of vinegar and the same of dry mustard. Pour it over the ham, add enough boiling water to cover the meat, put in three drops of Tabasco, and let it all boil up for a minute.

Another and somewhat similar way of preparing ham, which has been very successful, particularly at supper-time, after, say, a lobster salad, has been christened Ham in Hades.

Make a mixture of a teaspoon of made mustard, a tablespoon of Tarragon vinegar, a pinch of salt, a teaspoon of Paprika, a teaspoon of Worcester sauce. Spread this mixture on both sides of half a dozen slices of ham. Put two tablespoons of olive oil in the Chafer. When this begins to smoke, put in the ham and brown it quickly on both sides.

Gallimaufrey is a very old dish, meaning really All Sorts. Shakespeare calls it Gaily-Mawfrey. A very excellent Modern Gallimaufrey is prepared thus: Three thickish slices of ham with two walnuts of butter in the Dish. Let it cook slowly. Add six peeled and washed Jerusalem artichokes, three sliced carrots, one sliced onion. Let it go on simmering. Now put in a couple of dozen haricot beans, a sprig of parsley, three cloves, a wineglass of sherry, a blade of mace, salt, pepper, and a teaspoon of sugar. Simmer it for twenty minutes, bringing it at last just to the boil. It is then an agreeable stew, which is probably as totally unlike the[Pg 90] real old-fashioned Gallimaufrey as anything possibly could be. But that really does not matter.

Gallimaufrey dates back to the time of Master Robert May, who published a memorable cook-book in 1660, which is not without its humours. A real old English banquet, it seems, would not be complete without two pies, the one filled with live frogs, and the other with birds. These are for the particular delectation of the ladies. “They will desire to see what is in the pies; where lifting first the lid off one pie, out skips some frogs, which makes the ladies to skip and shreek; next after the other pie, whence come out the birds, who, by a natural instinct, flying at the light, will put out the candles. So that what with frogs beneath, and birds above, it will cause much delight and pleasure to the whole company.”

Not to know Bubble and Squeak is to admit one’s ignorance of one of the good[Pg 91] things of this earth. Chaffinda can tackle it, and in this wise. It is an old Cornish version. There may be others, but there can be none better. The dish needs cabbage, and it is most practical to get a young fresh cabbage, boiled, pressed, and chopped into shreds before you begin the actual cooking. It saves time and trouble. Put a tablespoon of butter in the Chafing Dish, also one chopped onion, and the cabbage. Let it frizzle and absorb the butter. Just before boiling, add gradually a cupful of milk, pepper and salt. As soon as it boils up, take it off and put it aside in a hot dish. Now hot up three underdone slices of cooked cold roast beef in two tablespoons of butter, turning them frequently, so that they shall be well cooked on both sides; add a tablespoon of Worcester sauce and the same of vinegar. Now make a mound of the cooked cabbage, and put the slices of well-done meat around it, upright. You will regret that you did not cook double the quantity.

There are so many kinds of sausages that it is difficult to pitch upon the best for Chafing purposes. Slices of the Brunswick[Pg 92] species are excellent in pea-soup. The genuine liver sausage makes good sandwiches. The more elaborate French kinds are akin to galantine. The Italian Bologna and Mortadella have their friends. But, after all, the well-made Cambridge sausage is hard to beat. I plump for the Cambridge variety.

This is a Cambridge recipe for Hodge’s Sausages. Put as many as you think you can eat in the dish with a walnut of butter for every two, pepper and salt, and a tablespoon of Worcester sauce. Then add one sliced apple for each sausage. Take out the cores, but do not peel them. Stab the sausages with a fork to prevent their bursting. Cook for twelve minutes. American apples are good for this dish, and also the homegrown Keswick Codlin, Blenheim Orange, or Hambledon Deux Ans.

There is something peculiarly bucolic about Hodge’s Sausages which may commend itself to the rurally minded. To me, it brings the scent of the hay over the spirit-lamp.

Another appetising stew is Goulasch. Beat well a half-pound (or larger) steak; cut it into pieces the size of a domino. Put them in the Chafing Dish with two cold cooked potatoes chopped into dice. Pour over the meat and the vegetables two tablespoons of olive oil, and as soon as it simmers add an onion in slices, half a teaspoon of Paprika, salt, and a cupful of bouillon. Cover it up, and let it cook for ten minutes, stirring occasionally. Just before serving drop in half a dozen stoned olives.

So much for beef. The next meat is of course mutton, for which three recipes should suffice. The first is Mutton Steaks, and is adapted from a Welsh recipe. I have a very interesting Welsh cookery book, tersely entitled: “Llyfr Cogino a Chadw ty: yn cynwys Pa fodd? A Paham? Cogyddiaeth.” I am sorry that ignorance prevents my giving anything out of it, but I think that I have got the title nearly right.

To make Mutton Steaks, cut three slices, each an inch thick, from the middle of a cold cooked leg of mutton. Put them in the Dish with enough water to cover them, pepper and salt, and five small onions. Cover it up and let the meat brown thoroughly on one side, then turn it over and add a walnut of butter and a tablespoon of flour. Do not allow it to boil, but keep it simmering gently for at least fifteen minutes. If raw meat be used, the result is also quite satisfactory, but it is well in that case to replace the water by a cup of bouillon.

Turkish Mutton, locally termed Etena Jarvat: this is one of those dishes which may fairly be included in Brillat-Savarin’s magistères restoratifs. It is easy enough to chafe.

Cut half a pound of uncooked mutton (from the leg from choice, but not absolutely necessary) into medium dice. Put the meat[Pg 95] into the Chafing Dish with salt, pepper and dripping, fat, oil, or butter, according to taste, but oil is preferable. When the meat turns brown, add half a pound of previously cooked and sliced French beans, also half a pint of water or bouillon (latter for choice) and a bunch of simples, either thyme or marjoram, or both. Simmer steadily for twenty minutes, stirring occasionally. Carrots can be used instead of beans. Just before serving turn up the flame full, and let it come just to the boil.

Mutton Venison is a compromise, and may be recommended as such. We live in an age of compromise, so why not bring it into our cookery? Make an extra strong decoction of bouillon from any good meat-juice, three tablespoons in quantity, mince into it an onion, and put in the pan with a tablespoonful of Worcester sauce, three drops of Tabasco, a glass of claret, a dessert-spoon of red-currant jelly (or guava or blackberry jelly), pepper and salt. When very hot put in[Pg 96] about a pound of slices of cold cooked leg of mutton, lean, cut into strips. Let it simmer for twenty minutes. It is not a bit like venison, but distinctly good nevertheless.

This advertisement, it is alleged, was addressed to the good people of Kirkmahoe, who were so poor that they could not afford to put any meat into their broth. A cobbler invested all his money in buying four sheep shanks, and when a neighbour wanted to make mutton broth, for the payment of one halfpenny the cobbler would “plump” one of the sheep shanks into the boiling water and give it a “wallop,” or whisk round. He then wrapped it in a cabbage leaf and took it home. This was called a “gustin bone,” and was supposed to give a rich “gust” to the broth.

A Boer recipe of much the same description was known in early Transvaal days (long before the War) as “Potatoes and Point.” The poor “Bijwoner” family was served all round with potatoes, and a red herring was hung up in the middle of the room. The elders were allowed to rub their potatoes on the herring, but the youngsters might only point theirs towards the delicacy at the end of a fork. The mere proximity of the highly-flavoured herring was supposed to give the potato a flavour.

Lots of quite worthy folk gorge themselves periodically and keep their children on the border-line of starvation. A certain exaggeratedly selfish family man of my acquaintance, who for economic reasons lived somewhere in the wilds of West Kensington, made it his unholy practice to dine once a month with a couple of boon companions of the same sex at the Carlton or Prince’s, and at the conclusion of a remarkable dinner was wont to blurt out: “By George, I wish I could afford to bring the wife and children here!”

Permit me now to suggest a trial of that very old and famous dish, Scouse. It is prepared in the following fashion: Get one pound of lean, dairy-fed pork, cooked and cold. Cut it into half-inch squares; sprinkle them with flour, salt, Paprika, and dip them lightly in French mustard. Put in the Chafing Dish three chopped onions, half a teaspoon of sugar, one wine-glass of vinegar, three cloves, a blade of mace and a bayleaf. Cover up and let it simmer, not boil, while the quantity of liquid is reduced by one half. Add the pork with half a pint of bouillon, and simmer for another ten minutes.

Young pork, like young veal, is always excellent, but it can be too young. A sucking pig with lacklustre eye and a lemon in its jaws is pathetic and none too appetising. Veal, in England at any rate, is often tasteless and somewhat dull. Not so very long ago, in Ireland, they used to kill newborn calves, bake them in an oven with potatoes, and call the dish “Staggering Bob.”

Kabobs have probably come to us from India, via the Cape. This is an old Capetown-Malay recipe which is thoroughly reliable. Half a pound of cold veal; the same of lean ham, both cut into slices a quarter of an inch thick; three apples, and three onions. Cut the meat and the vegetables into rounds with a knife or cutter, about the size of a crown piece. Skewer them up on wooden (or, if you are a de Beers shareholder, on silver) skewers, in the following order: (1) a round of veal; (2) a round of apple; (3) a round of ham; (4) around of onion. Sprinkle them with pepper, salt and curry-powder. Put them in the Chafing Dish with a teacupful of bouillon and a walnut of butter; simmer steadily for twenty minutes, then thicken the gravy with a little flour, and serve either with boiled rice, or toast, or both.

Cold fowls lend themselves in a hundred ways to the kind attentions of Chaffinda.[Pg 100] Mention of quite a few of these must urge the gastronomer to further experiments and discoveries. Pollio à la Contrabandista: this is the way brigands cook, or ought to cook, fowls. Cut a cold cooked fowl into neat joints. Put them into the Chafing Dish with four tablespoons of olive oil, and heat up until the meat is of a light brown colour, turning the pieces frequently. Then keep the flame lower and simmering all the time; add four tomatoes cut into quarters, two chopped green chillies, one shredded Spanish onion, one tablespoon of Worcester sauce, the same of mushroom ketchup, and four cloves. Let it simmer, closely covered, for at least fifteen minutes. It will then prove a most savoury mess.

From Spain to Bonnie Scotland! This is how to cook Howtowdie. Cut up a young fowl into handy joints. Put them into the Chafing Dish with two walnuts of butter, a cupful of bouillon, three sprigs of parsley, three small onions, salt and pepper. Simmer[Pg 101] continuously until the bird is tender. When half cooked add another cupful of bouillon to make up for evaporation. When quite cooked put the fowl on to a hot dish, surround it with poached eggs, then thicken the gravy in the pan with a tablespoon of flour and a tablespoon of Worcester sauce; give it a smart boil up and pour it over the fowl. This Howtowdie is adapted from an excellent recipe in “The Scottish Cookery Book containing guid plain rules for makin’ guid plain meats suitable for sma’ purses, big families, and Scotch stomachs.”

The preparation of Roman Fowl is simplicity itself. Pour four tablespoons of olive oil into the Chafing Dish with a pinch of salt, a teaspoon of Paprika, three cloves, and herbs to taste, but do not overdo the herbs. When the oil is sizzling put in all the limbs of a lightly boiled chicken, cut up. Cook it slowly, turning the meat so that all the flesh is equally cooked all over. When done it should be a delicate brown. Add half a cupful[Pg 102] of tomato sauce and the same of bouillon, also three shredded onions. Simmer for eight minutes, then serve.

This is an American recipe, copied verbatim from an American Chafing-Dish cookery book. Two cups cold chicken cut into small pieces, one cup chicken stock, one cup milk or cream, two tablespoonfuls of butter, one heaping tablespoonful of flour, salt and pepper. Cook the butter and the flour together in the Chafing Dish; add the stock and milk and stir until smooth; put in the chicken, salt and pepper, and cook three minutes longer.

