American Thumb-prints

“The ample cupboard … within the wainscot of the dining parlour itself … formed the safe depository of these precious stores.

“‘When merry Christmas-tide came round’ … the goodly litter of the cupboard, thus various in kind and aspect, was carefully swept into one common receptacle; the mingled mass enveloped in pastry and enclosed within the duly heated oven, from whence … perfect in form, colour, odour, flavour and temperament, it smoked, the glory of the hospitable Christmas board, hailed from every quarter by the honourable and imperishable denomination of the Mince-Pye.”

In the eighteenth century women themselves, following Hannah Wolley, began cook-book compiling. So great was their success that we find Mrs. Elizabeth Moxon’s “English Housewifry” going into its ninth edition in the London market of 1764. All through history there have been surprises coming to prejudiced minds out of the despised and Nazarene. It was so about this matter of cook-books—small in itself, great in its far-reaching results to the health and development of the human race.

Women had been taught the alphabet. But the dogmatism of Dr. Johnson voiced the judgment of many of our forebears: a dominant power is always hard in its estimate of the capacities it controls. “Women can spin very well,” said the great Cham, “but they can not make a good book of cookery.” He was talking to “the swan of Lichfield,” little Anna Seward, when he said this, and also to a London publisher. The book they were speaking of had been put forth by the now famous Mrs. Hannah Glasse, said to be the wife of a London attorney.

The doctor—possibly with an eye to business, a publisher being present—was describing a volume he had in mind to make, “a book upon philosophical principles,” “a better book of cookery than has ever yet been written.” “Then,” wisely said the dogmatic doctor, “as you can not make bad meat good, I would tell what is the best butcher’s meat, the best beef, the best pieces; how to choose young fowls; the proper seasons of different vegetables; and then how to roast and boil and compound.” This was the plan of a poet, essayist, lexicographer, and the leading man of letters of his day. His cook-book was never written.

But good Mrs. Glasse had also with large spirit aimed at teaching the ignorant, possibly those of a kind least often thought of by instructors in her art. She had, forsooth, caught her hare outside her book, even if she never found him in its page. “If I have not wrote in the high polite style,” she says, with a heart helpful toward the misunderstood and oppressed, and possibly with the pages of some pretentious chef in mind, “I hope I shall be forgiven; for my intention is to instruct the lower sort, and therefore must treat them in their own way. For example, when I bid them lard a fowl, if I should bid them lard with large lardoons, they would not know what I meant; but when I say they must lard with little pieces of bacon, they know what I mean. So in many other things in Cookery the great cooks have such a high way of expressing themselves, that the poor girls are at a loss to know what they mean.”

Mrs. Glasse’s book was published in 1747—while Dr. Johnson had still thirty-seven years in which to “boast of the niceness of his palate,” and spill his food upon his waistcoat. “Whenever,” says Macaulay, “he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins swelled and the moisture broke out on his forehead.” But within forty-eight years of the December his poor body was borne from the house behind Fleet Street to its resting-place in Westminster Abbey, a thin volume, “The Frugal Housewife,” written by our American Lydia Maria Child, had passed to its ninth London edition, in that day sales being more often than in our own a testimony of merit. This prevailing of justice over prejudice is “too good for any but very honest people,” as Izaak Walton said of roast pike. Dogmatism is always eating its own words.

Since the master in literature, Dr. Johnson, planned his cook-book many cooking men have dipped ink in behalf of instruction in their art. Such names as Farley, Carême, and Soyer have been written, if not in marble or bronze, at least in sugar of the last caramel degree—unappreciated excellencies mainly because of the inattention of the public to what nourishes it, and lack of the knowledge that the one who introduces an inexpensive, palatable, and digestible dish benefits his fellow-men.

