Cookery for Sportsmen
Among all the arts and sciences that improve, elevate, or embellish society, or that contribute to the pleasure and comfort of mankind, the one that is the most necessary to health and happiness, has produced the fewest great geniuses, and is the least understood, is cookery. Amid the thousands of men and women who pretend to a knowledge of its mysteries, how difficult is it among the former, and how impossible among the latter, to find a good cook—one who is devoted heart and soul to the intricate science, who passes days in pondering and nights in dreaming of these delicate combinations that constitute pure and refined taste!
The world has produced in hundreds painters that delight the eye, composers that enrapture the ear, scholars that convince the intellect, poets that touch the heart; but of culinary artists that enchant the stomach, the truly great may be counted on the fingers. In ancient times more attention was paid to gastrology, but the degraded taste that could employ an emetic to enable the repetition of indulgence, and the limited resources of restricted national intercourse, have left us little of value to be gleaned for the experience of antiquity. The great masters of the kitchen of those times have passed away into oblivion, or have left only a few crude dishes, remarkable more for their extravagance than their excellence. It was a deficiency of knowledge and high art that drove the gourmands of early days to peacocks’ brains, nightingales’ tongues, and dissolved jewels.
The middle ages have left us some right royal dishes; the boar’s head, the roasted ox, the black pudding, mince-pies, the plum-pudding; remarkable, however, more for their substantial character that satisfied a vigorous appetite, than for delicacy that would gratify an educated taste. During this period, however, many drinks attained a perfection that has never been improved on, and those delicious combinations that were called cardinal, bishop, punch, and the hearty sack, are almost as well known and as great favorites now as then. There is nothing to be drawn from the dark ages in the least elevating to the science of gastronomy, and we must look to modern times, and mainly to the French nation, for our highest authorities and truest instruction.
Catherine de Medicis introduced the art of cookery into France, and liqueurs were invented during the reign of Louis XIV., since which time the revered names of Vatel, Soyer, Ude, Kitchiner, Bechamel, and Carmel have become household words throughout Christendom; their skill has shed a benign influence over mankind, has restored invalids to health, and brought peace to families; they are quoted and looked upon with deep respect by all. Coarse minds, to whom the allurements of gastronomy are incomprehensible, consider cooking vulgar; while a few pitiable individuals are created without the sense to distinguish the tasty from the tasteless, as there are persons without an eye for the beauties of nature or an ear for the harmony of sounds. These unfortunates deserve our sympathy; but for the individual who affects to despise the pleasures of the table, as loftily placing himself above what he terms grovelling appetites, nothing is appropriate but contempt. Who would believe or respect the man who claimed that his inability to distinguish green from red was a credit to him? Or could tolerate one who was filled with ostentatious pride because, by a wretched malformation, he could not tell Old Hundred from Casta Diva?
The sense of taste is as noble, and as capable of education and improvement, as the art of the painter or the musician. The stomach being the governor, master, and director of the body, when it is pleased the intellect works with force, the eye and ear are in full play, and the nerves and muscles tingle with animation; when it is sick or exhausted the eye grows dull, the intellect feeble, the ear inaccurate, and the whole body drooping and spiritless. It has its ramifications in every part of the system, and controls as inferiors the other organs. An ill-cooked dinner has lost many a battle, ruined many an individual, and disgraced many a genius; it is said that an indigestible ragout cost Napoleon his crown.
Life is dear to all, and yet persons are continually committing a disagreeable and prolonged suicide, accompanied with painful indigestions and untold sufferings, by attempting to despise the rules that the imperative stomach has laid down. Under certain well-known chemical laws, food is rendered both digestible and palatable by special modes of preparation, and indigestible and unpalatable by other modes. The same piece of meat that, fried, will resemble shoe-leather, and afford neither pleasure nor sustenance, if nicely broiled would prove agreeable to the palate and wholesome to the body.
Our country is overflowing with abundance of the raw material from which good dinners are made; but we are absolutely without cooks, and the average American life is shortened one-tenth by the miserable ignorance of the rules of cookery that pervades all classes. The farmer bolts his heavy griddle cakes and tasteless fried meats; while the wealthy citizen devours rich gravies and ill-prepared compounds. The former loses his teeth, the latter incurs the thousand horrors of dyspepsia, and both shorten their lives.