Other times, other manners. Contrast with the severe simplicity of the above the sort of thing that gratified the palates of our forebears. In the fourteenth century, Sacchetti says, a baked goose stuffed with garlic and quinces was esteemed an excellent dish in Italy, and when the Gonfalonier of Florence entertained a famous doctor he gave him the stomach of a calf, boiled partridges, and pickled sardines.

Old Samuel Pepys, too, had a nice taste in food as in music, and other things. His idea of “a fine dinner” was to this effect: “A dish of marrowbones, a leg of mutton, a loin of veal, a dish of fowl; three pullets and a dozen of larks, all in a dish; a great tart, a neat’s tongue, a dish of anchovies, a dish of prawns, and cheese.”

For those who are curious in such things it is easy to find quaint recipes in old books. For instance, if you want to know how to bake a hedgehog in clay—and very good it is too—you have only to read Albert Smith’s “Christopher Tadpole” and you will know all about it. It is truly said that comparatively few people read Disraeli’s novels nowadays, but those who are culinarily inclined would do well to turn to the opening chapter of “Tancred,” where there is a delightful conversation between a grand old maître de bouche, “Papa Prevost,” and his pupil, the eminent chef, Leander. The pompous spirit of the culinary artist is delightfully caught and the gastronomic jargon wonderfully reproduced.

But gastronomy has never lacked its historians. Great painters have come to its[Pg 104] aid, as witness the glowing canvases of Snyders, Teniers, Jordaens, Ruysdael, Jan Weenix, Melchior de Hondecoeter and Jan Fyt. Their pictures of still life, the poulterers’ shops, the heaped baskets of good cheer, the brilliant lobster, the callow lemon, the russet hare, and the lustrous plumage of the pheasant, have inspired the hand of the Masters, who must have appreciated all such culinary delicacies in order to have painted them with such loving-kindness.

Yesterday’s Pheasant can be made into a most tempting dish by cutting up the remains into convenient chunks, omitting the bones. Put one tablespoon of butter in the Dish, add a tablespoon of flour, and keep on stirring till the mixture is smooth and light brown. Add a glass of claret, a tablespoon of Worcester sauce, pepper and salt, and bring to a boil,[Pg 105] stirring occasionally. Now put in the chunks of pheasant, and simmer for eight minutes. An excellent accompaniment to this is chestnut and celery salad.

Any game bird may be treated in like manner, save always the woodcock, that little epitome of all that is toothsome and delicate. A curious thing about the woodcock is its extraordinarily rapid digestion. A single bird has been known to consume in a night more earthworms than half filled a moderate-sized flowerpot.

Few people know the different expressions for flocks of birds. Here are some of them: a building of rooks, a bevy of quails, a watch of nightingales, a cast of hawks, a nide of pheasants, a muster of peacocks, a plump of wildfowl, a flock of geese, a pack of grouse, a chattering of choughs, a stand of plovers, and a wisp of snipe.

A woman I know had a very good cook, who was also a plain cook—or rather, a plain-spoken cook. She had been in the place many years, and much was forgiven her. The mistress, visiting the kitchen, inspected a turkey, and remarked that it was a very[Pg 106] thin bird. “Just you wait, M’m, till I’ve stuffed it with chestnuts,” said the cook, “you won’t know it then. It’ll be quite another thing. Just like you, M’m, when you has your di’monds on.”

I do not advise the fabrication of elaborate entrées in the Chafing Dish. They can be and have been done, but I mistrust them and find ample scope for ingenuity, inventiveness, and novelty in the cates I have already described, without venturing into the fields of fancy. Vol-au-Vent, for instance, or Brains à la Poulette, or Spanish Cream Pudding are all within the range of feasibility, but I leave the recipes to those less timorous than myself. In fact, in this case, I am at one with the waiter in the “Bab Ballads” who hurled the most awful threat in culinary literature at his flighty sweetheart:

The good things of this life are mostly plain and wholesome (with a few delightful exceptions), and we can all qualify to live in[Pg 107] Bengodi, Boccaccio’s country of content, where they tie up the vines with sausages, where you may buy a fat goose for a penny, and have the giblets thrown in into the bargain. In this place there is a mountain of Parmesan cheese, and the people’s employment is making cheese-cakes and macaroons. There is also a river which runs Malmsey wine of the very best quality.

There are no cheap excursions to Bengodi. We have to tramp there on foot—and earn our bread on the road as we travel thither.

[Pg 108]

CHAPTER·VI·VEGETABLES·AND·SALADS·

“Will a man give a penny to fill his belly with hay? Or can you persuade the turtle-dove to live upon carrion like the crow?”
John Bunyan (“Pilgrim’s Progress”).

The first vegetarian was probably Nebuchadnezzar, and he has many followers. With the utmost love and respect for all vegetables, without exception, I refuse to accept them as the staff of life, or indeed as anything more than a delicious aid thereto. It is possible that the internal economy of certain very worthy folk may be more easily conducted on a vegetarian basis, and indeed every man is at liberty to feed as suits him best; but as a matter of preference, predilection and experience, I decline to follow his example. If they are content to let me go my way[Pg 109] unmolested, I have no desire to interfere with their tastes. But no proselytising, please!

Here in England, although we shine in our roasts, our beef, our chops, and maybe a few other trifles, we are woefully and culpably ignorant of vegetable cookery. The average British cook has but one idea with vegetables. She cooks them in water, with lumps of coarse soda, which she thinks makes them soft and keeps their colour. As a matter of fact, this process, especially the soda, practically destroys their health-giving properties. Vegetables want the kindliest care, the most delicate handling, the most knowledgeable treatment. Otherwise they become mere parodies of their better selves. What could be more terrible, more depressing, than the usual slab of wet cabbage doled out at the average London restaurant? It is an insult to the cabbage, to the guest, and to the Art of Cookery. And it is so easy to cook it decently—even in a Chafing Dish.

Again, the average British household knows and uses only a very limited range of vegetables, ignoring, wilfully or otherwise, scores[Pg 110] of edible delights, easily grown and easily cooked, but with the inbred laziness of crass conservatism, totally overlooked, because, forsooth, “the greengrocer does not keep it!” The greengrocer, on the other hand, scorns the inquirer after such strange green meats, because “they are never asked for”; and so, between the two, we are relegated to the same dull round of vegetable monotony.

Household cookery knows nothing of the Aubergine, or Egg-plant, of which there are fourteen edible varieties, most of which can easily be grown in this country, although the rich purple kinds are best suited to our climate. Then there is Salsify, which is amenable to a dozen different treatments; as the vegetable oyster it is duly honoured in America, but we know it not. The Good King Harry is only known in Lincolnshire. The leaves served as cabbage are excellent, and the tender young shoots are as delicate as asparagus. The Cardoon, Scornzonera, Celeriac, Chicory, Buck’s Horn, Chervil, Jew’s Mallow, Lovage, Purslane, Rampion, Scurvy-Grass and Valerian, are only a selection from a list thrice as long.

It is useless, however, to lift up one thin quavering voice of protest in a wilderness of deaf greengrocers. I must e’en deal with the common vegetables of commerce, others being unprocurable, and their cultivation a counsel of perfection.

One naturally begins with potatoes, though the reason of their position in the hierarchy of the garden is occult. Sir Walter Raleigh, good man and true, has much to answer for. Tobacco and potatoes! I believe it to be a fact that throughout the length and breadth of Ireland there is no memorial to Raleigh. This seems a distinct omission. But then, neither is there a statue to Lord Verulam!

Between the primitive tuber, baked in the ashes, and Pommes à la Réjane, there lies the whole gamut of culinary ingenuity. They are the extremes of sophistication and the opposite. But it must suffice here to give a few only of the simplest recipes, well within Chaffinda’s modest capability, and in their very ingenuousness fit alike for the delectation of Prince or Pauper.

The first method is called Mary’s Potatoes for want of a better name. Slice up half a dozen cold cooked potatoes. Put them in the Chafing Dish with a walnut of butter and a cupful of milk; let them simmer for five minutes, then add the juice of half a lemon, a teaspoon of chopped parsley, pepper and salt. Simmer for five minutes more.

Cut up half a dozen cold cooked potatoes into quarter-inch slices. Put four slices of fat bacon into the Chafing Dish, and hot up until the fat begins to smoke; then drop in the potatoes, add pepper and salt, and cook for five minutes. Drain before serving.

Cut four potatoes in slices as large as a halfpenny, but twice as thick. Put two tablespoonsful of butter in the Chafing Dish, and a dozen delicate little onions cut into[Pg 113] dice. Hot up the onions and butter till the former turn a golden brown, then add the potatoes and a teaspoon of chopped parsley, salt, pepper, and a squeeze of lemon. Keep stirring, and when the onions are deep yellow, which should be in about eight minutes, the dish is ready.

Boil half a dozen potatoes in their skins. Peel them when hot, cut them in quarters, roll them in bread-crumbs, and then fry them for seven minutes in two tablespoons of sizzling butter. Sprinkle chopped parsley on them before serving.

The tomato or love-apple is a perennial joy to the eye, whether cooked or uncooked, ripe or unripe. Its form and colour are alike exquisite, and its flavour altogether a thing apart. Our grandfathers knew little or nothing about it, apart from sauce, and it has been left to our generation fully to appreciate its possibilities. It is the more strange because it has been a staple article of food in mid and southern Europe since[Pg 114] time immemorial. It has even been suggested that Eve’s apple, Paris’ apple, Nausicaa’s apple, and the apples of Hesperides were all really tomatoes! As pommes d’amour, pomi di mori, Liebesäpfel, Paradiesäpfel, or tomatoes, they are nowadays honoured and appreciated by all right lovers of the good things of the earth. They are both fruit and vegetable, and it is very difficult to spoil them in cooking. They are best of all when grilled as an accompaniment to chops (Mr. Pickwick, it will be remembered, enjoyed them in the form of sauce), but the following is a very simple and honest way of preparing them.

Cut three tomatoes in halves. Pepper and salt them and coat the cut surfaces with bread-crumbs. Put two tablespoons of butter in the Chafing Dish, and when sizzling add the tomatoes and cook them thoroughly for eight minutes.

The Jerusalem artichoke should not be devoted solely to soup. It is an excellent[Pg 115] adjunct to meats, and fully repays a little careful attention.

Wash and peel the outer skin of a pound of artichokes, then with a very sharp knife peel them into ribbons (as one would peel an apple); then put them lightly in a cloth to dry. Hot up two tablespoons of olive oil in the Chafer to smoking-point. Put in the artichokes, letting them fry until they rustle when stirred with a fork. Pour off the oil and strain them. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Wash and peel a pound of artichokes and put them aside in a basin of cold water. Melt a walnut of butter in the Chafing Dish; add the artichokes after drying them well. Let them brown well in the butter; add pepper and salt and stir them frequently, letting them simmer for twelve minutes.

Have your spinach thoroughly well washed in several waters till it is perfectly clean. Boil a pint of water in the Chafing Dish, salt it and put in the spinach. Boil it for ten minutes. Take out the spinach and strain it. Pour cold water over it to take away the bitter taste; strain again. Put a walnut of butter in the dish, add the spinach and half a cupful of milk. Mix up well with a wooden spoon. Heat for five minutes.

There are about twenty-five different kinds of edible mushrooms. The popular test of peeling is unreliable, because some poisonous mushrooms peel easily, and some harmless kinds do not. An authority on mushrooms (Mr. E. Kay Robinson) says: “If a mushroom of any kind which has been gathered from an open space is brittle and compact in texture, and not brightly coloured, nor peculiar in taste or unpleasant in smell, and neither exudes a milky juice when bruised, nor changes colour when exposed to the air, you may eat it without fear.”

Consequently, when you go mushroom-gathering you must bear in mind nearly as many things as when you address your ball on the tee. I always buy my mushrooms, and go to a good shop; then, I think, you are fairly safe.

