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THE COOK'S ORACLE."

DR. KITCHENER has greatly recognised the genius of his name by taking boldly the path to which it points; disregarding all the usual seductions of life, he has kept his eye steadily on the larder, the Mecca of his appetite; and has unravelled all the mysteries and intricacies of celery soup, and beef haricot, to the eyes of a reading public. He has taken an extensive kitchen range over the whole world of stews, and broils, and roasts, and comes home to the fireside (from which, indeed, his body has never departed) boiling over with knowledge-stored with curiosities of bone and sinew-a made-up human dish of cloves, mace, curry, catsup, cayenne, and the like. He has sailed over all the soups; has touched at all the quarters of the lamb; has been, in short, round the stomach world, and returns a second Captain Cook! Dr. Kitchener has written a book; and if he, good easy man, should think to surprise any friend or acquaintance by slily asking, "What book have I written?" he would be sure to be astounded with a successful reply, a book on Cookery." His name is above all disguises. In the same way, a worthy old gentleman of our acquaintance, who was wont to lead his visitors around his kitchen garden (the Doctor will prick up his ears at this), which he had carefully and cunningly obscured with a laurel hedge, and who always said, with an exulting tone, "Now, you would be puzzled to say where the kitchen garden was situated;" once met with a stony-hearted man, who remorselessly answered, “Not I! over that hedge, to be sure." The Doctor might expect you, in answer to his query, to say; "A book, Sir! Why, perhaps you have plunged your whole soul into the ocean of an epic; or rolled your mind, with the success of a Sisyphus, up the hill of metaphysics; or played the sedate game of the mathematics, that Chinese puzzle to English minds! or gone a tour, with Dugald Stuart, in search

of the picturesque; or leaped double sentences, and waded through metaphors, in a grammatical steeple-chace with Colonel Thornton; or turned literary cuckoo, and gone sucking the eggs of other people's books, and making the woods of the world echo with one solitary, complaining, reviewing note." Such might be the Doctor's notion of a reply, to which we fancy we see him simmering with delight, and saying, " No, Sir! I have not meddled either with the curry of poetry, or the cold meat of prose. I have not wasted over the slow fire of the metaphysics, or cut up the mathematics into thin slicesI have not lost myself amongst the kick-shaws of fine scenery, or pampered myself on the mock-turtle of metaphors. Neither have I dined at the table and the expense of other men's minds! No, Sir. I have written on cookery, on the kitchen, on the solids, the substantials, Sir Giles, the substantials!""

If it were not that critics are proverbial for having no bowels, we should hesitate at entering the paradise of pies and puddings which Dr. Kitchener has opened to us; for the steam of his rich sentences rises about our senses like the odours of flowers around the imagination of a poet; and larded beef goes nigh to lord it over our bewildered appetites. But being steady men, of sober and temperate habits, and used to privations in the way of food, we shall not scruple at looking a leg of mutton in the face, or shaking hands with a shoulder of veal. "Minced collops" nothing daunt us; we brace our nerves, and are not overwhelmed with "cockle catsup!" When Bays asks his friend, "How do you do when you write?" it would seem that he had the Cook's Oracle in his eye-for to men of any mastication, never was there a book that required more training for a quiet and useful perusal. Cod's-head rises before you in all its glory! while the oysters revolve around it, in their firmament of melted butter, like its well-or

The Cook's Oracle: containing Receipts for plain Cookery, &c. the whole being the Result of actual Experiments, instituted in the Kitchen of a Physician. London, Con stable and Co. 1821.

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The Cook's Oracle.

