Читать книгу My Remarkable Uncle and other Sketches - Stephen Leacock - Страница 8

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I have a friend in my home town in front of whose modest house on the highway appeared a little while ago the sign 'Tourists.' Meeting him casually, I asked, 'How are you getting on with the tourist trade? Are you getting any?' 'Fine,' he answered. 'You see, it's all in the way you treat them. Tourists come to the house and we show them up to their bedroom, and after a while the wife goes up and says, "Now you come right down to the kitchen. That's the place for you."'

With which, as my text, I will venture to assert that the kitchen is, and has been for generations and centuries, the most human part of any establishment.

Personally, like all my ageing generation, from actual experience I know what a kitchen used to mean. In the Canadian country setting in which I was brought up sixty years ago, the kitchen was par excellence 'the room' of the house. It was the only room with any size to it and the only room where it was always warm. A kitchen stove well filled with split hemlock maintained a heat of anything from 100 Fahrenheit to about 1000 Centigrade. You regulated the heat you wanted by the distance you sat from it. I am told that a kitchen of to-day can be regulated to an even 70 degrees by automatic stoking that is done in the cellar. On the other hand, we had the fun of moving our chairs backwards and forwards. These old kitchens when the farmhouses were laid out were practically the one room of the house. The others were just small spaces built off it. Later on, as the farmers got richer--or no, I don't quite mean that, as they got a little further into debt--they added a room called the 'parlour.' This was a swell room with an oilcloth on the floor and what was called an 'organ', on which the girls of the family learned to play 'Pull for the Shore, Sailor.' But the 'parlour' proved a false start--it was too good for daily occupation; so after a while it was used only for funerals, and the kitchen came into its own again.

The typical Canadian 'cooking stove' of those days was a broad, flat affair with six 'lids' on its top and two divisions to it underneath, the firebox and the oven. It didn't have any of these gadgets and contrivances that turn the kitchen range of to-day into a marvellous piece of machinery. I have before me as I write a beautiful little booklet of a modern kitchen firm, containing pictures of all sorts of these contrivances of our up-to-date day.

Here, for example, is a wonderful little thermostatic dial which tells you the number of degrees of heat in the oven, without having to open it and put your face in as we used to. We couldn't have used that; if the kitchen stove was too hot there was nothing for it but to eat your dinner half an hour sooner. Cooking in those days was like navigation--a lot of chance to it. Here in the same booklet is a 'ventilating fan above the stove to prevent cooking odours from reaching the rest of the house.' The apparatus would have made no hit sixty years ago. The 'cooking odours' were often the best part of the dinner.

After dinner, in the old days, came the 'dishwashing' with a commotion on the scale of a charge of cavalry. The women worked at it with spirit; the dishes, like the cavalry, coming together with a glorious crash and with the casualties counted afterwards. Nowadays, in the pretty little kitchen I've been admiring in a picture, it's all different. Hot water runs at the turn of the tap. The dishes, as soon as they pass into the gleaming enamelled cabinet sink, seem instantly again things of beauty--just, as Burke said, 'vice lost half its evil when it lost its grossness.' A little 'treatment' in the roomy looking basin and on to the drain boards, and the dishes will be clear back to virtue.

The kitchen, as I say, was the real house in our pioneer days. Indeed, if you have a taste for what is called archeology and go farther back than that, you find that houses only came to be built as a shelter around the kitchen fire. Primitive men cooked their food at an open fire built on stones. But that meant that, if it was windy, the smoke would blow all over the place. So after, let us say, ten thousand years (their minds moved slowly) it occurred to some one to make a sort of wall of earth and stones on the windward side of the fire to keep the wind away. After this brilliant novelty had been popular for another ten thousand years, the device was found of building the wall around all four sides. From that to putting a roof over it was a mere step--not more than a thousand years! After that most primitive men 'rested' and their houses--a wigwam, an igloo or what-not--remained at that, a cooking fire walled in and fairly well covered over.

Now, if you don't believe this theory, that the kitchen was the house, you can go and see the proof actually in England, in the famous kitchen of the Abbot of Glastonbury. It still stands as a beautiful eight-sided stone house, with a roof tapering up to a peak where hung a lantern. It has size to it. When you undertake to feed a mediaeval abbot and a hundred monks and lay brothers who have nothing to do all day but sing and cat, you have a real job. The abbot's kitchen was about forty feet across each way. Even at that it was only one of a lot of celebrated kitchens of the Middle Ages. Several Abbeys, like those of Durham and Gloucester, had kitchens over thirty-six feet wide. But the triumph of all is found in the kitchen built by Cardinal Wolsey for the college that he founded, Christ Church, at Oxford, still the marvel of the tourist. Wolsey, like all great men, when he did a thing, did it on a big scale. Just as Cheops of Egypt needed a pyramid as his gravestone, and Cecil Rhodes about a hundred square miles on the Matoppo Hills, so Wolsey, when he made a kitchen, saw to it that it was a kitchen. He had no use for underfed students. Learning, we are told, maketh a full man, and Wolsey's idea was to make the students full first so that they'd learn more easily. So the kitchen was made on such a proportion that you could roast an ox whole over one of its fires; and over another was a huge 'turnspit' on which you could spike about one thousand birds at a time.

