Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/267

the worst cooking in Christendom. The practical question is, how can a reform in cooking be effected? Culinary advice will not effect it; nor will appetizing descriptions of good dinners; nor new receipt books, of which some dozens have been published within a few years. Reform in cooking has reached the best city clubs, and the houses of a few rich men who can afford it, and of the gourmands who "live to eat." But how can better food, better cooked, and better served, be brought within the reach of private families of moderate incomes? The trouble is twofold. Excellent cooks are not to be had insufficient numbers at any price; and, if to be had, what with their salaries, the numberless pots and pans they demand, and the bulk of raw material they require to operate on, his kitchen brings a man of modest gains to the verge of bankruptcy. Had all of us the means of a Vitellius or Lucullus, we might venture on their banquets. However, in the family at home, much reform is practicable in the cooking question, if we in America can only be brought to attend to it. But for that great and always growing class of people who hire houses fitted with hopeless kitchens, and that other class who vegetate in hotels and boarding houses—for these we must have another remedy. In Rome, Venice, Dresden, Vienna, Berlin—in fact, in all the leading European cities where pleasant residence is a chief feature—and in Paris, above all, the public restaurant plays the part of cook to the private family. This is a custom worthy to be copied in America on a grand and liberal scale. In Paris, for example, a little family of two or three, or four, have their rooms, or a floor. The kitchen is eliminated—so much rent saved, or another room gained. One servant, at least, the cook, is also saved from household expenses, as is the whole paraphernalia of kitchen furniture and utensils. The femme de ménage comes in, in the morning, to sweep and make the beds, and before her has been the porteur 'deau, to bring water, make fires, and black boots. A score of families divide up the expenses of these servants, and the sum is light for each. Meals come in, hot and hot, and at the very minute, from neighboring restaurants, where they are prepared with a variety and skill hopeless for any private family of moderate income to emulate. Such is the system needed on a high scale in New York and the chief cities of America. We have a few excellent restaurateurs in New York—foremost, we need not say, the famous Delmonicos, unsurpassed in skill, if even equalled, anywhere in the world. The Delmonicos come from a country famous for its cooks, the Italian cantons of Switzerland, and are illustrious even above their countrymen. More than half the pâtissiers of Florence, you find, on inquiry, to be Suisses Orisons. But there is space left for different organizations, outside the sphere of the Delmonicos. We need restaurants which, in the first place, shall not be so frightfully expensive as theirs, not being intended, like Delmonico's, mainly for people of fortunes; and which, in the second place, shall be mainly devoted to furnishing to private houses their daily dinners, of such excellence and variety as it would be hopeless for them to attempt. That culinary savant, M. Blot, whose gastronomic genius has frequently corruscated on cooking questions in our Galaxy (and, in fact, gleams in the present number) is going to essay an enterprise of the sort here sketched. A joint-stock company furnishes the capital, and the professional skill and experience of M. Blot will insure its success. Fortunate they who get rid in this way of those supreme nuisances of housekeeping, bad cooking and bad servants—bad meals at bad boarding houses, bad dinners at home, in spite of heavy outlays of money and patience.