Companionate Cooking

Some Modest Prescriptions for the Perfect Art of Dining, With a Note on the Missing Ingredient

HEYWOOD BROUN

SLOWLY—and ever so reluctantly—mankind approaches Utopia. When the glory of the great day dawns full upon us all I hope that none will forget to give a generous share of the commendation to the city realtor and to his architects. New York leads the rest of the nation in moving upward toward the perfect state, for in much of the current building upon Manhattan Island it has become customary to omit the kitchen. This way freedom lies. The slaves of the stove and the serfs of the sink have need of an emancipation proclamation. It is curious that in a modern world where efficiency has gone so far there should still remain a devotion to amateur and individual cooking.

Save in very rare instances, the servant in the house hardly qualifies as a professional. She has, to be sure, lost her amateur standing and gained nothing in its stead except a mess of pottage. None of these observations is set down by one who believes the old jokes about the young wife's biscuits and her layer cake which killed the poodle. If adequate cooking were truly difficult the revolt against the home fires might have begun long centuries ago. Any intelligent man or woman can cook after a fashion if he will put his time to it. And this is the essential factor in the tragedy from which the modern community recovers slowly. It is a tradition, a folkway, almost a religion of Americans that family life demands home-cooked meals. This is celebrated in such familiar commercial slogans as "Pies like mother used to make". If I may introduce my own mother into the discussion I am prepared to testify that she is not without skill and her baked minces coldly embellish both Christmas and New Year's. But I would not pretend for a minute, in the light of later sophistication, that it would not be simple to obtain a better pie at any good pastry shop.

TO me there is no temptation in such cafes as advertise "Home-cooking". It is not for such that one puts on his coat and goes out into the night. Of course the thing is all tangled up with sentiment yet of an evanescent sort. Back in Colonial days I assume that each householder felt that all beer save that made on the premises was bitter with materialism, if not actually poisonous. But why should there be such store set by the presence of loved ones at the cook stove? I fail to see the romance which dwells in cabbages and turnips. Not, you understand, that I would for one instant deny the potential artistry of cooking. The skill demanded is great and the achievements of high talent are not to be despised. And I do not despise them. My contention is no more than the plea that these things should be taken from the hands of mediocre people. If pressed I will admit that most mothers, wives, and even grandmothers are without high culinary gifts.

How should it be otherwise? Here is no sermon on the flapper and the degeneration of womanly instincts. Cooking is not an instinct. It's a gift. Of late there has been a movement to bring woman back into the kitchen and to train young girls in the domestic arts. Schools and even colleges go in for such fads as cookery and nutrimental values. And this campaign, unless checked, threatens to bring the culinary art in America to a level lower than any which it has yet known. The statement is broad but I stick to it. The arts and the sciences do not mix. No wholly healthful dinner is altogether palatable. To count calories is to become as the beasts and eat merely to live. Man was made for better things.

Even in Utopia I'm afraid we must put up with something less than perfection for there never have been enough good cooks to go around. Faced with a shortage, the state should step in and deny to all experts the privilege of functioning for a few instead of for the many. Let us suppose that somewhere south of the Harlem River there is a wife and mother blessed with the divine touch; should she then be allowed to waste her skill upon her husband Tom, and sister Carrie with occasionally Uncle Jack on Sundays. I think not. It is not fair to the rest of us nor yet to her. The artist must be given the widest possible scope in that field to which it has pleased God to call him. A woman who knows how to cook belongs in no man's home. She is very properly the servant of her public. Surely something would have been lost to the world had Wagner made his music for friends and relatives alone.

MYSELF I have no great patience with miniaturism in any field of creative endeavour. I will not go so far as to say that every sculptor of skill must have his mountain but I am cold to small figures, tiny canvases and little theatres. When a man has something to say in colour, taste, or sound he need not whisper. Delicacy is not a matter of dimensions. A theatrical performance in the Hippodrome might be subtle and one in the little Provincetown theatre gross in quality of the commonplace. So it is with food. A dinner does not necessarily take on shadings simply because it is prepared for two or three.

Of course, I shall have to meet the obvious point about public banquets. It cannot be denied that when bankers, Rotarians or poets assemble in great numbers they dine most dreadfully. This I contend is a matter of custom and not of necessity. In the first place people who go to a function are only dimly interested in what is set before them. Since speeches are traditional the waiters must hurry each course through and seldom is any attempt made to depart from the familiar nameless soup, a snack of some unhappy fish, breast of chicken, hearts of lettuce, ice cream and coffee. The man in the hotel kitchen could do much better if he were urged, but why should he? Through long experience he knows that his audience is far removed from a receptive spirit. Naturally he is not going to break his heart to please the multitude which has come not for potage but for public poetry.