The names of these club cooks and royal cooks are not so often referred to as that of the large and human-hearted Mrs. Glasse. A key to their impulse toward book-making must, however, have been that offered by Master Farley, chief cook at the London Tavern, who wrote in 1791, a hundred and fourteen years ago: “Cookery, like every other Art, has been moving forward to perfection by slow Degrees.... And although there are so many Books of this Kind already published, that one would hardly think there could be Occasion for another, yet we flatter ourselves, that the Readers of this Work will find, from a candid Perusal, and an impartial Comparison, that our Pretensions to the Favour of the Public are not ill-founded.”

Such considerations as those of Master Farley seem to lead to the present great output. But nowadays our social conditions and our intricate and involved household arrangements demand a specialization of duties. The average old cook-book has become insufficient. It has evolved into household-directing as well as cook-directing books, comprehending the whole subject of esoteric economies. This is a curious enlargement; and one cause, and result, of it is that the men and women of our domestic corps are better trained, better equipped with a logical, systematized, scientific knowledge, that they are in a degree specialists—in a measure as the engineer of an ocean greyhound is a specialist, or the professor of mathematics, or the writer of novels is a specialist. And specialists should have the dignity of special treatment. In this movement, it is to be hoped, is the wiping out of the social stigma under which domestic service has so long lain in our country, and a beginning of the independence of the domestic laborer—that he or she shall possess himself or herself equally with others—as other free-born people possess themselves, that is.

And closely allied with this specialization another notable thing has come about. Science with its microscope has finally taught what religion with its manifold precepts of humility and humanity has failed for centuries to accomplish, thus evidencing that true science and true religion reach one and the same end. There are no menial duties, science clearly enunciates: the so-called drudgery is often the most important of work, especially when the worker brings to his task a large knowledge of its worth in preserving and sweetening human life, and perfectness as the sole and satisfactory aim. Only the careless, thriftless workers, the inefficient and possessed with no zeal for perfection of execution, only these are the menials according to the genuine teachings of our day—and the ignorant, unlifted worker’s work is menial (using the word again in its modern English and not its old Norman-French usage) whatever his employment.

In verse this was said long ago, as the imagination is always forestalling practical knowledge, and George Herbert, of the seventeenth century, foreran our science in his “Elixir:”

“All may of thee partake:Nothing can be so mean,Which with this tincture for thy sakeWill not grow bright and clean.“A servant with this clauseMakes drudgery divine;Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,Makes that and th’ action fine.“This is the famous stoneThat turneth all to gold:For that which God doth touch and ownCannot for less be told.”

Present-day, up-to-date books on housekeeping stand for the fact that in our households, whatever the estimates of the past and of other social conditions, all work is dignified—none is menial. For besides intelligent knowledge and execution, what in reality, they ask, gives dignity to labor? Weight and importance of that particular task to our fellow-beings? What then shall we say of the duties of cook? of housemaid? of chambermaid? of the handy man, or of the modest maid of all work? For upon the efficient performance of the supposedly humblest domestic servitor depends each life of the family. Such interdependence brings the employed very close to the employer, and no bond could knit the varied elements of a household more closely, none should knit it more humanly.

The human, then, are the first of the relations that exist between employer and employee, that “God hath made of one blood all nations of the earth.” It is a truth not often enough in the minds of the parties to a domestic-service compact. And besides this gospel of Paul are two catch-phrases, not so illuminated but equally humane, which sprang from the ameliorating spirit of the last century—“Put yourself in his place,” and “Everybody is as good as I.” These form the best bed-rock for all relations between master and servant. There is need of emphasizing this point in our books on affairs of the house, for a majority of our notably rich are new to riches and new to knowledge, and as employers have not learned the limitation of every child of indulgence and also polite manners in early life.

It is after all a difference of environment that makes the difference between mistress and maid, between master and man. The human being is as plastic as clay—is clay in the hands of circumstance. If his support of wife and children depended upon obsequiousness of bearing, the master might, like the butler, approximate Uriah Heep. If the mistress’s love of delicacy and color had not been cultivated by association with taste from childhood, her finery might be as vulgar as the maid’s which provokes her satire. It is after all a question of surroundings and education. And in this country, where Aladdin-fortunes spring into being by the rubbing of a lamp—where families of, for example, many centuries of the downtrodden life of European peasant jump from direst poverty to untold wealth—environment has often no opportunity to form the folk of gentle breeding. Many instances are not lacking where those who wait are more gently bred than those who are waited upon.

