The Spirit of Cookery, a Popular Treatise on the History, Science, Practice, and Ethical and Medical Import of Culinary Art

Abstract

THE scientific branch of culinary literature has just received in Dr. Thudichum's book an addition which cannot fail to attract the attention of those who give to the selection and preparation of food the consideration that the subject undoubtedly deserves. Of works which come under the denomination of kitchen text-books we have had of late years more than enough perhaps, but treatises on the culinary art from an academical and philosophical point of view have been few. “I could write,” said Dr. Johnson, “a better book about cookery than has ever yet been written; it should be a book upon philosophical principles. Pharmacy is now made much more simple. Cookery may be so too. A prescription which is now compounded of five ingredients had formerly fifty in it. So in cookery. If the nature of the ingredients is well known, much fewer will do. Then, as you cannot 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.” The author of “The Spirit of Cookery” has evidently been guided by a similar recognition of the requirements of the case; and seeing that he is a member of a scientific profession which may be said to endow with special advantages those of the cloth who turn their attention to the study of food-stuffs and their treatment, it may be taken for granted that he has executed his task with competence and ability. His object has been “to produce such a system of general rules as will enable those who thoroughly master them to perform the principal culinary operations without reference to the frequently unintelligible records of the details of mere empiricism. These rules,” continues he, “are based in the first place upon unimpeachable scientific data or fundamental truths which admit of no circumvention or compromise, and have to be obeyed under pain of certain failure. This obedience has at once its ample reward in clearing the subject of a mass of errors and delusions which disfigure it as a science, and impair its utility, and in placing into the hands of operators the means of attaining their object with certainty and elegance.”

The Spirit of Cookery, a Popular Treatise on the History, Science, Practice, and Ethical and Medical Import of Culinary Art.

By J. L. W. Thudichum (London: Baillière, Tindall, and Cox; Frederick Warne and Co., 1895.)