And remember, too, that I have never said that the highest phases of cookery were likely to be obtained when many sat down together. If we are to heed the precepts of nature it is well to remember that a dog goes off alone with a bone. Perhaps something atavistic in us spoils all the fun of dining with great crowds elbowing and chewing all around us. Maybe in some unconscious layer of the mind the fear persists that some one of these strangers may steal the fried potatoes placed upon our plate unless we watch both him and them. But the dog who retires into solitude with his particular portion of marrow makes no demand that his ration shall have been an individual creation. My appeal is wholly for large kitchens run by masters and tiny cubicles for solitary diners. There might be a few accommodating two, three or four. Beyond that any number is too many.

Doctors are fond of saying to such as suffer from neurotic indigestion, "Never eat a meal alone." This is shallow counsel. Of all aesthetic human activities that of dining is most successfully and properly conducted in solitude. Those who miss appetite are suffering from a lack of concentration upon their viands. They have lost appreciation of aroma and of flavor by allowing competing sights and sounds to enter into the performance of a ceremony which should partake of religious austerity. If I ever set up as physician I will send no nervous wreck through the horrible ordeal of sitting at some long table in a health farm and dining amid the clatter of the nascently red-blooded. Oh no indeed! I will suggest a quiet hostelry and a table in the corner. And most of all, insistence will be made upon concentration. Let the sufferer gaze for minutes upon the menu and then slowly and with gusto pick a great variety of things delicate and supposedly indigestible. So lacking in imagination is the average physician that he prescribes bran and carrots for dyspeptics instead of terrapin and truffles.

A DULL and solid newspaper adds to the delight of dining all alone. Things always taste a little better after one has allowed his eye to wander down some long and dreary editorial. The servitor should be old and above everything else silent. Restaurant life in America suffers horribly from the advent into service of the go-getter. No one likes to be told that the lamb hash is very good today. Such things are wholly a matter of opinion and no waiter should confuse his function with that of the dramatic critic. Even if, in some meek mood, I accept the waiter's suggestion and find his judgment excellent I'll still be far from mollified. If it happens that the hash is good the joy of discovery should be mine. I do not want to follow blindly in the footsteps of another. Dining is nothing if not adventurous. The menu should seem not unlike a well-trapped golf course suggesting both rewards and punishments. Soup is more fun if you regard it as a potential hazard.

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One must move with courage and foresight among the many dishes if he is to avoid the disaster of disappointment.

But even disappointment is better than to know the outcome from the very start. And here I think is the major point to be made against the uncivilized practice of subsisting on home cooking. There is no risk and never any triumph. At home we take what is given to us and if it's good no credit accrues to any diner. To enjoy an art there must be some feeling upon the part of him who sees, or hears or tastes that in some curious way the contact is a collaboration. If you like a play by Shakespeare a vague and happy suspicion arises that you wrote it or at least made valuable suggestions. The cafe affords a similar opportunity. If the chef has hidden one masterpiece among many things of ordinary sort you actually do deserve a part of praise for moving toward the real and true amid the shoddy.

Of course, if others come along upon the party some limitation will inevitably be placed upon each individual's right to play the role of Cortez. Always there is one who has been here before and recommends the steak and kidney pie. I've read of sparkling dinner table conversation but I have not encountered any until such time as everything was over. If the dinner is good what on earth is there to talk about?

We will not heed the doctors, then, when they advise us to come to any meal in clusters. Perhaps a few slight exceptions should be noted. Breakfast I will admit is better for two than one and a companion is not always amiss at late suppers. But these, of course, are functions, at which gastronomy is but a minor matter. And to revert to breakfast, it is best in bed.

Again we will pay not the slightest attention to physicians who speak dogmatically of regular meals. The very man who tells you this will also mention Mother Nature and wholly without warrant. The birds of the air and the beasts of the field confine themselves to no such formula. They dine only when the spirit moves them. The very fact that there is such a thing as the early bird is proof enough for me that many much prefer to come a little later. Home cooking necessitates schedule. Only the homes of the very rich can provide breakfast from nine until noon and even in these great houses dinner is at half-past eight in spite of the fact that some of the guests undoubtedly would prefer seven and others nine minutes after ten.

When the kitchen has been banished from every private home each man may suit himself as to the hours of dining. I see a community not unlike Paris with its cafes conveniently clustered upon every corner. But not: enough like I fear. When I have adopted medicine as a calling and seek to restore appetite to the ailing I must in all frankness tell my patient that he can hardly find complete health on this side of the water. Up to this point I have been holding something back. The sad truth of the matter is that even the greatest genius who ever fried an egg cannot possibly provide a great and perfect dinner without the vintner's aid. Given that aid, the good song and the good fellows are unnecessary.