In their larger discourse, then, up-to-date household books stand for the very essence of democracy and human-heartedness—which is also the very essence of aristocracy. After the old manner which Master Farley described, our women seem to have given their books to the public with the faith that they contain much other books have not touched—to stand for an absolutely equable humanity, for kindness and enduring courtesy between those who employ and those who are employed, the poor rich and the rich poor, the householders and the houseworkers—to state the relations between master and man and mistress and maid more explicitly than they have before been stated, and thus to help toward a more perfect organization of the forces that carry on our households—to direct with scientific and economic prevision the food of the house members; to emphasize in all departments of the house thoroughgoing sanitation and scientific cleanliness.

Of questions of the household—of housekeeping and home-making—our American women have been supposed somewhat careless. Possibly this judgment over the sea has been builded upon our women’s vivacity, and a subtle intellectual force they possess, and also from their interest in affairs at large, and again from their careful and cleanly attention to their person—“they keep their teeth too clean,” says a much-read French author. Noting such characteristics, foreigners have jumped to the conclusion that American women are not skilled in works within doors. In almost every European country this is common report. “We German women are such devoted housekeepers,” said the wife of an eminent Deutscher, “and you American women know so little about such things!” “Bless your heart!” I exclaimed—or if not just that then its German equivalent—thinking of the perfectly kept homes from the rocks and pines of Maine to the California surf; “you German women with your little haushaltungen, heating your rooms with porcelain stoves, and your frequent reversion in meals to the simplicity of wurst and beer, have no conception of the size and complexity of American households and the executive capabilities necessary to keep them in orderly work. Yours is mere doll’s housekeeping—no furnaces, no hot water, no electricity, no elevators, no telephone, and no elaborate menus.”

Our American women are model housekeepers and home-makers, as thousands of homes testify, but the interests of the mistresses of these houses are broader, their lives are commonly more projected into the outer world of organized philanthropy and art than women’s lives abroad, and the apparent non-intrusion of domestic affairs leads foreigners to misinterpret their interest and their zeal. It is the consummate executive who can set aside most personal cares and take on others efficiently. Moreover, it is not here as where a learned professor declared: “Die erste Tugend eines Weibes ist die Sparsamkeit.”

To have a home in which daily duties move without noise and as like a clock as its human machinery will permit, and to have a table of simplicity and excellence, is worth a pleasure-giving ambition and a womanly ambition. It is to bring, in current critical phrase, three-fourths of the comfort of life to those whose lives are joined to the mistress of such a household—the loaf-giver who spends her brains for each ordered day and meal. Moreover, and greatest of all, to plan and carry on so excellent an establishment is far-reaching upon all men. It is the very essence of morality—is duty—i.e., service—and law.

The French aver that men of the larger capacity have for food a particularly keen enjoyment. Possibly this holds good for Frenchmen—for the author of Monte Cristo, or for a Brillat-Savarin, of whose taste the following story is told: “Halting one day at Sens, when on his way to Lyons, Savarin sent, according to his invariable custom, for the cook, and asked what he could have for dinner. ‘Little enough,’ was the reply. ‘But let us see,’ retorted Savarin; ‘let us go into the kitchen and talk the matter over.’ There he found four turkeys roasting. ‘Why!’ exclaimed he, ‘you told me you had nothing in the house! let me have one of those turkeys.’ ‘Impossible!’ said the cook; ‘they are all bespoken by a gentleman up-stairs.’ ‘He must have a large party to dine with him, then?’ ‘No; he dines by himself.’ ‘Indeed!’ said the gastronome; ‘I should like much to be acquainted with the man who orders four turkeys for his own eating.’ The cook was sure the gentleman would be glad of his acquaintance, and Savarin, on going to pay his respects to the stranger, found him to be no other than his own son. ‘What! you rascal! four turkeys all to yourself!’ ‘Yes, sir,’ said Savarin, junior; ‘you know that when we have a turkey at home you always reserve for yourself the pope’s nose; I was resolved to regale myself for once in my life; and here I am, ready to begin, although I did not expect the honour of your company.’”

