Cooking - 200 Recipes for Italian Dishes (Share Me).txt
The Cook's Decameron: A Study In Taste
Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes
By
Mrs. W. G. Waters
"Show me a pleasure like dinner, which comes every day and lasts an
hour." -- Talleyrand circa 1901
To
A. V.
In memory of Certain Ausonian Feasts
Preface
Montaigne in one of his essays* mentions the high excellence
Italian cookery had attained in his day. "I have entered into this
Discourse upon the Occasion of an Italian I lately receiv'd into my
Service, and who was Clerk of the Kitchen to the late Cardinal
Caraffa till his Death. I put this Fellow upon an Account of his
office: Where he fell to Discourse of this Palate-Science, with
such a settled Countenance and Magisterial Gravity, as if he had
been handling some profound Point of Divinity. He made a Learned
Distinction of the several sorts of Appetites, of that of a Man
before he begins to eat, and of those after the second and third
Service: The Means simply to satisfy the first, and then to raise
and acute the other two: The ordering of the Sauces, first in
general, and then proceeded to the Qualities of the Ingredients,
and their Effects: The Differences of Sallets, according to their
seasons, which ought to be serv'd up hot, and which cold: The
Manner of their Garnishment and Decoration, to render them yet more
acceptable to the Eye after which he entered upon the Order of the
whole Service, full of weighty and important Considerations."
It is consistent with Montaigne's large-minded habit thus to
applaud the gifts of this master of his art who happened not to be
a Frenchman. It is a canon of belief with the modern Englishman
that the French alone can achieve excellence in the art of cookery,
and when once a notion of this sort shall have found a lodgment in
an Englishman's brain, the task of removing it will be a hard one.
Not for a moment is it suggested that Englishmen or any one else
should cease to recognise the sovereign merits of French cookery;
all that is entreated i