The onion is a sure poison detector. Put an onion in a dish of mushrooms. If it does not change colour the mushrooms are all right. If it blushes black with shame at its contiguity, they are all wrong. A silver spoon acts in the same way and gets black in contact with toadstools or the like. Verily, evil communications corrupt good manners—even in onions.

Flood the Chafing Dish with really good olive oil. Put in a teaspoonful of Paprika and a pinch of salt. Drop in the mushrooms, after having stalked and peeled them, black part uppermost. Cover up, and listen to the appetising sizzling for seven minutes. They should then be done to a turn.

Mushrooms used to be dried, powdered,[Pg 118] and used as a flavouring in the eighteenth century. Cook-books of that period speak of the condiment as “Cook’s Snuff.” The great and justly esteemed Grimod de la Reynière said that it ought always to be on the dining-table together with pepper and salt. Here is a hint for the modern purveyors of table delicacies.

In Sir Henry Layard’s Essay on “Renaissance Cookery,” he says: “Amongst vegetables, the thistle (Cardo) was esteemed a delicacy, and was generally served with fruit at the end of the dinner. The thorny thistles with well-grown white stalks are the best.” The Cardo includes the artichoke, but that the name was usually applied to the common thistle is shown by the quaint remark of Romoli in his “Singolare Dottrina,” that “it should not be eaten with milk, which it has the property of curdling, and consequently the process would take place in your stomach, but it should be eaten with pepper, which does not generate wind, and clears the liver; and such is the reason why donkeys, who eat largely of this, have better stomachs than men.”

Dr. Thudichum, an eminent authority on dietetics, does not agree with these conclusions, which are nevertheless illuminating, and do not detract from the merits of the nettle as a food-stuff.

Boil half a dozen leeks in a pint of water. Drain them well, and cut each leek into two-inch lengths; squeeze a lemon over them, pepper and salt them well. Set them aside. Make half a dozen croûtons of toast and put the leeks on them. Replace them in the Chafing Dish, pouring over each croûton a liberal dose of Sauce Robert. Heat up and serve on a very hot plate. Sauce Robert (Escoffier brand) can be bought ready made at the Stores.

Boil a pound of shredded beans till tender, and then drain them well. Melt two tablespoons of butter in the Chafing Dish and stir into it a small dessert-spoon of flour.[Pg 120] Keep these simmering, and shake them about till they are lightly browned; add salt and pepper and a cup of milk. Just before serving, add the yolks of two eggs, slightly beaten, and a squeeze of lemon. Stir all up thoroughly and beat up to just below boiling-point.

Shell and wash in cold water one pint of broad beans. Put them in the Chafing Dish and boil them with a sprinkling of salt; when nearly soft strain them, and then replace them in the dish with a tumbler of bouillon, a little chopped parsley, and a lump of sugar. Cook them slowly until they are quite tender. Beat up the yolk of an egg and a wine-glass of milk; add both to the beans with pepper and salt, and beat up thoroughly to just below boiling-point.

Shell a pint of fresh young broad beans and put them aside in a dish of cold water.[Pg 121] Fill the Chafing Dish with nearly two pints of water, add a thick slice of cooked ham, a stick of celery, a bunch of parsley, three cloves, twenty peppercorns, and a bay leaf. Boil all this for seven minutes, then remove the ham, vegetables, and spices, and put in the beans. When they are quite tender, take them out, strain them, put them back in the dish; add a tablespoon of butter, and hot them up again for three or four minutes before serving.

Place a pint of small Brussels sprouts in the Chafing Dish with two pints of boiling water, slightly salted. Boil for ten minutes; take out the sprouts, drain them and put them aside to keep hot. Then make the following sauce in the Chafing Dish. Two tablespoons of butter melted, one tablespoon flour, pepper and salt, and sufficient bouillon to make the mixture of the consistency of thick cream. Heat this to boiling, stirring it well. Just before serving, add the juice of a whole lemon. Pour the[Pg 122] sauce over the hot sprouts, and serve very quickly.

Both this and the previous recipe are adapted from a most excellent book on the cooking of vegetables: “Leaves from our Tuscan Garden,” by Janet Ross.

Put a pint of young green shelled haricot beans into the Chafing Dish with two pints of boiling water. When half cooked add salt and pepper and a tablespoon of butter. Take out the beans, drain them, and replace them in the dish with another tablespoon of butter, a little chopped parsley, more salt and pepper and a squeeze of lemon. Toss them about well in the Chafing Dish and hot up for eight minutes.

Indispensable for flavourings. Wash the parsley thoroughly, pick off the stalks, leaving the large heads. Dry it very carefully as, if it is left at all damp, it will[Pg 123] never become crisp. Put the parsley in the Chafing Dish with a tablespoon of olive oil or butter. As soon as the oil or butter ceases bubbling, take out the parsley and let it dry on a piece of paper. The parsley should remain quite green; if it is brownish it is a sign that it has been fried too long.

A pint of shelled peas, a tablespoon of butter, pepper and salt, and a good squeeze of lemon; put all these in the Chafing Dish. Add a cupful of milk and hot up for ten minutes, then strain and serve. Avoid mint, green or otherwise.

Shell a score of chestnuts, cover them in the Chafing Dish with boiling water, and in four minutes take them out and remove the skins. Return them to the boiling water, add a cup of milk, pepper and salt, and simmer until quite tender but not soft.

It has been made plain, I trust, that it is not necessary to rely solely on the damp-sodden vegetables of the pre-historic cuisine. It is just as easy to cook them nicely as otherwise, and a deal more satisfactory. The bounteous housewife Nature overwhelms us with her treasures of root and sap, and it seems almost an outrage to neglect the opportunities so lavishly offered to us.

I have just described a score or so of the plainer methods of cooking vegetables, simply as an indication of their possibilities, but the enterprising Chafer will find as he progresses in the art (and Chafing grows upon one like any other hobby) that there are dozens of others which lend themselves readily to his, or her, deft manipulation.

The grandfather of Charles Darwin was a poet of parts, and in his “Phytologica” he says:

There are many American vegetables which may be cooked without a twang. They are all in tins or bottles, bearing plain directions. Among others I can speak from personal experience of Sugar Corn, Green Corn, Oyster Corn, Boston Beans, Lima Beans, and Succotash. This last is a meal in itself, and of most excellent flavour and convenience. Green corn, too, reminds those who know the South African mealie in all its toothsomeness, of many a hearty supper of Kaffir mealies roasted in the embers of a camp fire, or even in that most primitive of ovens, an ant-heap, which, believe it or not as you will, turns out better cooked meats than some of your very patent, very modern, very “gadgetty” kitchen ranges, although not better, I ween, than my chaste Chaffinda.

From vegetables to salads is but one step. I do not see any valid reason for apologising for the inclusion of salads in a Chafing-Dish book. They are not cooked in a Chafing Dish, it is true, but it is part of my religion that no meal is complete without a salad,[Pg 126] green for choice, but anyhow a salad. I do not insist on salad for breakfast, although on a blazing hot July day, after a swim or a tramp, or both, I can imagine worse things than an omelette, some kidneys and bacon, and a slice of real ham, and a green salad to top up with. But no dinner is really a dinner without a salad, and by that I do not mean three scraggy lettuce leaves, soused in vinegar, which as Salade de saison is the usual accompaniment to that disastrous hen, Poulet au cresson, which is a centipede as to legs and has no breast or liver wing.

As this screed is, after all, a plain record of personal likes and dislikes, I see no reason for concealing the fact that I have no use whatever, no manner of use in the wide wide world, for mayonnaise with salad. The Americans swear by it; I swear at it. My salad mixture, which goes with everything—absolutely everything—is simplicity itself. Eccolo!

Into a large bowl put half a teaspoon of salt, same of Paprika, a dash of black pepper, freshly ground by a hand-mill, and a teaspoon of made English mustard. Mix them up well. Now add very gradually the very best quality of olive oil, almost drop by drop, to the quantity of three tablespoons, mixing all the time until the ingredients assume the consistency of cream; now thin this with one tablespoon of good wine vinegar, and amalgamate thoroughly. That is all I use.

Now and again, by way of extra titillation of the jaded palate, you may add half a tablespoon of Tarragon vinegar, herbs to taste, Spring onions, chives, French mustard, olives (French only), hard-boiled eggs, dandelion leaves, nasturtium leaves, and celery salt.

But there are half a dozen rules which I would seriously enjoin the salad mixer to bear in mind.

Do not bother about garnishing the top of a salad; see the ingredients are well mixed. The decoration will look after itself and be much more artistic if left natural than if fussed into geometrical designs.

Make your mixture proportionate to your salad. This is a matter of intuition and experience combined. The test of right mixing is that no fluid should remain at the bottom of the bowl when finally mixed.

The “fatiguing” or turning over and over, that is, the actual mixing of the salad, should be very thoroughly done for just as long as is bearable to the verge of impatience. Rub a crust of bread with garlic or onion, put it in the bottom of the bowl and take it out just before serving. This is a chapon.

The true salad artist will never add any second dose of any ingredient during the process of mixing the sauce. I was once[Pg 129] present at a salad duel between an eminent Belgian violoncellist and a British banker. The former was an artist, the latter a well-meaning amateur. They used the same cruet-stand, and during the mixing process the banker politely pushed the oil and vinegar across to the Belgian, who bowed and said: “Thanks. I never add!” The banker appreciated the rebuke and retired from the contest. Both salads were excellent.

The old salad-proverb about the oil-spendthrift, the vinegar-miser, and all the rest of it, is too old to quote, but it expresses a truism aptly enough. Three to one is, according to my view, a fair proportion of oil to vinegar, but this, as indeed most things in this so-called twentieth century of ours, is only a matter of individual taste, and I have no desire to suggest that my opinion should be given the force of law. I have known a salad enthusiast who coated each leaf of lettuce with oil on a camel’s-hair brush, but this I think is an exaggeration of artistry. On the other hand, the wild stirring of dollops of the four condiments[Pg 130] in the salad spoon, which is then emptied vaguely into the salad, is childish and inefficient. The Italians have a proverb that runs:

It is quite unnecessary to give full recipes for all the following salads. I have already indicated the mixture, and the choice of ingredients need only be hinted at.

Lettuce should be young, fresh, and crisp. There are many varieties, the most delicate of which perhaps is the Romaine.

Endive is good when quite young. It should be very light in colour. Do not mix it with lettuce. A few dandelion leaves are quite permissible.

Celery and Parmesan cheese go well together. The celery must be cut into half-inch pieces.

Cauliflower, cooked and cold, mixed with celery, or a very few slices of cold cooked carrot, is cool and pleasant.

Potato salad requires firm round little potatoes cooked, cold, and cut into slices. The best kind is known as Hamburg Potatoes, and they may be had at the German Delikatessen shops. Avoid anchovies and olives with potato salad, but encourage chives and a sprinkling of cheese.

This is a variety of celery, sometimes known as Dutch celery, a tuber which has a quite peculiar and characteristic flavour. It needs no addition whatever, and is an excellent accompaniment to all meats. Cut it in slices, after boiling it for twelve minutes, and mix carefully with plenty of liquid.

Beat up ordinary mashed potatoes with a little lukewarm weak stock or warm water instead of milk, and no butter. Then dress[Pg 132] them with a little chopped chive, oil and vinegar, pepper and salt. This can be endlessly varied with chopped hard-boiled eggs, beetroot, cucumbers, anchovies, &c. This salad comes from that most excellent compendium of quaint conceits, “More Potpourri from a Surrey Garden,” by Mrs. C. W. Earle.