The French may say truly of the famous “high-priest of gastronomy.” And a story which has lately appeared in Germany tells of a sensitive palate in Goethe: “At a small party at the court of Weimar, the Marshal asked permission to submit a nameless sample of wine. Accordingly, a red wine was circulated, tasted, and much commended. Several of the company pronounced it Burgundy, but could not agree as to the special vintage or the year. Goethe alone tasted and tasted again, shook his head, and, with a meditative air, set his glass on the table. ‘Your Excellency appears to be of a different opinion,’ said the court marshal. ‘May I ask what name you give to the wine?’ ‘The wine,’ said the poet, ‘is quite unknown to me; but I do not think it is a Burgundy. I should rather consider it a good Jena wine that has been kept for some while in a Madeira cask.’ ‘And so, in fact, it is,’ said the court marshal. For a more discriminating palate, one must go to the story of the rival wine-tasters in ‘Don Quixote,’ who from a single glass detected the key and leather thong in a cask of wine.”

But that great capacity means also discriminating palate could hardly be true for Americans of the old stock and simple life. Judge Usher, Secretary of Interior in Lincoln’s Cabinet at the time of the President’s death, said that he had never heard Abraham Lincoln refer to his food in any way whatever.

From a consideration of women’s cook-books springs another suggestion. Heaped upon one’s table, the open pages and appetiteful illustrations put one to thinking that if women of intelligence, and of leisure except for burdens they assume under so-called charity or a faddish impulse, were to take each some department of the household, and give time and effort to gaining a complete knowledge of that department—a knowledge of its evolution and history, of its scientific and hygienic bearings, of its gastronomic values if it touched upon the table—there would be great gain to the world at large and to their friends. For instance, if a woman skilled in domestic science and the domestic arts were to take some fruit, or some vegetable, or cereal, or meat, and develop to the utmost what an old author-cook calls, after those cook-oracles of ancient Rome, the “Apician mysteries” of the dish, her name would deserve to go down to posterity with something of the odor—or flavor—of sanctity. Hundreds of saints in the calendar never did anything half so meritorious and worthy of felicitous recognition from their fellow-men.

Take, for example, the democratic cabbage and its cousins german, and their treatment in the average cuisine. What might not such an investigation show this Monsieur Chou or Herr Kohl and his relations capable of!—the cabbage itself, the Scotch kale, the Jersey cabbage, and Brussels sprouts, and cauliflower, and broccoli, and kohl-rabi, and cabbage palms, and still other species! Looked at in their evolution, and the part they have played in human history as far back as in old Persia and the Anabasis of the Greeks, and so late as the famine times of Ireland, these succulent and nutritious vegetables would be most interesting. And, even if chemically their elements vary, the fact that all the family are blessed with a large percentage of nitrogen might be shown to have increased their usefulness long before chemists analyzed their tissues and told us why men who could not buy meat so carefully cultivated the foody leaves. Under such sane and beneficent impulses every well-directed household would become an experiment station for the study of human food—not the extravagant and rare after the test and search of imperial Heliogabalus, but in the best modern, scientific, economic, gastronomic, and democratic manner.

Since making this foregoing suggestion I find this point similarly touched by the man who dissertated on roast pig. “It is a desideratum,” says Lamb, “in works that treat de re culinaria, that we have no rationale of sauces, or theory of mixed flavours: as to show why cabbage is reprehensible with roast beef, laudable with bacon; why the haunch of mutton seeks the alliance of currant jelly, the shoulder civilly declineth it; why loin of veal (a pretty problem), being itself unctious, seeketh the adventitious lubricity of melted butter—and why the same part in pork, not more oleaginous, abhorreth from it; why the French bean sympathizes with the flesh of deer; why salt fish points to parsnips.... We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery. We feed ignorantly, and want to be able to give a reason of the relish that is in us.”