But to rise above the unimportant consideration of mere life, which is held in our land at its true value, and regarding cookery from a loftier point of view, is there not something noble in the art that moulds together the various subjects of taste, and builds up an exquisite, soul-thrilling composition? Is not that man worthy of our deepest admiration, who, not only from the wealth of materials prepares the perfection of luxury, but when reduced to the simplest articles, still manages to gratify the most delicate and exacting of our organs? Who has not felt his heart expand as he surveyed a royal feast; his affections become purified, his feelings elevated, as dish followed dish, and each proved itself worthy of the other; and at last has not taken a gentler view of human kind when contentment filled his soul? A good dinner encourages generosity, begets sympathy, increases geniality, while it strengthens the intellect and the nerves; a bad dinner produces ill-nature, leads to discontent and quarrelling, dulls the mind, and injures the body. The former aids Christianity and promotes virtue; the latter is the bold accomplice of vice and crime; evil humors cannot exist in the body without spreading to the mind, and vices in the former create vices in the latter. Controlled by that complacency which is the stomach’s return for kind treatment, the evil passions sleep, and fading gradually, lose half their strength; whereas, if aggravated by perpetual dissatisfaction and uneasiness, they become daily more violent, till they disdain command and burst forth in unrestrained fury. So that the soul, even, may be endangered by bad cookery. The civilization and power of nations advance in proportion to their improvement in their cuisine, and the reformation is said to be due to the strong Teutonic impatience of fast days. A coarse taste in eating is as sure an indication of coarseness in mind and habits, as delicacy of taste is of delicacy and refinement in other particulars. As the more vulgar desires are controlled by the higher impulses of the mind, and clean hands are often the index of a clean heart, so purity of appetite usually accompanies purity of soul. Nothing condemns the vulgar man more quickly than the nature of his appetite, and his mode of gratifying it; driven on like the beasts by hunger, he thinks only of the readiest and quickest mode of satisfying the unpleasant craving, and never dreams there can be anything intellectual in a dinner. The Americans, as a nation, are ignorant of the first principles of dining; in private, they ruin their digestions; in public, they disgust their fellows. With that practical turn for which they are famous as a body, they devote themselves to what is profitable; and the arts of sculpture, painting, and gastronomy are just beginning to be appreciated.
Those huge dishes that delight hungry, vulgar John Bull, such as roast beef, boiled mutton, and the like, still meet with the approbation of the active American; and while our women, with their natural elegance, draw their fashions from France, our matter-of-fact men imitate the rude cookery of England. It is a melancholy truth that there is no place in America where a dinner can be obtained; feeding-places, miscalled restaurants after those priceless legacies of the French revolution, are innumerable; but even the famous Delmonico fails to appreciate that wonderful production, the pride of our land—none of the miserable little coppery European abominations, but the great American oyster—does not understand it, and never rises to a proper comprehension of its capabilities, and consequently never serves a perfect dinner.
So must it be while ignorant Irish cooks—whose only claim to the title consists in having spoiled thousands of potatoes, in having rarely seen, and never cooked, a piece of meat, and only dreamed of coffee—possess our kitchens and rule the roast; and as it is impossible for the master of the house, and would be unladylike in the mistress, to superintend the dinner, the only spot for truly scientific cookery is in the woods. There, under the blue vault of heaven, where the shade of some friendly tree tempers the combined heat of sun and fire, accompanied only by the interested and appreciative guides, with the hot wood fire rapidly forming its pile of glowing coals, can the contemplative man, tempted by appetite and opportunity, devote himself to the higher branches of epicurism. Not that the materials are plentiful, rich, or costly, but working up from the very plainness of his fare a more gratifying compound. With that bed of coals suggesting broiling, and that dancing, smokeless blaze inviting roasting, no intelligent being would think of frying meat.
Under such circumstances, the larder being necessarily limited, and repetition threatening to breed disgust, ingenuity is sharpened and exercised to produce variety; an accurate knowledge of the power of different sauces is obtained, and new modes of dressing simple articles invented. It is to lead the mind of the reader in this direction, and not with the hope of instructing Irish cooks, or educating American taste, that this short article on cookery is written; and if the life in the woods, or on the water, of our sportsmen shall be in a degree improved by the effort, the main object will be attained.
The materials generally at the disposal of the hunter or fisherman on the coast and in the woods consist of fish, oysters, clams, ducks, game birds, and venison; while he will carry of necessity pork, ship-biscuit, salt, and pepper, and, if possible, eggs, flour, sauces, Indian-meal, and as many of the minor aids of a good cuisine as his means of transportation will admit.
No attempt will be made to confuse the reader with complicated directions for the construction of highly seasoned and strangely named French dishes, but the simplest and readiest mode of cooking each article will be given, with instructions in varying the effect. If the enthusiasm inherent in the subject shall occasionally carry the writer away and lead him to indulge in what the reader—living on hard tack and salt pork—may regard as vain imaginings, the weakness of man in the contemplation of so vast a subject must be the excuse; and the disciple need undertake nothing for which he has not the materials.
One of the great deficiencies, although partially supplied by the solidified article, is milk, which cannot be kept in its natural state, and is badly represented by its substitute. Generally, however, water will answer in its stead, and for gravies or thickening for stews, a little flour mixed with a lump of butter, and dissolved in a cupful of tepid water, is an excellent equivalent.