Old-fashioned salads, according to a seventeenth-century cook-book, were more diversified than ours. Among the ingredients of “Grand Sallets of divers compounds” were broom buds, pickled mushrooms, pickled oysters, blew figs, Virginia potato, caperons, crucifix pease, sage, mint, balm, burnet, violet leaves, red coleworts, raisins of the sun, charvel and ellicksander buds. Some of these we know under other names, but “blew figs” and “ellicksander buds” are untraceable. The list has a Rabelaisian smack, and gives one some idea of the crude admixture of flavourings which was acceptable to our forebears.

In a very charming old book, “Travels in England in 1702,” by C. P. Moritz, a Prussian clergyman, the following passage[Pg 133] seems quotable: “An English dinner generally consists of a piece of half-boiled, or half-roasted, meat; and a few cabbage leaves boiled in plain water; on which they pour a sauce made of flour and butter. This, I assure you, is the usual method of dressing vegetables in England. The slices of bread and butter which they give you with your tea are as thin as poppy leaves. But there is another kind of bread and butter usually eaten with tea, which is toasted by the fire, and is incomparably good. You take one slice after the other, and hold it to the fire on a fork till the butter is melted, so that it penetrates a number of slices at once; this is called toast.”

Another part of the same book describes the kitchen in a country inn, and gives a picture which seems to describe some old Dutch interior. “I now, for the first time, found myself in one of these kitchens which I had so often read of in Fielding’s fine novels; and which certainly give one, on the whole, a very accurate idea of English manners. The chimney, in this kitchen, where they were roasting and boiling, seemed[Pg 134] to be taken off from the rest of the room, and enclosed by a wooden partition, the rest of the apartment was made use of as a sitting and eating room. All round on the sides were shelves with pewter dishes and plates, and the ceiling was well stored with provisions of various kinds, such as sugar-loaves, black puddings, hams, sausages, flitches of bacon, &c.”

A modern Dr. Syntax in search of the picturesque would vainly nowadays look for anything approaching this homely simplicity in any English hostelry. The modern tendency seems all directed towards spurious finery, meretricious decoration, and uncomfortable New Art. The old inns are neglected, and the new hotels merely vulgarly gorgeous. The food is ambitious and basely imitative of bad French models. The advent of the ubiquitous motor car on old country roads, away from the railways, may in time improve matters, and revive, to a certain extent, the extinct glories of the old coaching inns; but as yet there is little, if any, improvement to be marked. In the meanwhile, I would suggest that every[Pg 135] travelling motor car be provided with a Chafing Dish, and thus mitigate or improve the dull pretentious meals which the country hotel proprietor thinks proper to provide. The Chafing Dish and the motor car seem made for one another. Will somebody try the combination?

There are just a few more salads which I should like to recommend, premising, however, that they are not altogether orthodox. By this I mean that they are not wholly composed of greenstuffs, but require the addition of extraneous appetisers.

Boil and blanch a dozen walnuts; break them in halves, mix them with a pint of green peas, cooked and cold, and toss them about in a small quantity of dressing.

Boil and skin a dozen chestnuts. Break them up and mix with a pint of cold cooked Brussels sprouts. Toss them in a small amount of mixture.

Almost any cold cooked vegetables. For choice, use equal portions of sliced potatoes, green peas, carrots, beans, celery, tomatoes, and onions. Add plenty of dressing.

Wash, scrape and dry the anchovies. Chop them up. Have the cucumber thinly sliced and thoroughly drained; plenty of salt, and little mixture. Sprinkle the anchovies over the sliced cucumber.

Dry the cauliflower and break up into small pieces, using all the flower and very little stalk or green. Cut a couple of slices of bacon into dice, sprinkle it about in the cauliflower, and use plenty of dressing.

Cut three slices of stale bread (crumb only) into half-inch squares; same amount[Pg 137] of sliced cold cooked potatoes; three tomatoes in quarters, one onion; toss all well together with a good deal of dressing. This sounds very simple, but as Sam Weller’s pieman said, “It’s the seasoning as does it.”

Lest I be thought quite unspeakably impossible in these last recipes, let me assure the worthy sceptics that they are in no wise guess-work, but one and all duly approved, and that I have merely taken the trouble to collate them and set them down here. They are excellent and original. I think that many folks will be grateful for them.

[Pg 138]

CHAPTER·VII·EGGS·AND·SAVOURIES

In the name of the profit: Eggs! Although farming in England may spell ruin, poultry almost always pays, and if intelligently and economically managed, one rarely hears of the failure of a poultry-farm. We import a vast number of millions of eggs annually (many of which come to a deservedly unrighteous end in villainous omelettes), but it would be easy, with capital, initiative, and incubators, to produce them one and all in Great Britain and make the egg trade a national industry.

A couple of generations ago, when any one walked gingerly in the street, he or she was said to be going at an “egg-trot,” because it[Pg 139] reminded one of a good housewife riding to market at a jog-trot pace with eggs in her panniers. Let us therefore approach the subject of eggs at an “egg-trot.”

A good egg is never bad. That is not such an inept truism as it looks. A good egg is unspoilable, even by the worst cook. There are over four hundred and fifty ways of cooking eggs, each of which has some peculiar excellence denied to the others. You cannot even make an omelette without breaking eggs, and most people find breakfast almost impossible without the regulation hen-fruit. To teach one’s grandmother how to suck eggs is a futile labour partaking of juvenile presumption, but it is at least easier than persuading the average cook that the fried egg of commerce is only one out of scores of simple breakfast egg-dishes. “There is reason in roasting eggs.” Even the most trivial culinary conjuring trick has some good motive for being performed in one way rather than in another. When wood fires were usual it was more common to roast eggs than to boil them, and great care was required to prevent their being “ill-roasted,[Pg 140] all on one side,” as Touchstone says in the play. Which is an additional reason for keeping strictly to the formula. Eggs are ticklish things to monkey with, and it is much easier to break them than to make them.

Learned disquisitions have before now been written on “How to boil an egg.” It is not in my province to touch on that subject. The votary of the Chafing Dish may be presumed to have enough common sense to come in out of the rain, and to be able to boil an egg. It is not much to ask. Pope, by the way, thought it vulgar to boil an egg, but then we are all vulgar nowadays—and glory in it. Neither do I propose to expatiate upon egg-flip, egg-nog, and kindred “dulceties.” I will give a few plain straightforward recipes for eggs in the Chafing Dish, and leave egg-eccentricities to my betters. I have only to premise that there is but one kind of egg. The Best. Real new-laid eggs are reliable friends. All others are base impostors!

The Chafing Dish should be more than half full of boiling water. Break each egg separately into a saucer and slip it steadily and dexterously into the Chafing Dish. Light the lamp, cover up the water and eggs, and put the dish over the lower hot-water pan, which should have in it a pint of hot water. Let it heat until the whites of the eggs are set; then remove the eggs from the pan with the special flat implement ad hoc. Put the eggs on rounds of toast. Sprinkle them with pepper, salt and parsley, and put a tiny piece of butter on top of each egg.

Beat up three eggs, whites and yolks, in a bowl, and add a pinch of salt. Put a good tablespoon of butter in the Chafing Dish, over a pan of hot water. When the butter sizzles, pour in the eggs, and stir with a wooden spoon very briskly for a minute and a half to two minutes, keeping the eggs from adhering to the sides and bottom of the[Pg 142] Dish. Have rounds of toast ready, and pour the eggs on to them. Dust them with Paprika and parsley.

It is easy and pleasant to vary plain scrambled eggs with a dozen odds and ends. Asparagus tips, for instance, bacon dice, tiny slicelets of ham, green peas, thin rounds of Brunswick sausage, broad beans, chicken livers, button mushrooms, tomatoes, or chopped nasturtium leaves. All these should be added, cooked of course, towards the end of the stirring operation, and just before serving. Many other ingredients might be suggested, but the ingenious innovator will be able to think these out for himself, and he can always christen his invention scrambled eggs à la quelque chose to please his own fancy and flatter his friends.

An omelette should not be too lightly undertaken. There are few things more tricky, more unreliable, more human, in a sense, than an omelette. You may make it a dozen times with perfect success. It will[Pg 143] be light, frothy, ethereal, almost gossamer-like in its impalpable fairyhood. The thirteenth time you proceed on precisely the same lines, use the same material, and in every way follow the same formula, and the result is chaos. If there be a sex in cookery, omelettes must be essentially feminine.

This is how to make an omelette. Beat three eggs lightly with two tablespoons of milk, a little salt and pepper. Put one tablespoon of butter in the Chafing Dish over the hot-water pan, and when sizzling hot, pour in the eggs. You must hold the dish in the left hand, and rapidly scrape away with a knife the cooked egg where it seems to adhere, letting the liquid portion follow the knife. It should be cooked in less than fifty seconds if the water beneath it is boiling. Then gently, but firmly, slip the knife under the left-hand edge of the omelette and fold it over rapidly and neatly to the side of the dish opposite the handle. Have a very hot plate ready; reverse it on to the dish, turn the latter over the former quickly, and the omelette will (or should) rest on the plate.

Of course all this sounds very easy, but it needs knack and practice—lots of both. When entirely successful, however, it is most gratifying and self-flattering. You feel a real cook at last, and look upon Ude, Carême, Francatelli, and the other great names of history as brothers. All Chafers go through that pleasant period when all goes right and nothing goes wrong. Sometimes it lasts quite a while; but at last, sooner or later, there comes a moment when we know we feel that we know how little we know. As at golf, when we never play so well as during our first month, even so is it with Chaffinda.

The testing of eggs should not rightly be one of the Chafer’s duties. He should be able to rely on his purveyor. The best eggs I ever had in London were provided by an old landlady who told me that she got them twice a week from the country. When I asked her what county they came from, she said, “They come all the way from Clapham Junction, sir!” Anyhow, they were remarkably good, and I have been served with less reliable ones in country farmhouses.[Pg 145] This was possibly for the same reason that one can rarely get fish at the seaside until the London train comes in.

You must provide some of those dear little fireproof china cups especially made for the purpose. Butter these little cups. Put two teaspoonsful of cream into each. Then break very carefully an egg into each. Dust with pepper, salt, and parsley. Stand these cups in the Chafing Dish with enough boiling water to come half-way up the cups. Have the lower pan full of hot water underneath. Boil up gently till the eggs are just set. Serve in the cups very hot, taking care in hauling them out of the Chafing Dish as they are very easily dropped.

Put two slices of Gruyère cheese (not very thin) in the Chafing Dish with a tablespoon of butter. Break two eggs in a saucer and slide them on to the cheese; sprinkle with[Pg 146] salt and Paprika and let it simmer (over the hot-water pan) till the eggs are set. Serve with fingers of toast.

Put a tablespoon of butter in the Chafing Dish. When it sizzles add an onion cut into slices; let it get well browned. Then throw in three fair-sized potatoes in slices. Pour over these the well-beaten yolks of two eggs, adding salt and pepper. Heat up to boiling-point. Serve with toast.

Cut into slices three hard-boiled eggs and one onion; put the latter only in the Chafing Dish with a tablespoon of butter. Stir it, and fry the onion to a light brown, then sprinkle in half a tablespoon of flour, and add two tablespoons of milk, pepper and salt. Boil up and then add the eggs; serve at once with grated Parmesan cheese.

Place a tablespoon of butter in the Chafing Dish, add half a teaspoon of dry mustard, two tablespoons of tomato sauce, one of Worcester sauce, and one of mushroom ketchup. Let it simmer, and then drop in four hard-boiled eggs cut into quarters, salted and peppered. Prepare four rounds of toast, spread them with good anchovy paste, or, better still, with Patum Peperium, and put the eggs on the toast, pouring over them the mixture.

This a remarkably good dish after a dance in the country and a ten-mile drive home. If the proper preparations are made, it can be turned out in five minutes in the billiard-room, and it picks one up in a thoroughly businesslike and efficient manner. Those cold winter drives after a busy night’s dancing, especially if the supper was good and frequent, demand a powerful restorative.