dered satellites! Moorgame, mackaBut now, to avoid sinking rel, muscles, fowls, eggs, and force-going much upon the order of his meat-balls, start up in all directions, into the same trick, we will proceed and dance the hays in the imagina- without further preface to conduct tion. We should recommend those our readers through the maze of readers with whom dinner is a habit, pots, gridirons, and frying pans, not to venture on the Doctor's pages, which Dr. Kitchener has rendered a without seeing that their hunger, very poetical, or we should say, a like a ferocious house-dog, is care- very palatable amusement. fully tied up. To read four pages with an unchained appetite, would bring on dreadful dreams of being destroyed with spits, or drowned in mullagatawny soup, or of having your tongue neatly smothered in your own brains, and, as Matthews says, a lemon stuck in your mouth. We cannot but conceive that such reading, in such unprepared minds, would have strange influences; and that the dreams of persons would be dished up to suit the various palates. The school-girl would, like the French goose," be persuaded to The indolent man The following receipts are not a mere roast itself." marrowless collection of shreds, and patchwould" steep a fortnight," and even then not be fit for use. The lover es, and cuttings, and pastings;-but a bona would dream that his heart was fide register of practical facts,-accumu overdone. The author would be lated by a perseverance not to be subdued, roasted alive in his own quills, and or evaporated, by the igniferous terrors of a roasting fire in the dog-days,-in defibasted with cold ink. It were an endless task to follow this specula- ance of the odoriferous and calefacient retion; and, indeed, we are keeping pellents, of roasting,-boiling,-frying, and broiling:-moreover, the author has our readers too long without the meal to which we have taken the submitted to a labour no preceding Cookto encounter having eaten each receipt, liberty of inviting them. The dinery Book-maker, perhaps, ever attempted nerbell invites" us-we go, and before he set it down in his book. it is done.

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The book, the Cook's Oracle, opens with a preface, as other books occasionally do; but "there the likeness ends;" for it continues with a whole bunch of introductions, treating of cooks, and invitations to dinner, and refusals, and "friendly advice," and weights and measures, and then we get fairly launched on the sea of boiling, broiling, roasting, stewing, and again return and cast anchor among the vegetables. It is impossible to say where the book begins; it is a heap of initiatory chapters-a parcel of graces before meat-a bunch of heads, the asparagus of literature. You are not troubled with "more last words of Mr. Baxter," but are delighted, and re-delighted, with more first words of Dr. Kitchener. He makes several starts, like a restless race-horse, before he fairly gets upon the second course; or rather, like Lady Macbeth's dinner party, he VOL. IV.

us to guess at his progress. We presume he ate his way, page by page, through fish, flesh, fowl, and vegetable; he would have left us dead among the soups and gravies. . Had a whole army of martyrs accompanied him on this Russian retreat of the appetite, we should have found them strewing the way; and him alone, the Napoleon of the task, living and fattening at the end of the journey. The introduction goes on very learnedly, descanting upon Shakspeare, Descartes, Dr. Johnson, Mrs. Glasse, Professor Bradley, Pythagoras, Miss Seward, and other persons equally illustrious. The Doctor's chief aim is to prove, we believe, that cookery is the most laudable pursuit, and the most pleasurable amusement of life. Much depends on the age of your domestics; for we are told, that "it is a good maxim to select servants not younger than THIRTY.' Is it so? Youth" thou art shamed!" This first introduction concludes with a long eulogy upon the Doctor's "laborious stove work;" and upon the spirit, temper, and ability, with which he has dressed his book. The Doctor appends to this introduction, a chapter called "Culinary Curiosities," in which he gives the following recipe for "persuading a goose to roast itself." We must say it out-horrors

all the horrors we ever read of.

How to roast and eat a goose alive. "Take a goose, or a duck, or some such lively creature, (but a goose is best of all for this purpose), pull off all her feathers, only the head and neck must be spared: then make a fire round about her, not too close to her, that the smoke do not choke her, and that the fire may not burn her too soon; nor too far off, that she may not escape free; within the circle of the fire let there be set small cups and pots full of water, wherein salt and boney are mingled; and let there be set also chargers full of sodden apples, cut into small pieces in the dish. The goose must be all larded, and basted over with butter, to make her the more fit to be eaten, and may roast the better: put then fire about her, but do not make too much haste, when as you see her begin to roast; for by walking about, and flying here and there, being cooped in by

the fire that stops her way out, the unwearied goose is kept in ;* she will fall to drink the water to quench her thirst, and cool her heart, and all her body, and the apple sauce will make her dung, and cleanse and empty her. And when she roasteth, and consumes inwardly, always wet her head and heart with a wet sponge; and when you see her giddy with running, and begin to stumble, her heart wants moisture, and she is roasted enough. Take her up, set her before your guests, and she will cry as you cut off any part from her, and will be almost caten up before she be dead: it is mighty pleasant to behold!!!" See Wecker's Secrets of Nature, in folio, London, 1660, PP. 148, 309.

The next chapter, or introduction, (for we are not within forty spits' length of the cookery directions yet!) is entitled "Invitations to Dinner;" and commences thus:

In the affairs of the mouth," the strictest punctuality is indispensable ;—the gastronomer ought to be as accurate an observer of time, as the astronomer. least delay produces fatal and irreparable misfortunes.

