obligations, and through an investment in a silver mine in Utah had again become wealthy. He died at Ogontz, Pennsylvania, on the 18th of February 1905. Cooke was noted for his piety, and gave regularly a tenth of his income for religious and charitable purposes. His handsome estate at Ogontz, which he had been compelled to give up during his bankruptcy, he later repurchased and converted into a school for girls.
See E. P. Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke, Financier of the Civil War (Philadelphia, 1907).
COOKE, ROSE TERRY (1827–1892), American writer, née Terry, was born at West Hartford, Connecticut, on the 17th of
February 1827. She published in 1860 a volume of Poems, but after her marriage in 1873 to Rollin H. Cooke she was best known
for her fresh and humorous stories, though in 1888 she published more verse in her Complete Poems. The chief volumes of fiction dealing mainly with New England country life, produced by Rose Terry Cooke, were Happy Dodd (1878), Somebody’s
Neighbors (1881), Root-bound (1885), The Sphinx’s Children (1886), Steadfast (1889) and Huckleberries (1891). She died at
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on the 18th of July 1892.
COOKERY (Lat. coquus, a cook), the art of preparing and dressing food of all sorts for human consumption, of converting the raw materials, by the application of heat or otherwise, into
a digestible and pleasing condition, and generally ministering to the satisfaction of the appetite and the delight of the palate. We may take it that some form of cookery has existed from the earliest times, and its progress has been from the simple to the elaborate, dominated partly by the foods accessible to man, partly
by the stage of civilization he has attained, and partly by the appliances at his command for the purpose either of treating the food, or of consuming it when served.
The developed art of cookery is necessarily a late addition—if it may be considered to be included at all—to the list of “fine arts.” Originally it is a purely industrial and useful art. Man, says a French writer, was born a roaster, and “pour être cuisinier, il a besoin de le devenir.” The ancients were great eaters, but strangers to the subtler refinements of the palate. The gods were supposed to love the smell of fried meat, while their nectar and ambrosia represented an ideal, which, though preserved as a phrase, would hardly satisfy a modern epicure. The ancients were poorly provided with pots and pans, except of a simple order, or with the appurtenances of a kitchen, and they were sadly to seek in the requisites of a modern table. So long as men ate with their hands no dainty confection was suitable; the viands were set forth in a straightforward style fit for their requirements. “Plain cooking,” which, after all, can never become obsolete, was the only sort. Oddities, no doubt, were the luxuries; and we can see to-day in the ethnological accounts of contemporary savages and backward civilizations, a fair representation of the cookeries of the ancients. The luxuries of the Chinese are, in their way, a survival of long ages of a cookery which to western civilization is grotesque. Even if it is an historic impertinence, it is impossible for the countries of western civilization to regard the fine flower of their own evolution as other than the highest pitch of progress. Autres temps, autres mœurs. To the Chinaman French cooking may possibly be as grotesque as to an Englishman the Chinaman’s hundred-year-old buried egg, black and tasteless. The history of comparative cookery is bound up with the physical possibilities of each country and its products; and if we attempt to mark out stages in the evolution of cookery as a fine art, it is necessarily as understood by the so-called civilized peoples of the West in their culmination at the present day.
It is obvious that opportunity has dominated its history, for the art of cookery is to some extent the product of an increased refinement of taste, consequent on culture and increase of wealth. To this extent it is a decadent art, ministering to the luxury of man, and to his progressive inclination to be pampered and have his appetite tickled. It is thus only remotely connected with the mere necessities of nutrition (q.v.), or the science of dietetics (q.v.). Mere hunger, though the best sauce, will not produce cookery, which is the art of sauces. For centuries its elaboration consisted mainly of a progressive variety of foods, the richest and rarest being sought out; and their nature depended on what was most difficult to obtain. The Greeks learnt by contact with Asia to increase the sumptuous character of their banquets, but we know little enough of their ideas of gastronomy. Athens was the centre of luxury. According to our chief authority Athenaeus, Archestratus of Gela, the friend of the son of Pericles, the guide of Epicurus, and author of the Heduphagetica, was a great traveller, and took pains to get information as to how the delicacies of the table were prepared in different parts. His lost work was versified by Ennius. Other connoisseurs seem to have been Numenius of Heraclea, Hegemon of Thasos, Philogenes of Leucas, Simonaclides of Chios, and Tyndarides of Sicyon. The Romans, emerging from their pristine simplicity, borrowed from the Greeks their achievements in gastronomic pleasure. We read of this or that Roman gourmet, such as Lucullus, his extravagances and his luxury. The name of the connoisseur Apicius, after whom a work of the time of Heliogabalus is called, comes down to us in association with a manual of cookery. And from Macrobius and Petronius we can gather very interesting glimpses of the Roman idea of a menu. In the later empire, tradition still centred round the Roman cookery favoured by the geographical position of Italy; while the customs and natural products of the remoter parts of Europe gradually begin to assert themselves as the middle ages progress.
It is, however, not till the Renaissance, and then too with Italy as the starting-point, that the history of modern cookery really begins. Meanwhile cookery may be studied rather in the architecture of kitchens, and the development of their appurtenances and personnel, than in any increase in the subtleties of the art; the ideal was inevitably gross; the end was feeding—inextricably associated in all ages with cooking, but as distinct from its fine fleur as gluttony from gastronomy.
Montaigne’s references to the revival of cookery in France by Catherine de’ Medici indicate that the new attention paid to the art was really novel. She brought Italian cooks to Paris and introduced there a cultured simplicity which was unknown in France before. It is to the Italians apparently that later developments are originally due. It is clearly established, for instance (says Abraham Hayward in his Art of Dining), that the Italians introduced ices into France. Fricandeaus were invented by the chef of Leo X. And Coryate in his Crudities, writing in the time of James I., says that he was called “furcifer” (evidently in contemptuous jest) by his friends, from his using those “Italian neatnesses called forks.” The use of the fork and spoon marked an epoch in the progress of dining, and consequently of cookery.
Under Louis XIV. further advances were made. His maître d’hôtel, Béchamel, is famous for his sauce; and Vatel, the great Condé’s cook, was a celebrated artist, of whose suicide in despair at the tardy arrival of the fish which he had ordered, Madame de Sévigné relates a moving story. The prince de Soubise, immortalized by his onion sauce, also had a famous chef.
In England the names of certain cookery-books may be noted, such as Sir J. Elliott’s (1539), Abraham Veale’s (1575), and the Widdowe’s Treasure (1625). The Accomplisht Cook, by Robert May, appeared in 1665, and from its preface we learn that the author (who speaks disparagingly of French cookery, but more gratefully of Italian and Spanish) was the son of a cook, and had studied abroad and under his father (c. 1610) at Lady Dormer’s, and he speaks of that time as “the days wherein were produced the triumphs and trophies of cookery.” From his description they consisted of most fantastic and elaborately built up dishes, intended to amuse and startle, no less than to satisfy the appetite and palate.
Louis XV. was a great gourmet; and his reign saw many developments in the culinary art. The mayonnaise (originally mahonnaise) is ascribed to the duc de Richelieu. Such dishes as “potage à la Xavier,” “cailles à la Mirepoix,” “chartreuses à la Mauconseil,” “poulets à la Villeroy,” “potage à la Condé,” “gigot à la Mailly,” owe their titles to celebrities of the day, and the Pompadour gave her name to various others. The