Now come we to the great question of Welsh Rabbit. I venture to doubt whether Rarebit is defensible, and I have read shoals[Pg 148] of arguments for and against. Anyhow, my kind is a Rabbit, and it tastes as nice—or nicer.

A small boy walking across a common with his mother espied a bunny. “Look, mother, there goes a rabbit!” “Nonsense, my boy, it must have been imagination.” “Mother, is imagination white behind?”

There is no imagination about a Welsh Rabbit. It is sternly real. But not, I think, quite as indigestible as generally supposed, especially if it be liberally dosed with Paprika, which I find to be marvellously digestive. A well-made Rabbit should be suave in flavour, not harsh, stringy, or pungent. There should be a silky sensation of sensuous softness, and, above all things, it should not tickle the palate. I fear that I am led to dogmatise on the rabbit, and to ferret out my own didactic ideas on the subject, but if my rabbit be carefully concocted and intelligently degustated, I am convinced that I shall be forgiven.

Use about half a pound of hard, dry, sound, mild cheese, without flaw or speck. Cut it up into tiny dice, in fact the smaller the better; some indeed insist on grating the cheese, but I have found this to be an unnecessary labour. Put a tablespoon of butter into the dish and knead it well with a wooden spoon until it begins to sizzle. Add half a teaspoon of Paprika, rather less of salt, and a tablespoon of beer (anything except bitter). Mix all thoroughly. Turn in the cheese and stir it about until it gets as consistent as thick cream, adding two to three more tablespoons of beer gradually, and taking great care that it does not become lumpy or stringy. Now put in a teaspoonful of made mustard. Keep on stirring until bubbles appear. It is then ready. You should beforehand get some toasts ready and as soon as the bubbling is well developed plunge in the toasts and cover them with the cheese. Serve on very hot plates. Milk can be used instead of beer, and condiments may be added in the shape[Pg 150] of Worcester sauce or Tabasco, but I do not recommend them. Everything depends on regular and practically continuous stirring, always in one direction of course.

If you want to turn the Welsh Rabbit into a Buck Rabbit, drop a poached egg upon each piece of toast on top of the cheese. Here you have the whole art of Rabbiting, and it is a very good thing to eat—sometimes.

The right and only place for Savouries at a dinner-party is fixed and determined by immutable custom, but at a Chafing-Dish meal, be it luncheon or supper, more latitude is allowed, and a savoury may pop up here and there at the most unexpected—and thereby most delightful—moment. I see nothing heterodox in having a savoury instead of hors d’œuvres, or introducing it after the fish or instead of sweets. Few people, and those only of the baser sort, despise a simple savoury. It is such a succulent trifle, a mere mouthful of suggestion, an airy nothing that agrees with everything. There are of course savouries and savouries. I can only give a very few recipes,[Pg 151] but have tried to make them as diverse and appetising as possible.

A quarter of a pound of lean ham, chopped fine. Do not mince it. Mincing machines, however patent and “adjustable,” have a way of reducing everything to an unholy pulp. Put the ham in the Chafing Dish with a teaspoon of Worcester sauce, half a teaspoon of good curry powder (I like Ventacachellum’s), a small tablespoon of butter, three drops of Tabasco, and two tablespoons of milk. Mix all well, heat up for five minutes and then spread on hot fingers of toast.

Put a walnut of butter into the Chafing Dish, also a Spanish onion sliced. Simmer for three minutes. Then cut a quarter of a pound of hard dry cheese into dice, and drop into the mixture; add half a cup of milk and stir well till it is all thoroughly[Pg 152] amalgamated and the cheese melted; add salt and Paprika and one beaten-up egg. Hot up for another three minutes and serve with toast.

Mix up the yolks of two eggs and two tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese. You can buy this ready grated, but it is not as good as if you grate it yourself. Add half a teaspoon of mustard and some salt. Spread the mixture on thinly buttered water biscuit (or thin Captains), put the biscuits in the Chafing Dish, over boiling water, and let them get slowly hot.

Stone neatly a dozen Spanish olives. Put them in the Chafing Dish with enough strong bouillon to cover them. Add a wine-glass of claret and the rind of half a lemon. Boil up quickly, strain, and serve the olives on toast or heated biscuit.

A tablespoon of butter in the Chafing Dish; as it melts stir in two eggs, yolks and whites, half a teaspoon of Paprika, the same of anchovy sauce, and half a dozen capers, chopped up. When very hot spread this upon rounds of buttered toast.

Boil half a pound of chestnuts and remove the shells and skins. Break them in handy little lumps. When cold and hard return them to the Chafing Dish and fry them in a tablespoon of butter, half a teaspoon of Paprika, and plenty of salt, until they are well cooked through. Drain and dry them on blotting-paper, and put a drop of Tabasco on each lump.

Melt one and a half tablespoons of butter. Drop into it a quarter of a pound of blanched almonds, and hot up till the almonds are[Pg 154] well burned, brown but not black. Drain them on blotting-paper and sprinkle them with plenty of salt and a little Paprika.

One can devil bones, biscuits, meat and fish in a Chafing Dish very nearly as well as on the grill. Care must be taken always to score the flesh across with deep incisions, so that the devil mixture penetrates well into the meat. This is the best devil mixture for Chafing-Dish purposes that I know. There may be better, but I have not come across them. Mix well upon a plate a teaspoon of mustard, the same of Worcester sauce and anchovy sauce, two teaspoons of olive oil and half a teaspoon of Paprika. Let the meat soak up this mixture, and then hot it up in a tablespoon of butter till it almost boils. A chicken drumstick makes the best devil in the world, but biscuits dipped in the mixture are not to be despised, and even slices of cold cooked meat, beef or mutton, are very toothsome if treated in the same manner. Any cold bird makes an excellent devil.

Although it may not come quite strictly under the head of Eggs and Savouries, this seems about the right place to expatiate upon Macaroni, the national food of Italy and the delight of every cultivated nation.

Real macaroni is made of hard wheat of a semi-translucent kind, which is richer in gluten and other nitrogenous matter than soft wheat. Macaroni is nothing but flour and water mixed in a cylinder, which concocts it into stiff paste. Then it is rolled under a huge granite wheel which flattens it into a smooth mass. It is cut into squares, and flattened by the wheel again and again until it is thoroughly kneaded. The dough then goes into an upright metal cylinder closed at the lower end with a thick disc of copper. This is pierced with openings through which a plunge-piston squeezes the dough into threads. The threads are cut off at regular intervals, and hung upon wooden drying-rods. Real macaroni is tender, yellowish, rough in texture, and elastic. It breaks with a clean, porcelainlike fracture. When[Pg 156] it boils it swells to twice its size, and does not become sticky, but keeps its tubular form without collapse. It will keep any length of time in a dry cool place.

There are many agreeable variations on the macaroni theme, some of which suggest music rather than cooking. Everybody knows Vermicelli, but among the lesser known but equally admirable kinds are Tagliatelli, Lasagnete, Fuselli, Bicorni, Candele, Cannelloni, Pennoni, Capelli di Angelo, and many more. Each has its own little special peculiarity. All are alike excellent.

Perhaps the handiest for Chafing-Dish purposes is Tagliatelli. Boil two pints of water in the Dish, put in half a pound of Tagliatelli, boil eight minutes, then strain. Return to the Dish, add a tablespoon of grated Parmesan cheese, and the same of butter. Toss round and round until well mixed, and serve very hot. Tomatoes mix well with macaroni, and so do mushrooms;[Pg 157] but the real macaroni-lover will prefer it by itself, accompanied always, of course, by plenty of cheese. Mustard mixes well with it, but be very chary of the salt, for it is already salted during the process of preparation. To make macaroni au gratin, which seems (unaccountably enough) to be the only way in which it is served in nine British households out of ten, the top of the cooked macaroni must be well covered with grated Parmesan cheese, and then carefully browned with a salamander.

Another most useful Italian preparation is Ravioli, which is compounded of a variety of good things. As Leporello says in Don Giovanni: “Madamina, il catalogo è questo!” Eggs, Macaroni, Paste, Pork, Chicken, Vegetables, and Cheese. It is a sort of White Knight portmanteau food, and if quite fresh (it is best in summer) is rightly termed “A dinner in one course”—if you cook it badly you may omit one letter in the last word.

This is how to prepare Ravioli with the help of Chaffinda. To two pints of boiling water in the Chafing Dish put a quarter of a pound of Ravioli; boil for ten minutes, then strain. Return to the dish; add half a teaspoon of butter, the same of grated Parmesan cheese, and hot it up for three minutes. Additional zest may be given, though it is by no means necessary, by cooking with the Ravioli a few fresh mushrooms, tomatoes, or even anchovies or olives. The best Ravioli I have found in London come from the Vegetable Meal Company of Soho.

With Macaroni or Ravioli I always suggest the drinking of Chianti, or Lacrima Christi. The former can often be obtained of quite good quality, not too rough or fiery. As to the latter, it is rare to find it drinkable. As a rule it is impossible. But the combination of food and wine is a good memory-reviver of a week at Genoa.

[Pg 159]

CHAPTER·VIII·SAUCES·

Madame de Staël said that she did not believe in ghosts—but that she was afraid of them. After the same fashion, I do not altogether believe in sauces, or perhaps I ought to say in any save the very simplest; but I fully recognise their great value in the assimilation of food.

Many dishes, without their special sauces, would be like a well-known song sung without an accompaniment. However beautifully delivered, no one, be he never so musical,[Pg 160] could honestly say that he enjoyed Schubert’s “Erlkönig,” unaccompanied. The accompaniment is so much a part of the artistic whole that to separate them would be sheer vandalism. Something of the same intimate oneness exists in cookery. Who would care to eat lamb divorced from mint sauce, or boiled mutton without the necessary caper sauce, or goose minus apple sauce?

At the same time it is a culinary axiom that the less sauce used the better. A dish—any dish—“covered in sauce” is an abomination. We have the august authority of Pliny for moderation and simplicity. “Their best and most wholesome feeding is upon one dish, and no more, and the same plaine and simple: for surely this huddling of many meats one upon another of divers tastes is pestiferous. But sundrie sauces are more dangerous than that.” This is Holland’s translation.

Another point worthy of consideration is that sauce is to a great extent a geographical expression. What may be most excellent in Madrid is wholly out of place in Inverness; and what is nice at Nice is nasty at Norwich.

Insufficient account, I venture to think, is taken of the influence of climate upon national food, and it is often difficult if not impossible to acclimatise foreign fare to British stomachs, not because of anything inherent in the food, but simply as a matter of latitude. It is an historical commonplace that in the bleak cold north of Europe boar’s flesh was found more to man’s taste than that of the bull or bear, because it is fatter, richer, and produces much more heat. For this very reason in the South and East of Europe the flesh of swine is an abomination. In the Scandinavian Edda we are told that a boar was killed every night for the food of the warriors who feasted in high Valhalla. The bones were all preserved, together with the hide and head, and in the morning they were put together and re-endowed with life. The name of this huge pig was Sœhrimner, the cauldron in which it was boiled was called Eldhrimner, and the cook Andhrimner.

Much depends, too, upon the cooking; bad cooking is waste, both of money and comfort.[Pg 162] Those whom God has joined in matrimony, ill-cooked joints and worse-cooked potatoes have often put asunder. In sauces, above all things, careful cooking, implicit keeping to the exact formulæ of recipes, and a restraint of all imagination, are immensely necessary. Not even the greatest artist can afford to juggle with sauces. They are fixed, immutable, and unalterable. A very favourite expression in French culinary manuals is the injunction to the cook: Travaillez bien votre sauce. The amateur sauce-maker would do well to bear this in mind. The sauce must be well worked, amalgamated, combined; otherwise it is a mere mess, lacking cohesion and perfection.

It is alleged of the incomparable Soyer that he said that sauces are to cookery what grammar is to language. Whether he really said so or not matters little. Some of the Soyer sauces are classics to this day, and not to be lightly imitated—especially on the Chafing Dish.