The

It appearing, therefore, that delay is dangerous, as mammas say to their daughters on certain occasions, the Doctor directs that "the diningroom should be furnished with a goodgoing clock." He then speaks of food" well done, when it is done,” which leads to certain learned sentences upon indigestion. The sad disregard of dinner-hours generally observed meets with his most serious displeasure and rebuke; but to refuse an invitation to dinner is the capital crime, for which there is apparently no capital punishment.

Nothing can be more disobliging than a refusal which is not grounded on some very strong and unavoidable cause, except not coming at the appointed hour; according to the laws of conviviality, a certificate from a sheriff's officer, a doctor, or an undertaker, are the only pleas which are admissible. The duties which invitation imposes, do not fall only on the persons invited, but like all other social duties, are reciprocal.

If you should, therefore, fortunately happen to be arrested, or have had the good luck to fracture a limb; or if, better than all, you should have taken

This cook of a goose, or goose of a cook, which ever it may be, strangely reminds us of the Doctor's own intense and enthusiastic bustle among the butter-boats. We fancy we see him, and not the goose, "walking about, and Hying here and there, being cooped in by the fire." By this time, we should suppose, he must be about "roasted enough."

1821.

The Cook's Oracle.

a box in that awful theatre at which
all must be present once and for
ever; you may be pardoned refusing
the invitation of some tiresome friend
to take a chop: but there is no other
excuse, no other available excuse,
for absenting yourself; no mental
Late
inaptitude will save you.
comers are thus rebuked:

There are some, who seldom keep an appointment; we can assure them they as seldom "scape without whipping"-and exciting those murmurs which inevitably proceed from the best regulated stomachs, when they are empty and impatient to be

filled.

Carving is the next subject of the Doctor's care; but he resolutely, and somewhat vehemently, protests against your wielding the king of knives at any other table than your own; thus for ever excluding an author from the luxuries of table anato

my. After giving an erudite passage from the "Almanach des Gourmands,' the Doctor wanders into anecdote, and becomes facetious after the following recipe.

I once heard a gentle hint on this subject given to a blue-mould fancier, who, by looking too long at a Stilton cheese, was at last completely overcome by his eye excit ing his appetite, till it became quite ungovernable and unconscious of every thing but the mity object of his contemplation; he began to pick out in no small portions, the primest parts his eye could select from

the centre of the cheese.

The good-natured founder of the feast, highly amused at the ecstacies each morsel created in its passage over the palate of the enraptured Gourmand, thus encouraged the perseverance of his guest-" Cut away, my dear sir, cut away, use no ceremony, pray-I hope you will pick out all the best of my cheese-the rind and the rotten will do very well for my wife and family!!"

I

There is something so serene and simple in the above little story, that we recommend it to persons after dinner, in preference to those highly seasoned and spicy jests, which Mr. Joseph Miller has potted for the use of posterity.

The next introduction contains "Friendly Advice to Cooks and other Servants;" but we cannot help thinking that Dr. Swift has in some degree forestalled our own good Doctor in this department of literature; although, perhaps, Dr. Kitchener is the most sober of counsellors. The

following, to be sure, is a little sus-
"Enter into all their plans
picious.
of economy, and endeavour to make
the most of every thing, as well for
your own honour as your master's
profit." This, without the note, would
be unexceptionable; but the Doctor
quotes from Dr. Trusler (all the Doc-
tors are redolent of servants!) as
follows:-" I am persuaded, that no
servant ever saved her master six-
pence, but she found it in the end in
her own pocket."-"Have the dust
What
removed," says Dr. Kitchener, “re-
gularly every fortnight!"
dust? Not that, we trust, which
- The accumulation
down with."
people are often entreated to "
of soot has its dire evils; for "

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houses burned down, by the good dinners have been spoiled, and soot falling:"-thus the Doctor, very properly, puts the greater evil first. "Give notice to your employers when the contents of your coal

cellar are diminished to a chaldron." -Diminished! We should be glad to hear when our cellars had increased to this stock. There is no hope then for those chamber-gentlemen who fritter away their lives by sack or bushel! Dr. Kitchener is rather abstruse and particular in another of his directions:-"The best rule for marketing, is to pay ready money for every thing." This is a good rule with the baker's bill? Are butchers' reckonelect:-but, is there no luxury in a ings nothing? Is there no virtue in a milk-tally? We cannot help thinking that tick was a great invention, and gives many a man a dinner that would otherwise go unfed.

