The Cooks Decameron | Page 7

cordon bleu. One hears
now and again pleasant remarks about the worn-out Latin races, but I
know of one Latin race which can do better than this in cookery." And
having thus delivered herself, the Marchesa lay back on the pillows and
reviewed the situation.
She was sorry in a way to miss the Colonel's dinner. The dishes which
the Bengali cook turned out were excellent, but the host himself was a
trifle dictatorial and too fond of the sound of his own voice, while
certain of the inevitable guests were still worse. Mrs. Gradinger's letter
came as a relief; indeed the Marchesa had been wondering why she had
ever consented to go and pretend to enjoy herself by eating an
ill-cooked dinner in company with social reformers and educational
prigs. She really went because she liked Mr. Gradinger, who was as
unlike his wife as possible, a stout youth of forty, with a breezy manner
and a decided fondness for sport. Lady Considine's dinners were
indifferent, and the guests were apt to be a bit too smart and too
redolent of last season's Monte Carlo odour. The Sinclairs gave good
dinners to perfectly selected guests, and by reason of this virtue, one
not too common, the host and hostess might be pardoned for being a
little too well satisfied with themselves and with their last new bibelot.
The Fothergill dinners were like all other dinners given by the
Fothergills of society. They were costly, utterly undistinguished, and
invariably graced by the presence of certain guests who seemed to have
been called in out of the street at the last moment. Van der Roet's
Japanese menus were curious, and at times inimical to digestion, but
the personality of the host was charming. As to Sir John Oglethorpe,
the question of the dinner postponed troubled her little: another repast,
the finest that London's finest restaurant could furnish, would certainly
be forthcoming before long. In Sir John's case, her discomposure took
the form of sympathy for her friend in his recent bereavement. He had
been searching all his life for a perfect cook, and he had found, or

believed he had found, such an one in Narcisse; wherefore the
Marchesa was fully persuaded that, if that artist should evade the
guillotine, she would again taste his incomparable handiwork, even
though he were suspected of murdering his whole family as well as the
partner of his joys.
That same afternoon a number of the balked entertainers foregathered
in the Marchesa's drawing-room, the dominant subject of discourse
being the approaching dissolution of London society from the refusal of
one human to cook food for another. Those present were gathered in
two groups. In one the Colonel, in spite of the recent desertion of his
Oriental, was asserting that the Government should be required to bring
over consignments of perfectly trained Indian cooks, and thus trim the
balance between dining room and kitchen; and to the other Mrs.
Gradinger, a gaunt, ill-dressed lady in spectacles, with a commanding
nose and dull, wispy hair, was proclaiming in a steady metallic voice,
that it was absolutely necessary to double the school rate at once in
order to convert all the girls and some of the boys as well, into
perfectly equipped food-cooking animals; but her audience gradually
fell away, and in an interval of silence the voice of the hostess was
heard giving utterance to a tentative suggestion.
"But, my dear, it is inconceivable that the comfort and the movement of
society should depend on the humours of its servants. I don't blame
them for refusing to cook if they dislike cooking, and can find other
work as light and as well paid; but, things being as they are, I would
suggest that we set to work somehow to make ourselves independent of
cooks."
"That 'somehow' is the crux, my dear Livia," said Mrs. Sinclair. "I have
a plan of my own, but I dare not breathe it, for I'm sure Mrs. Gradinger
would call it 'anti-social,' whatever that may mean."
"I should imagine that it is a term which might be applied to any
scheme which robs society of the ministrations of its cooks," said Sir
John.
"I have heard mathematicians declare that what is true of the whole is
true of its parts," said the Marchesa. "I daresay it is, but I never stopped
to inquire. I will amplify on my own account, and lay down that what is
true of the parts must be true of the whole. I'm sure that sounds quite
right. Now I, as a unit of society, am independent of cooks because I

can cook myself, and if all the other units were independent, society
itself would be independent-- ecco!"
"To speak in this tone of a serious science like Euclid seems