Let it be borne in mind that each and every sauce should have a character of its own. Many otherwise quite virtuous cooks[Pg 163] live and die in the belief that they cannot make a sauce sufficiently savoury without putting into it everything that happens to be available, thinking, ignorantly enough, that every addition is bound to be an improvement.

There are only two real foundation sauces—mères sauces, or grandes sauces, as the French call them—the white and the brown sauce. All other sauces are more or less based on these two.

The great Carême resigned the position of Master of the Mouth to George IV. after only a few weeks’ service, and at an honorarium of £1000 a year, because he could not bear the English climate. His culinary swan-song took the form of a wondrous sauce, now alas! lost, which he called la dernière pensée de Carême.

A quite excellent and easily prepared sauce, which the very poorest households can make, and which will give zest to the simplest meal, is that described in the Delamere Cookery Book. This is the recipe for Pleasant Companionship sauce. A kind word will stir up the dormant appetite, while a[Pg 164] harsh one will extinguish it, and, what is worse, will check the digestion of nutriment already taken. Such sauce may be regarded as Moral Sauce.

Reasoning from these winged words, we may infer that the remark so often heard from the mouths of little girl-children in the street: “Now, I won’t ’ave none o’ your sauce!” must really mean that there is a lack of Moral Sauce in the family circle.

In the recipes for the following sauces, I have purposely kept the ingredients as simple as possible; they are all reliable and appetising. As to which sauce appertains especially to which fish or meat, I do not propose to enter. That is a matter of taste, experience, and individuality, and I need hardly add that a white sauce does not go well with brown meat, nor brown sauce with white meat. Such admonitions are surely unnecessary to the advanced Chafist.

Two tablespoons of butter, the same of flour; melt and mix together in the Dish,[Pg 165] bring to boiling-point and allow to boil up for half a minute, then pour in a cupful of boiling water, to reduce the same to the consistency of cream; boil up again, stirring all the time, add a squeeze of lemon before serving.

Mix well in the Chafing Dish two tablespoons of flour, one of butter, a small grating of nutmeg, a little pepper and salt; add a tumbler of milk; hot it up, stirring the while, and strain before using.

Two tablespoons of butter. Heat and stir until it is brown and sizzling, then add a tablespoon of Tarragon vinegar, the same of Worcester sauce, half a tablespoon of chopped capers, a teaspoon of anchovy sauce, and a wine-glass of bouillon. Boil up all this for three minutes.

Mix up in the Dish a teaspoon of each of the following, chopped finely: gherkins, capers, shallots (or mild onions); add half a teaspoon of black pepper and a tablespoon of vinegar. Boil this for three minutes, then add a wine-glass of bouillon and a tablespoon of “brown thickening”—which is sold ready made by grocers—and a dash of anchovy sauce. Boil up again and skim the surface before using.

Mix up well two tablespoons of butter with one of flour, a grating of nutmeg, half a teaspoon of black pepper, the same of salt, rather more of chopped parsley, and a good squeeze of lemon. Put all this in the Chafing Dish with a tablespoon of milk. Stir it until it boils up, and then serve very hot.

These are to all intents and purposes the same sauce, save that Rémoulade has an[Pg 167] added dose of oil and mustard. Mix a tablespoon of flour with the same of butter, a grating of nutmeg, half a teaspoon of pepper, the same of salt, the same of chopped parsley, and a good squeeze of lemon. Put this in the Chafing Dish with a tablespoon of bouillon, boil it up and skim it. Now mix up separately a tablespoon each of Tarragon and Chili vinegar and Worcester sauce, with a teaspoon of anchovy sauce. Boil up this mixture, and after two minutes’ boiling add it to the former mixture and combine the two.

A cupful of bouillon in the Dish, add a wine-glass of port (or claret, but port is more orthodox), half as much Worcester sauce, a teaspoon of anchovy sauce, and a full tablespoon of red currant jelly. Boil it all up for three minutes, and skim before using.

Peel and slice four onions; put them in the Dish with a teaspoon of butter, a little[Pg 168] nutmeg, pepper, and salt. Cover up and stew very slowly until the onions are almost dissolved. Then add two tablespoons of flour, a cold cooked potato cut into dice, a cupful of bouillon, and the same of milk. Stir and boil for three minutes. Then rub the sauce through a sieve and hot up again before serving.

A tablespoon of bread-crumbs in the Dish with an onion, pepper and salt, a cup of milk, and half a tablespoon of butter. Hot up and stir for four minutes. Take out the onion before using.

To the foregoing plain butter sauce add a teaspoon of made mustard, a tablespoon of Chili vinegar, a squeeze of lemon, and a teaspoon of anchovy sauce. Make and serve very hot.

Chop up a fair-sized onion in the Chafing Dish with half a tablespoon of butter. Fry to a light brown, then add a cup of bouillon, a teaspoon of vinegar, pepper and salt, and a teaspoon of chopped parsley. Stir vigorously and add gradually half a tablespoon of flour, and another half-tablespoon of butter. Boil up the sauce for two minutes.

Put in the Dish a teaspoon of bread-crumbs, two shredded shallots, a walnut of butter, a teaspoon of vinegar and two tablespoons of bouillon. Boil this for three minutes with pepper and salt. The sauce should not be too thick.

A walnut of butter in the dish; heat it till it is thoroughly brown, then add a tablespoon of vinegar, pepper and salt, and hot it up again.

Put in the dish the peel of a quarter of a lemon, three sprigs of parsley, one of thyme, four button mushrooms, cut up small, a walnut of butter, and a suspicion of garlic. Hot up, and when all is well mixed pour in half a cup of bouillon; let it get thick, but not boil. Then take out the garlic, and add half a walnut of butter.

Cut up two good-sized onions into slices. Simmer them gently with a tablespoon of butter and two slices of ham, one fat slice and one lean slice, a teaspoon of flour, salt, pepper, a pinch of sugar, a wine-glass of bouillon, and a good squeeze of lemon juice. Hot up for three minutes.

This is the best sauce I know, and I have tried many, for grills or anything in that way. I copy it verbatim (and without permission)[Pg 171] from that most excellent food-book entitled “Cakes and Ale,” by Mr. Edward Spencer. Gubbins’ Sauce is peculiarly adaptable to the Chafing Dish, and is made in this wise: Fill the lower hot-water dish with boiling water. Keep it so. Melt in the Chafing Dish proper a lump of butter the size of a large walnut. Stir into it, when melted, two teaspoonsful of made mustard, then a dessert-spoonful of vinegar, half that quantity of Tarragon vinegar, and a tablespoonful of cream—Devonshire or English. Season with salt, black pepper and cayenne, according to the (presumed) tastes and requirements of the breakfasters. So far the recipe. I should add that although the ingenious inventor puts Gubbins’ Sauce with a grill among his breakfast allurements, it is by no means necessary to confine it to that meal. I have found it excellent at midnight—and later—with devilled kidneys, and it is not to be despised at any time of the day when you feel that way inclined.

“The Gastronomic Regenerator: a Simplified and entirely New System of Cookery,” by Monsieur A. Soyer of the Reform Club,[Pg 172] London, 1846. Such is the mouth-filling title of one of the most interesting and curious works of the last century. The two-page dialogue with Lord M(arcus) H(ill), and the extraordinary recipe for “The Celestial and Terrestrial Cream of Great Britain,” are in themselves inimitable in their quaint pomposity. Maga for August 1846 reviews the work kindly and good-humouredly, and says that the “Gastronomic Regenerator” reminds them of no book so much as the “Despatches of Arthur Duke of Wellington.” It may be a matter of dispute, adds Maga, whether Wellington or Soyer acquired his knowledge in the face of the hotter fire. Although Soyer was comic in his pompous affectation it must not be forgotten that he did splendid work in the Crimea in feeding the sick and wounded. Also his sauces are master works. And for these two things much may be forgiven him.

The foregoing sauces are best described as the regulars. There are plenty of others, mostly of a rather elaborate description, which those more experienced than myself[Pg 173] must describe. I will content myself with adding quite a few irregular or freak sauces, if I may use the expression.

This is a rather rich mixture, adapted for fresh-water fish. After a decent day’s sport with the tricksome Mayfly, the quarter of an hour just before dinner may profitably be employed in concocting it. Half a pint of cream, or milk, but cream is better, two tablespoons of walnut ketchup, home made for choice, and one tablespoon of anchovy sauce. Boil these up for five minutes, and just before serving add a small walnut of butter, a teaspoon of flour, a squeeze of lemon, and a pinch of cayenne. Stir up all together, and serve very hot. It is the best fresh-water fish-sauce going.

This is essentially the wild-duck sauce, and is a welcome and agreeable variant on the stereotyped port-wine sauce. Pare the[Pg 174] rind of two oranges, shred the rind thinly, and boil up for five minutes in as little water as possible. Set the rind aside. Melt a walnut of butter in the Dish, mix it with half a tablespoon of flour, and stir it till it begins to burn; add a cupful of bouillon, pepper and salt, the squeezed juice of both oranges, and a teaspoon of soft white sugar. Now put in the shredded rinds, boil up for two minutes, and serve with the duck. If you have not time to make this sauce, mix a glass of port wine, a dash of cayenne, and a squeeze of lemon. Slice the breast of the duck and pour this mixture over it. A very useful adjunct to wild duck is a simple orange salad. Divide two or three oranges into sections, dress them with oil, vinegar, pepper and salt, and eat it as you would any ordinary salad.

This is simply Truffle Sauce, and appeals mainly to the vulgar-minded. It is made thus: Chop up two truffles very finely. Put them in the Chafing Dish with a glass[Pg 175] of sherry and a walnut of butter, and boil for five minutes; add pepper and salt and a squeeze of lemon. I am of opinion that truffles (which the ancients thought were the product of thunder) should only be eaten in one way, and that is en serviette, cooked in hot wood ashes and eaten with praise and thanksgiving. The flavour of truffles I take to be one of the most perfect in the whole category of food-stuffs. Their indiscriminate use in shreds, choppings, patterns, and for ornament, I consider to be a capital sin. The charcutier is mostly to blame for this; any old thing dressed up aux truffes he considers a delicacy. One day a band of knowledgeable eaters will slay all charcutiers.

Truffles suggest pigs; pigs suggest, to me, Berkshire; and Berkshire a certain witty lady who, speaking of a local magnate, a self-made man, and a very wealthy one too, but who retained his awfully uncouth manners, described him as a wild boar whom civilisation had turned into a pig. I fear me there are many such.

One of the English Kings died of a surfeit of lampreys, and one of the French[Pg 176] Ministers of a surfeit of truffles, which were also alleged to have mainly contributed to the demise of the famous gourmand Béquet, who was the predecessor of Jules Janin on the Débats, and on whom Roger de Beauvoir wrote this epitaph:

An ex-chef to whom I told this story of Béquet was profoundly moved, and said simply: “It must have been a beautiful death!”

[Pg 177]

CHAPTER·IX·SWEETS·AND·ODDMENTS·

The warm glow of virtuous satisfaction induced by the knowledge that one has done what was expected of one is my sole excuse for the contents of this chapter. I have no sweet tooth, and my experience in the cooking of sweets has been limited to the few recipes which come later on. Even these I would rather have omitted, because it is so easy to buy éclairs, petits fours, and other “dulceties” wherewith to finish off a Chafing-Dish meal, but it is just on the confines of possibility that this book may be read by a lady—or, if I am lucky, by two or even three—and I should be indeed accounted a poor instructor if I omitted[Pg 178] sweets from my curriculum. “I humbly beg pardon of heaven, and the lady,” as Mr. Pepys said when he kissed the cook.