If you think these details were mere display, you only show that you don't understand the great part eating played in the Middle Ages. What else was there to do? No movies, no radio, no lectures on Cosmic Evolution--nothing but to fight and make love and eat. And as you kept running out of enemies and running out of girls, it left nothing but eating.

The size of the feasts was appalling. When King Edward IV. (1467) wanted to express his delight at the consecration of Bishop Neville as Archbishop of York, he felt that a fitting religious touch would be given to it by a feast--all free for everybody. He invited 6000 guests, and they all came. (They will every time!) The menu included roast mutton (1000 sheep), a veal entree (504 calves), a side dish of 504 hogs, an 'entremets' of 2000 geese and 1000 capons, along with a trifle of 15,500 birds. For anybody who wanted 'another helping' there were 1500 hot venison pasties and 15,000 fancy tarts and jellies.

That sounds unbelievable, doesn't it? But it is all in an old Latin book called Antiquitates Culinariae. Of course, the feast went on for days and days, lasted till the guests began to leave because they had an engagement at another feast.

Now the odd thing was that when they cooked these vast banquets in the mediaeval kitchens, everything was done by hand labour in the simplest fashion. It never occurred to these people to look for mechanical contrivances, such as 'mincers,' 'mixing machines,' 'cutters' and 'parers' and the fancy cookers that replace human hands. The huge ox was hoisted up on a hook over the fire, and a group of 'turnspits'--unhappy little kitchen devils who lived and slept in the refuse--turned it round and round. The birds--the light stuff--were spiked together, a hundred or more at a crack, and turned on a spit in the same way. The furniture and appliances of the kitchen were of the same primitive simplicity. One or two enormous tables of oak planks hewed flat were placed to hold the huge copper cauldrons. Into these the head cook threw everything he could think of--nothing was measured, nothing was timed. Up went the cauldron over the fire, and when it was done--perhaps he knew what it was!

Compare with these our modern experts. I'd like to read this (I'm quoting again the latest 'Kitchen Notes') to Cardinal Wolsey or Archbishop Neville:

'In the kitchen of to-day the work centres for preparation and storage, washing of food and utensils, and cooking and serving are arranged around the walls in proper sequence. The food comes in the back door and goes into the adjacent refrigerator and storage cabinets. Next in line comes the all-important sink, complete with ventilated cupboards for the storage of vegetables and utensils, providing hot and cold tempered water to any part of the basin, a concealed spray fixture for rinsing on a rubber hose which pulls out from a niche and pops back when let go, and a removable cup-strainer in the outlet which catches crumbs and parings.'

And yet I don't know whether that kind of thing would have made much impression on the Archbishop or the Cardinal. They had their own way in the Middle Ages. They didn't care much about mechanical exactitude. What they liked was the personal touch; and they had a grip on the cook which we have since lost. If anything went wrong with the banquet--well, there's no need to go into details--just say he never cooked again!

Yet, while he went strong, he was a person of great importance, even of rank or wealth. He had the privilege of walking into the hall in the procession, along with real gentlemen who had never worked in their lives and couldn't boil an egg.

The evolution of the kitchen seen from early times is odd enough. But odder still is the evolution of the cook. Take the cook of the Middle Ages with the long spoon and the turnspits and the cauldrons and what did he turn into, as medieval civilization faded away and the modern era replaced it? The cook of the great families, by the time of Queen Victoria and till yesterday, turned into a woman, usually a large, stout woman weighing from two hundred up, as shapely as a wet Bologna sausage dressed in a black costume tied into divisions. She was called Mrs. Jennings, or Mrs. So-and-so, but nobody ever heard of her husband. Familiarly she was called 'cook,' and generations of English children got from her surreptitious tarts and delicacies meant for the grown-up people.

Then slowly 'cook's' job began to be undermined. A woman called Mrs. Beaton conceived the daring design of feeding her own husband. Mr. Beaton died. Nothing, however, could be proved, and the matter was presently allowed to drop. Mrs. Beaton found no second husband and devoted her widowhood to making a list of all the things she had fed Mr. Beaton on. She published it under the name Cook Book. Other rivals followed in her wake, and cooking, which had been, like the church, a closed profession, was thrown wide open by the new 'cook book.'

The cook book, though nobody foresaw it at the time, did away with the cook. Anybody could be a cook now. All you had to do was to follow the directions. 'Take a pound of steak; beat it for an hour; and then add half ounce of mace, half ounce of dice and beat it again for an hour; strain it, jump on it and add a gill of rosemary and anything else you haven't got...and then give it to them.'

So, with the cook gone, and these simple directions to follow, and gadgets to do it with, the result has been that the kitchen, the real old kitchen, has gone too. There isn't any. Go out to dine in any of the new apartment households that Cupid opens every day, and the only cook that you find is the charming little hostess, who has just served the cocktails, dainty, as if she never worked a minute in her life, and cool as a lobster salad. She just turns on a 'control' to keep its eye on the roast, sets the soupometer for 70 degree, turns on enough electric heat to freeze the cocktail, and there you are! Nothing to do but start the radio and wait for the guests and hope her husband gets shaved in time.

And when the little dinner is served, believe me, Cardinal Wolsey and his whole ox are just nowhere!