In speaking of modern household books one cannot have done without adding still one word more about the use of the word “servant” as these books seem to speak of it. Owing to an attempted Europeanizing of our ideas, and also to the fact that many of our domestics are of foreign birth and habits of thought—or of the lowly, velvet-voiced, unassertive suavity of the most loyal negro—the term has gradually crept to a quasi acceptance in this country. It is a word not infrequently obnoxious to Americans—employers—of the old stock, and trained in the spirit which wrote the Declaration of Independence and fought its sequent War. “From the time of the Revolution,” says Miss Salmon in her “Domestic Service,” “until about 1850 the word ‘servant’ does not seem to have been generally applied in either section [north or south] to white persons of American birth.”

The term indicates social conditions which no longer exist and represents ideas which no longer have real life—we have but to consider how the radical Defoe published, in 1724, “The Great Law of Subordination consider’d; or, the Insolence and Unsufferable Behaviour of Servants in England duly enquir’d into,” to be convinced of our vast advance in human sympathy—and a revival of our American spirit toward the word would be a wholesome course. In the mouths of many who use it to excess—those mainly at fault are innocently imitative, unthinking, or pretentious women—it sounds ungracious, if not vulgar, and distinctly untrue to those who made the country for us and desirable for us to live in; and untrue also to the best social feeling of to-day. It is still for a genuine American rather hard to imagine a person such as the word “servant” connotes—a lackey, a receiver of tips of any sort—with an election ballot in hand and voting thinkingly, knowingly, intelligently for the guidance of our great government. It would not have been so difficult for the old δοῦλοι of Athens to vote upon the Pnyx as for such a man to vote aright for us. And not infrequently, in the ups and downs of speculation and the mushroom growth and life of fortunes among us, the “servant,” to use the old biblical phrase, is sometimes greater in moral, intellectual, and social graces than his “lord.” The term belongs to times, and the temperamental condition of times when traces of slavery were common, and when employers believed, and acted upon the faith, that they hired not a person’s labor but the person himself—or herself—who was subject to a sort of ownership and control.

Let us remand the word to the days of Dean Swift and such conditions as the tremendous satire of his “Directions to Servants” exhibited, in which—except perhaps in Swift’s great heart—there was neither the humanity of our times, nor the courtesy of our times, nor the sure knowledge of our times—which endeavor to create, and, in truth, are gradually making trained and skilful workers in every department, and demand in return for service with perfectness as its aim, independence of the person, dignified treatment and genuine respect from the employer.

All these things the women’s household and cook-books will be, nay, are, gradually teaching, and that which Charles Carter, “lately cook to his Grace the Duke of Argyle,” wrote in 1730 may still hold good: “’Twill be very easy,” said Master Carter, “for an ordinary Cook when he is well-instructed in the most Elegant Parts of his Profession to lower his Hand at any time; and he that can excellently perform in a Courtly and Grand Manner, will never be at a Loss in any other.” When this future knowledge and adjustment come we shall be free from the tendencies which Mistress Glasse, after her outspoken manner, describes of her own generation: “So much is the blind folly of this age,” cries the good woman, “that they would rather be imposed upon by a French booby than give encouragement to a good English cook.”

Economic changes such as we have indicated must in measurable time ensue. The science and the art of conducting a house are now obtaining recognition in our schools. Not long, and the knowledge will be widespread. Its very existence, and the possibility of its diffusion, is a result of the nineteenth century movement for the broadening of women’s knowledge and the expansion of their interests and independence—this wedded with the humane conviction that the wisest and fruitfullest use of scientific deduction and skill is in the bettering of human life. Behind and giving potence to these impulses is the fellowship, liberty, and equality of human kind—the great idea of democracy.

Already we have gone back to the wholesomeness of our English forebears’ estimate that the physician and cook are inseparable. Further still, we may ultimately retrace our ideas, and from the point of view of economics and sociology declare that with us, as with the old Jews and Greeks, the priest and the cook are one.