“Give the bairns pudding in plenty, again say I”—so wrote Sir Walter Scott, and I am heartily at one with him, but Chaffinda does not accommodate herself to the fabrication of pudding—and, besides, children ought to be in bed when supper-time brings the Chafing Dish on the table. Baking is of course impossible, and boiling in a cloth equally so. I have already said that Chaffinda—being so nearly human—has her limitations, and these are two of them, which I, for one, in no wise regret. Nevertheless, pudding is a great institution—in its proper place—which is childhood.

Our national Jack Pudding was a common object of whilom country fairs, a sort of typical buffoon who performed pudding tricks on a stage; one of them being to swallow a number of yards of black puddings amidst yokel plaudits. Curiously enough, and this is an etymological puzzle well worth following up, the typical buffoon of most European countries is christened[Pg 179] after the commonest article of the daily food of the people. France has her Jean Potage; Germany, Hanswurst; Italy, Macaroni; and Holland, Pickel Herringe. This can hardly be a coincidence.

The learned Dr. Thudichum wisely says: “The state of culture of every nation can be estimated comparatively by its confectionery, even when we know little of its cookery, for confectionery is the most advanced and refined part of cookery, and thus enables an expert to draw a conclusion backwards regarding the kind of cookery out of which it originated.”

This is certainly true to a limited extent, but to attempt a rough and ready analysis on these lines is like dissecting a hummingbird with a hatchet. Generalisations are as dangerous as July oysters.

Now for my sweets. The first one on the list is the familiar Apple Fritter, or Beignet de Pommes. It is quite easily cooked, especially if a little care be taken over the[Pg 180] concoction of the all-important matter of batter.

Begin by carefully peeling four apples, fairly large ones for choice, then cut them into slices, about one-eighth of an inch thick, and take out the cores. Now make the batter. Put four tablespoons of flour in a basin with half a teaspoon of salt. Pour one tablespoon of oil on to half a tumbler of tepid water. They will not mix of course. Add this gradually to the flour, stirring it well. Next beat up two whites of egg to a very stiff froth, and stir it lightly into the flour. The batter is then ready for use. The eggs should not be added until you are quite ready to make the fritters. Now with a skewer or fork take up the apple rings, one by one, dip them in the batter, see that they are well covered, and then drop them into the Chafing Dish in which you have heated two tablespoons of butter to boiling-point. Fry the apples until they are soft, and of a golden brown colour. Drain them on kitchen paper, and sprinkle them with a little castor sugar.

Apples, plainly stewed in slices, in milk and sugar, and then served on a bed of rice, are very satisfactory. The experimenting Chafist will find that sweets can very often be adapted so as to be suitable for the Chafing Dish. But always rehearse your impromptus before trying them in public.

Cut a pound of fresh sweet rhubarb into two-inch lengths, put it in the Chafing Dish with a tumbler of water, the peel of one lemon, and a tablespoon of soft white sugar. Let it boil up until the rhubarb is quite soft, and then either serve hot, or—preferably—let it get quite cold and serve with clotted cream.

Almost any stoneless fruit can be cooked in the same way. Gooseberries, currants, strawberries, and raspberries all make excellent compote, but care must be taken that the fruit does not get pulpy: it should be quite soft, but retain its proper shape.[Pg 182] Quite ripe fruit is not so desirable as fruit that is just going to be ripe.

Cut a smallish pine into half-inch slices, paring the skin, of course, and split in half three or four ordinary penny sponge cakes. Fry these latter in the Chafing Dish in a tablespoon of butter till they are light brown on both sides. Take them out and keep them hot. Fry the pine slices in a like amount of butter and their own juice. Pour over them a wine-glassful of brandy and serve on the browned sponge cake. Cream may be added, but it is not at all necessary.

Shell a dozen chestnuts, and boil them for five minutes, then remove the skins. Put them back in the Chafing Dish with enough fresh water to cover them, and a tablespoon of soft white sugar, boil them until they are soft. Take them out and drain them, but do not break them up. Now put in the[Pg 183] Chafing Dish the yolk of one egg, another tablespoon of soft white sugar, half a teacup of strong black coffee, a liqueur of brandy and a tablespoon of milk or cream. Keep on stirring till just upon boiling, then pour over the chestnuts, and serve hot.

It is not requisite to add brandy or other spirits to the foregoing dishes. It certainly tends to completeness of flavour, and, especially with cooked fruits, seems to bring out a subtle aroma or bouquet, but many most estimable gourmets dispense with all spirits in cookery, and are none the less well fed. Spirits should never be given in food for the young.

A Surrey curate opened the Sunday School one day with the well-known hymn, “Little drops of water, little grains of sand.” In the middle of the first verse he stopped the singing, and complained strongly of the half-hearted manner in which it was sung. He made a fresh start. “Now then,” he shouted, “little drops of water, and for goodness sake put some spirit into it!” And he wore a blue ribbon in his buttonhole too!

I should have liked to give the full recipe for a seventeenth-century “Quelque-Shose,” according to Master Robert May’s cook-book. The ingredients read temptingly—if somewhat lavish in quantity. Forty eggs are required, which are to be made in the form of omelets, which are to be “rolled up like a wafer” and served with “white wine, sugar, and juyce of lemon.” Another recipe of the same artist was for “Pie Extraordinary, or Bride Pie, which was made of ”severall compounds, being of severall distinct pies on one bottom.” At a rough guess this may have been the forerunner of our latter-day Bride-cakes, with their superimposed layers of almond paste, and consolidated indigestion. It is always marvellous to me that there are so few sudden deaths after a wedding, particularly if the cut cake has been handed about promiscuously.

Bananas contain three times as much nourishment as meat or potatoes, and as a food are declared to be superior to bread. They are as good raw as cooked, and my only advice is to take care to buy the smaller, more delicate kinds, and to avoid the grosser[Pg 185] plantains, which are musty and flavourless. The kind known as “Lady’s Fingers” are the best of all.

Tear off a strip of skin from each of half a dozen bananas. Put them in the Dish with a tablespoon of milk, and a sprinkle of soft sugar. Heat them up until the skins are quite brown and the fruit soft and pulpy. Then strip the skins, add some more sugar, and serve with sponge-cake fingers.

Put in the Chafing Dish a teacupful of clean boiled rice, rather more than a pint of milk, a small stick of cinnamon, and a bay leaf. Add a heaped tablespoon of soft white sugar, and a suspicion of vanilla. Boil up very slowly, and remove spices before serving.

There is a very good Swedish pudding, known as Skansk Gröt, which is made in the following wise: Boil in the Chafing Dish half a pound of clean rice, with the peel of a lemon, and half a stick of cinnamon, and a cup of milk. Just before it comes to the boil add four apples, sliced and cored but not peeled, and a handful of stoned raisins, a tablespoon of sifted sugar, and a wine-glass of sherry. Boil all this for eight minutes, then take out the lemon peel and the cinnamon before serving. This Skansk Gröt can be eaten hot or cold, with or without cream or milk. It is good anyway.

Stuff a quarter of a pound of good pulled figs with blanched almonds, split in half. Put in the Chafing Dish a tablespoon of soft white sugar, a teaspoon of lemon juice, and a wine-glass of claret. Heat this up, but do not boil. Add the figs, cover up, and cook for eight minutes, when they ought to be quite tender and ready to serve.

Peel and core, but do not cut up, four largeish apples, not necessarily cooking ones; in fact sweet eating apples are better. Put them in the Chafing Dish with six tablespoons of soft white sugar, the rind and juice of half a lemon, and an inch stick of cinnamon, a tiny bit of vanilla, and half a tumbler of whisky. Let this simmer over a low flame for a good half-hour, till the apples are soft. When quite done put them on a hot dish and pour the sauce over them.

There is an old tradition among whist players to the effect that there are at the present moment seven hundred and fourteen Englishmen wandering in destitution upon the continent of Europe, because they would not lead trumps when they held five. I do not desire to find myself in a like case, so I have played my trumps, and must abide by the consequences. I do not propose to invent impossible sweets which I have not tested in the Chafing Dish, give them high-falutin’ titles, and palm them off on unsuspecting and all-confiding Chafing students.[Pg 188] Let them turn inventors themselves, and my blessing go with them!

I have purposely said little or nothing on the subject of appropriate drinks to accompany Chaffinda’s efforts, because that is, to a certain extent, a personal matter. At the same time it may be useful to know that it is very easy to mature cheap claret. The trick is French, and fairly reliable. It happens sometimes that the ordinary dinner claret of commerce leaves something to be desired in the way of flavour and palatability. It may be sour, acrid, harsh, biting, vinegary, and half a dozen other things, all unpleasant. Add to a glass of such ordinary wine a teaspoonful of very hot water. The effect is usually magical. The wine seems ten years older. It becomes softer, mellower, suaver, and really almost drinkable. Le petit vin bleu du pays becomes almost a cru.

Some people drink coffee after dinner, and eke after lunch, if they have time—and lunch. Others use it as a barometer. You can do both, if you know how. It is very simple. The coffee must be very hot. Drop a lump of sugar into the cup, and before stirring it[Pg 189] observe how the bubbles rise. If they rush towards the middle of the cup and meet, then it is going to be fine weather. If they remain close to the edge of the cup it will rain or snow. If they separate but wander about vaguely, then the weather will be changeable. This barometer is not infallible, but it has been known to be accurate. Try it. Café frequenters on the boulevards spend hours in checking the prognostications of their coffee by the weather reports in the papers.

I should like to give a few final hints on Chafing-Dish party-giving, the result of my own experience, which has been both bitter and sweet. Imprimis: “Don’t ask too many people,” as H. J. Byron said on his deathbed, when his coachman told him that one of his horses was ailing and he thought he had better give him a ball. “You should always be two,” quoth the Abbé Morellet, “to eat a truffled turkey. It is my invariable practice. I am going to dine off one to-day. We shall be two—the turkey and myself.”

A fellow feeding makes us wondrous kind, and I do not for a moment suggest that Chafing-Dish meals should always be soli, far[Pg 190] from it; a duet is delightful, a trio tactful, and a quartet quieting. I cannot advise going beyond that number. Chaffinda is always present, of course, but she does not count as company, she is merely the hand-maiden, the geisha, the tutelary genius hovering over the meal.

I have already enjoined the absolute necessity of rehearsal; leave nothing to chance. If you want to make your little effect, see that it is properly stage-managed: your properties ready, your limes in working order, and your band parts ready and complete. “In the green salad days of my youth, when I rarely spoke aught but the truth,” I tried more than once to dazzle my guests with unrehearsed effects, but in every case the result was dire failure. All that sort of thing is magnificent, but it is not cookery.

Again, do not attempt too elaborate a bill of fare. Be pre-Raphaelite in your attention to detail rather than Academic in your mass of lavish decoration. Of two evils choose the prettier, and prefer a discreet little meal of soup, meat, vegetable and savoury, to an[Pg 191] elaborate programme which defeats its own ends, and clogs the appetite.

It is such much better form to be simple, poor and proud—besides, it costs less. About forty years ago the late Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborn wrote a letter on the growing love of luxury to the Times, in the course of which he said: “The wealthy per force of their positions must have large expensive establishments; they are doomed to live in show houses; they are the proper consumers of the produce of the decorative arts; but they yet have to eat, and here comes the question. How can they eat in character? How can they dine up to their pictures, sculpture, plate, and music?”

The answer is easy enough. They can never dine up to their pictures, because they are usually dyspeptic.

[Pg 192]

CHAPTER·X·AMENITIES·OF·THE·TABLE

“I had some hopes of the cook at first, but when I talked to her tightly and closely, I could make nothing of her: she was all wiggle-waggle, and I could never persuade her to be categorical.”
Dr. Johnson (“D’Arblay’s Memoirs”).

Some of us have been to school. It was usually a long time ago. Still, here and there a man with a memory may recollect that when Achilles, in the “Iliad,” has granted the request of the unhappy Priam in reference to the dead body of his son, his next remark to the old man is an eminently practical and sensible one: “Let us now go to dinner!” It has struck me that this classical allusion may have been one of the reasons for the erection of the Achilles statue at Hyde Park Corner; just to remind late dawdlers in[Pg 193] the Park that dinner-time and dressing-tide wait for no man or woman.