The chapter on weights and measures is short, but deeply interesting and intense. There is an episode upon trough nutmeg-graters that would do the water-gruel generation good to hear.

And now the book begins to boil. The reader is told that meat takes twenty minutes to the pound; and that block-tin saucepans are the best. We can fish out little else, except a long and rather skilful calculation of the manner in which meat jockeys itself, and reduces its weight in the cooking. Buckle and Sam Chiffney are nothing to " a leg of mutton with the shank bone taken out ;" and it perhaps might not be amiss if the Newmarket profession were to con

212

sider how far it would be practicable to substitute the cauldron for the blanket, and thus reduce by steam. We should suppose a young gentleman, with half an hour's boiling, would ride somewhere about featherweight.

Baking is dismissed in a page and a half. We are sorry to find that some joints, when fallen into poverty and decay, are quite unworthy of credit: "When baking a joint of poor meat, before it has been half baked, I have seen it (what?) start from the bone, and shrivel up scarcely

to be believed."

Roasting is the next object of Dr. Kitchener's anxious care; and if this chapter be generally read, we shall not be surprised to see people in future roasting their meat before their doors, and in their areas; for the Doctor says

Roasting should be done in the open air, to ventilate the meat from its own fumes, and by the radiant heat, of a clear glowing fire, otherwise it is in fact baked-the machines the economical grate-makers call roasters, are in plain English, ovens.

The Doctor then proceeds, not being content with telling you how to cook your victuals, to advise carefully as to the best method of cooking the fire. "The fire that is but just sufficient to receive the noble sirloin, will parch up a lighter joint ;" which is plainly a translation into the cook's own particular language of temper the wind to the shorn lamb." The chapter does not conclude with out observing that "every body knows the advantage of slow boiling, -slow roasting is equally important." This is an axiom.

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Frying is a very graceful and lively species of cooking, though yielding perhaps, in its vivacity and music, to broiling-but of this more anon. We are sorry to find the Doctor endeavouring to take away from the origin-. ality of frying, classing it unkindly with the inferior sorts of boiling calling it, in fact, the mere corpulence of boiling.

A fryingpan should be about four inches deep, with a perfectly flat and thick bottom, twelve inches long, and nine broad

with perpendicular sides, and must be half filled with fat: good frying is in fact -boiling in fat. To make sure that the pan is quite clean, rub a little fat over it and

then make it warm and wipe it out with a clean cloth.

Broiling follows. We really begin to be enacting this sort of cookery ourselves, from the vigour and spirit with which we have rushed along in the company of Dr. Kitchener. Broiling is the poetry of cooking. The lyre-like shape of the instrument on which it is performed, and the brisk and pleasant sounds that arise momentarily, are rather musical than culinary. We are transported at the thought to that golden gridiron in the beef-steak club, which seems to confine the white cook in his burn

ing cage, which generates wit, whim, and song, for hours together, and pleasantly blends the fanciful and the substantial in one laughing and robust harmony.

The Doctor is profound on the subject of vegetables. And when we not surprised to hear him earnestly consider the importance of it, we are exclaim, "I should as soon think of roasting an animal alive, as of boiling a vegetable after it is dead." No one will question that the one is quite as cannot be too particular in looking pardonable as the other. Our readers to their brocoli and potatoes.

This branch of cookery, requires the most vigilant attention.

long over the fire, they lose all their beau

If vegetables are a minute or two too

ty and flavour.

tremendously indigestible, and much more If not thoroughly boiled tender, they are troublesome during their residence in the stomach, than under-done meats.

dressing fish, and of compounding We pass over the rudiments of broths and soups, except with remarking, that a turbot is said to be better for not being fresh, and that “lean juicy beef, mutton, or veal, form the basis of broth."

Gravies and sauces are not neglected. The Doctor writes

However les pompeuses Bagatelles de la Cuisine Masquée" may tickle the fancy of demi-connoisseurs, who leaving the substance, to pursue the shadow,-prefer wonderful and whimsical metamorphoses, and things extravagantly expensive to those which are intrinsically excellent,-in whose mouth-mutton can hardly hope for a welcome, unless accompanied by Venison sauce or a rabbit any chance for a race, down the red lane, without assuming the form of a frog or a spider; or pork, with

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