Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 363
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!
LITERARY STUDIES IV - COME BACK TO SCHOOL
FOR THE LAST few years before the present war, the British Isles, so it was understood, were being swept by a wave of Adult Education — the same wave which was almost washing the United States into the Gulf of Mexico. Washing by waves — crime waves, drink waves, waves of enthusiasm and of disillusionment — is a part of the progress of our great democracies. After the wave comes the back-wash of common sense that levels the ground again.
But this adult education; I’m all for it. For some it means carrying on school all through life, never ceasing to learn; for others, beginning late what they had not the chance to begin early; making opportunity by overtime effort; supplying, by their own initiative and will, the defects imposed by adversity. That is adult education, and that is what it does for the community at large. I am, I say, all for it. If I could think of anything I didn’t know, I’d take classes in it right now, at seventy-two.
Only I don’t like the name — adult education. I wouldn’t want any one to call me an ‘adult.’ That word never seems quite right; it always sounds like a half-wit. Don’t they have homes for adults? No? Well, surely there are adults in some of the homes, and you can hang an adult, can’t you? And, of course, ‘education’ is a tainted word. It carries still its old false suggestion that it is something everybody had as a child, like measles, and doesn’t need any longer. Say to any man, ‘Look here, don’t you think you need a little education, the kind they give to adults?’ and see how he reacts to it.
But the reality of adult education, which is what I want to talk about, is one of the big things of the world to-day. What it means is that all the world is going back to school.
Now here is one of the reasons for it. People are no sooner out of school than they have a wistful longing to get back to it. Boys and girls take school as an accepted routine, understood by convention to be a sort of hardship, a violence to be done to youth. The teacher, if a man, is understood to be a pretty hard lot, and if a woman, a mean kind of cat. The child who says ‘I love teacher’ is the odd one out, and will go to heaven early. At best they say, ‘She’s not so bad,’ or ‘He’s all right out of school.’ But school is no sooner over for the last day than they begin to weave round it a gossamer web of retrospect.
Each year that passes adds to their wistful illusion. They go back after three years, and there are the same old bricks (still there) and the same old desk with their names cut on it — look, see it! And when they hear, after four years, the sound of the same old bell, at the old hour (no change), they almost break down. As the years go still farther, and get really on, they find out that the teacher (dead) was a grand man, a scholar of the real old type. All the real type are dead. In fact, as with the Indian, the only good teacher is a dead teacher. As for the woman teacher, they discover later on that she wasn’t a woman at all, just a girl — young and timid. How it must have distressed her — the rough horseplay, and the classroom cut-ups. Too bad!
It is the same, of course, with college, only on a much bigger scale, just as a three-ring circus eclipses a local Fall show. All through college the students are counting up the time to get out of it. The minute they enter, they call their class not by the year it comes in but by the year in which it hopes to go out. ‘Rah! Rahl ‘46!’ they shout. Just as if a baby was christened ‘Old Jones.’ They count each course; they number each credit; they ‘finish’ trigonometry; after the second year they are no longer ‘liable’ to history; after the third ‘not responsible’ for Shakespeare; at the end of the fourth they are all signed off and paid off like a ship’s crew from a long voyage. They shout ‘Rah! Rah! ‘46!’ But the sound weakens in their throat. Open the gates again! Isn’t there any way to get us back?
So that is why, as they get on in life, people form all sorts of service clubs and luncheon clubs and go and hear speeches. They pretend, of course, that what they want is current information; that they want to get posted — but it isn’t so. They want to get back to school, just as an old sailor wants to get back on a deck, and an old actor to get back on the boards. So there they sit, listening, back on their school benches, and the tougher the subject, the better they like it.
In my city, as in everybody else’s, the luncheon clubs prefer a lecture on ‘Egypt Before Christ’ to a talk on ‘England After Churchill.’ A week or two ago, I met a group of my acquaintances coming out in a flock from their weekly gathering. ‘What was it to-day?’ I asked. ‘Great stuff!’ one answered. ‘Professor Drydout was talking on Babylonian inscriptions. I couldn’t get it all; in fact, I missed a lot of it, but it was great stuff.’ You see, there’s a peculiar charm in ‘missing a lot of it.’ It takes you back to the class in geometry at high school.
So the clubs, though the members wouldn’t admit it, are really a sort of school, a branch of ‘adult education.’ You can prove it by realizing how unwilling they are to permit a ‘humorous’ lecture. In their hearts they’d really like something funny instead of Babylon, just as they like a joke in school. But dignity won’t allow it. Fun isn’t education. If you want to give them a humorous lecture you must call it something else — pretend that it’s on ‘The Later Tendencies of Democracy,’ and fill it with stories about Pat and Mike, and what Bill Nye said to Josh Billings.
Meantime the clubs go on expanding information like ripples on a pond, and ‘expanding’ with it the capacity to listen, the desire to know, the sense of interest — in short, all those things which are the very soul of real education.
All power to the luncheon speeches. I only wish I could hear them. But like all old professors, I lost the power of listening years ago. I couldn’t listen to Mohammed for more than four minutes.
One must remember that, after all, the continuance of education, the process of learning, or of trying to, brings its own reward. Human knowledge at large, in the huge philosophical sense, may indeed be more or less lost and bankrupt.
It was the custom, in the far back days that we now call Victorian, to insist that knowledge, in the sense of the contemplation of the universe, brought a sort of warm satisfaction. The stars sang together. A harmonious world fitted its parts like nickel-plated joints. Knowledge, so the poet said, unfolded to their eyes its ample page rich with the spoils of time. Study was even recommended to the Victorian working class, as a kind of sedative to put them to sleep.
‘Oh, what a world of profit and delight,’ sang one blithering poet, ’is open to the studious artisan.’ It may have been in 1842. At present, he wouldn’t get much of a feed out of it, not in a universe of matter that has dissolved into atoms which are now merely ‘fields of force’ — the whole physical world just a sort of disturbance, a universe ‘expanding’ with terrific rapidity, not where you think it is, ‘out there,’ but in a ‘time-space continuum,’ which beats the studious artisan right to the balkline. In short, there’s nothing left except a mathematic frame — inside of which a world agonizes, while what we called civilization fights for its life. No, my poor artisan, go and look at another peep-show. Ours is no good.
But while that is true of the general outlook, the humble individual satisfaction in learning something still holds good. If there is conceit and vanity in it, it is too pardonable to notice. If there is mingled with its excellence a little false assumption of superiority over one’s fellows, the recording angel will easily blot it out with a tear.
At least the conceit of learning is better than the boast of ignorance that used to vaunt itself as an aid to success. I say ‘used to’; it was in the days before the great depression chastened the great conceit. ‘Look at me,’ once said in my hearing a big business man, a great big one. ‘I can’t do fractions.’ I looked at him. He couldn’t. But I felt that even a small decimal would have done him good.