I have already had the presumption to suggest that we eat too often and too much and too late and too elaborately; this has emboldened me to further frankness. A French friend who “knew himself” in dining matters said to me once: “En Angleterre on se nourrit bien, mais on ne dine pas.” He was both right and wrong. Right as regards the very pseudo-French cookery of the affluent middle-class, wrong as regards the best restaurants and hotels.

Buckle, in his “History of Civilisation,” following Cabanis, considers food as one of the four physical agents most powerfully influencing the human race. Men’s manners and morality, their customs and condition, depend mainly on what they eat. The boldness of the Norseman and the timidity of the Bengalee are justly due to their respective preference for meat or vegetables, for carbonaceous or nitrogenous diet. Slavery in India is the direct result of rice, in Egypt of dates, of maize in Mexico and Peru.

We must, therefore, adapt ourselves to[Pg 194] circumstances in so far as the circumstances adapt themselves to us. It is no longer fashionable to get drunk, and in a generation or two it will be the worst kind of form to eat more than three courses at dinner.

“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,” said Brillat-Savarin, Judge of the French Court of Cassation in 1826, and not a professed cook, as so many folk seem to imagine. He goes on to say: “The gourmets by predestination can be easily told. They have broad faces, bright eyes, small foreheads, short noses, full lips, and rounded chins. The females are plump and pretty rather than handsome, with a tendency to embonpoint.”

This is not complimentary, and does not seem to be borne out by experience. Women gourmets are fewer than men, but they make up in knowledge what they lack in number. Both Goethe and Byron have left it on record that they objected to seeing women eat, but nowadays, with better table manners, it is not a disagreeable sight, except perhaps at a Swiss table d’hôte.

An English dinner-party, in the present[Pg 195] year of grace, is not at all ugly. It may be—and sometimes is—almost a thing of beauty. The modern dinner-table approaches as nearly to the old Greek type as is compatible with the widely divergent character of the two civilisations. It certainly follows the classic pattern in two valuable particulars—beauty and repose. True, we do not wreathe our heads in roses, nor carry doves nestling in the folds of our robes, nor pour libations of wine over one another (such a messy habit!), but we have done away, for good and all, let us hope, with the dreadful mid-Victorian table decorations. Instead of hideous dish-covers, branching candelabra, hideous épergnes, and appalling “set pieces,” we have Hawthorn bowls of roses, delicate Venetian glass, beaten copper finger-bowls, perfectly plain silver, and the simplest of white china. Everything perfect of its kind, and its kind the non-ostentatious.

We have also become franker in the honest avowal of our appetites. Even in our grandmothers’ time it was considered somewhat immodest to take a second helping without being pressed. Pressure was expected[Pg 196] as a politeness from the host. An old manual of table etiquette says: “Offer every dish at least thrice to each guest. Timid appetites must be tempted, for they exist still, especially among literary folk!”

Altogether we are much politer, outwardly at any rate, than we used to be. Even a Royal Duke has manners. So he had formerly—but they were mostly bad. It is told of one of the Royal Family, of a couple of generations ago, that he was dining at Belvoir, and his host, noticing His Royal Highness studying the menu at dinner, asked him if he would like anything that did not appear on the bill of fare. “Yes; roast pig and apple dumpling,” was the gracious reply.

The daring simplicity of the royal appetite is splendid, but the pity is that it was not more pleasantly put.

Another reform in our dining arrangements is the greater love which folks now bear to fresh air. Formerly dining-rooms were heated up as though the guests were early cucumbers, and wanted forcing. This, I am sure, contributed greatly to the dulness of the average dinner-party. As the result[Pg 197] of careful observation, I have found, by experimenting with a thermometer, that at a temperature of 62° Fahrenheit conversation flows easily and every one’s wits are at their best and sharpest. At 75° or higher the most elastic spirits become subdued. If any one says to me: “So-and-so was not himself last night at dinner,” I am always tempted to ask: “What was the temperature?”

Why will people, when they dine out in public places, insist on having music? It seems to me a confusion of the arts, and with little ear for music I cannot bring myself to take my soup in polka time, or masticate my whitebait to the Intermezzo from “Cavalleria Rusticana.” It is quite a modern fad, for in 1874 G. A. Sala discusses music at dinner in a magazine, and only refers to it in royal palaces. With all deference to those who know better, it seems to me to be rather rude to good music, and to a good dinner.

All the foregoing is in direct relation to the art of the Chafing Dish, because the refinement of modern cookery is nowhere more evident than in dealing with Chaffinda. I have been to a dinner-party where two[Pg 198] Chafing Dishes were brought on to the table after the sweets, one being placed before the host and the other before the hostess. Deft servants handed the necessary ingredients, and in five minutes, the guests (we were eight, I think) were enjoying a little egg savoury, piping hot, and cooked before their eyes. This sort of thing may become quite common. Who knows?

The table for an ordinary Chafing-Dish meal, whether luncheon, dinner or supper, such as might be cooked after a diligent study of the foregoing chapters, should be arranged as simply as possible. One end bears the Chafing Dish on its own little tray and cloth. The remaining three-quarters of the table may be laid for a smallish party, and, by all the canons of good taste, avoid decorating it with tulle or nun’s veiling, or chiffon, or whatever the silly, flimsy, puffy stuff is called. You might as well put ostrich feathers and bombazine in the middle of the table. Good simple glass and china, the older the better, as a rule, because the forms are more beautiful; and I see no need for uniformity in either service, so long as[Pg 199] each individual piece is beautiful in itself. Pewter plates retain the heat splendidly, and some of the old ones are excellent in design. Wooden platters are affected by some people for meats, and I confess that the red juice of the meat on the well-scrubbed surface is very pleasing. Keep the centre ornament very low, so that one can see and talk across it. A big dish of almost any old blue and white ware, with a very few flowers, but each bloom perfect in itself, is my own ideal. Nothing is more trying than to talk to your opposite neighbour across a small table, through a mass of tightly packed towering flowers, or a jungle of dense fern. It is not beautiful, but just annoying.

Chafing-Dish cookery, I am delighted to be able to add, seems to engender the love of beautiful things. It is so easy to pick up and use, in parlour cookery, all sorts of quaint and delightful pieces of china of curious and old-fashioned design. They may not all be genuine; in fact, most of them are pretty certain not to be. But if the shape is good, the colouring pleasing, and the form well adapted for holding sauce,[Pg 200] sweetmeats, condiments, or anything else, then, so far as Chaffinda is concerned, their genuineness and intrinsic value is a secondary matter.

One is occasionally tempted by the offer of a real old silver Chafing Dish with or without an ivory handle. Cooking in such an implement would be an ultra refinement of the art. But the temptation must be resisted, such things are not for daily use, although at one time and in some houses a silver dish no doubt was always put before the master, wherein to make his Welsh Rabbit.

There is a sort of huge silver Chafing Dish in the Cluny Museum, which rather suggests a cauldron, so vast are its dimensions. It is evidently fairly old and has seen much use, though it is not quite evident what could have been cooked in it, unless it were the original marmite of Monsieur Deharme, which never left off cooking.

Grimod de la Reynière places on record, as an example to all good cooks, this extraordinary marmite—or stockpot—of Monsieur Deharme, a restaurateur in the Rue[Pg 201] des Grands-Augustins. He calls it “the everlasting marmite,” as, at the date of writing (1803), it had not been off the fire for eighty-five years! During that time it had cooked at least three hundred thousand capons, for Monsieur Deharme’s specialty was the purveying of well-cooked hot capons at any hour of the day and night. His establishment was always open, and the procession of succulent birds to the marmite was unending; in fact, the Deharme fowl was regenerated perpetually in one long procession of—apparently—the same bird, born anew for each successive customer. The author adds that this marmite was celebrated throughout Europe—and no wonder.

In preparing some of the recipes in preceding chapters, Chafers may find some difficulty, if it be summer-time, in keeping one portion of the dish hot whilst the other portion is cooking. When I have no fire in the room, I use a copper tray with two spirit lamps underneath. This is a splendid invention and no Chafer should be without one. Then there is another useful thing to[Pg 202] remember. The lower hot-water dish, if filled with water and put over the lamp, only half turned up, will keep food warm in the Chafing Dish for ever so long. This is often useful to know, as it is so pleasant to find something unexpectedly prepared and ready when one had feared that all the cooking had to be done by oneself. After a late night’s work such a surprise is very comforting.

In preparing a Chafing-Dish meal it is important to remember the sequence of cooking, so that the waits between the courses shall not be too long. I use two Chafing Dishes, so that there need be no delay; one can be cleaned whilst the other is in use. If you are making soup, have the fish ready so that it only wants hotting up. If your second course takes a little time, fill up the interval with something cold, or a salad. Work out your plan carefully beforehand so that there can be no possibility of accident, and if the occasion be special, and you wish to shine to your very best advantage, I earnestly recommend you to have a full-dress rehearsal the day before,[Pg 203] and time yourself accurately for each dish; then there can be little chance of failure.

The setting forth of menus seems to me to be an entirely futile method of filling up a cook-book. No one ever follows them, because things never happen just so as to make all the materials simultaneously available. It is much better to dip here and there in a book—to choose a soup, a meat, and a salad; or a fish, a bird, and a savoury; or a soup, a fish, and a sweet (an it be Friday)—to suit your convenience, pocket, and taste of the moment.

Further, as I have already explained, I do not pretend to have done more than touch on the fringe of the possibilities of the Chafing Dish. I have only described what I have done, and hinted at what others may do. But what I particularly want to draw attention to is the scope for original research in the cult of Chaffinda. A long winter’s evening is much more profitably spent experimenting with the Chafing Dish than—well, playing Patience, for instance.

I do not desire to make every unmarried man and woman a cook. Far from it.[Pg 204] But it would do us no harm to think a little more of the quality of the food we eat, and less of the quantity. Few of us, however, are so stomach-ridden as Mynheer Welters, Burgomaster of Dilburg, in a delightful novel published thirty years ago, called “The Burgomaster’s Family,” by Christine Muller, and translated from the Dutch by Sir John Shaw-Lefevre. Burgomaster Welters worshipped his stomach. What a good dinner was to him no words can express. It was the realisation of all his dreams and wishes. The content of soul and the feeling of philanthropy which his eyes expressed after such a dinner must have been seen to be described. He was accused of marrying Widow de Graaff because she knew the recipe of a certain pie which she would not divulge at a less price than marriage. If any one spoke of glorious summer, he only thought of early vegetables; France reminded him of Veuve Cliquot, and Germany of Bavarian beer.

An American Chafing-Dish book in my possession contains the following quaint apothegm: “The Chafing Dish not only[Pg 205] makes possible the sincerest expression of the most perfect hospitality, but it seems the true symbol of good fellowship.” The sentiment herein expressed is unimpeachable, and I should like to be able to use such pretty talk myself. It is exactly what I wanted to explain, but being clumsy in the expression of intimate feeling, I cannot get beyond something to this effect: “The Chafing Dish is a handy thing to have about the house, and turns up usefully at the most unexpected moments. It is a ripping good idea!”

Transcriber’s Notes:

The cover for this 1905 edition is taken from the cover of the 1905 edition residing in The Cornell University Library.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.

Perceived typographical errors have been changed.

CHAP.		PAGE
I.	The Chafing Dish	1
II.	Preliminaries	19
III.	Soups	38
IV.	Fish	54
V.	Flesh and Fowl	79
VI.	Vegetables and Salads	108
VII.	Eggs and Savouries	138
VIII.	Sauces	159
IX.	Sweets and Oddments	177
X.	Amenities of the Table	192
	Index	207

THE CULT OF THE
CHAFING DISH