Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/822

792 poet. Was there ever before such criticism, or, for that matter, such eulogy as this!

This is sheer raving in the superlative degree; and leads us to distrust the critic almost as much as we do the crazy subject of his rhapsody. Yet amid all this extravagance there are passages of rare power and simple beauty, such as the following, in which the critic describes the effect produced by a rude but strong design of the poet-painter's.

The description is a hundred-fold more beautiful, incomparably more so, than the thing described, which owes much of what the critic finds in it to the critic's own imagination, and not a little to the painter's coarse, rude workmanship, which caused him to neglect such trifling details as finding stars for his heavens. There are few readers, even among intelligent lovers of art, who would not smile at seeing the little patch of printer's ink that elicits this fine descriptive criticism. It is not surprising that Mr. Swinburne finds in Blake a great likeness to Walt Whitman. And here we must, at last, leave one of the most noteworthy literary topics of the day; but one which has not much interest for the mass of readers in this country, or probably in any other.

—'s "Handbook of Practical Cookery" reminds us by contrast of the reply made by an old negro cook to a lady who asked her for the receipt by which she made such delicious corn bread. "Why, darlin'," she said, "sometimes gen'ally I takes a little meal, an' sometimes gen'ally I takes a little flou', an' I kine' o' mixes' em up with some hot water, an' I puts in eggs enough, an' a little salt, an' then I bakes it jess 'bout 'nough. An' you do jess so, honey, an' you'll make it as good as I do." The old negress gave only a somewhat caricatured likeness of most receipts for cooking. The fault with nearly all books on cookery is a lack of explicitness in instructions—a fault which results partly from a supposition of a degree of knowledge on the part of the reader which is not possessed, and partly from an inability on the part of the writer to express clearly and consecutively that which he or she can do very well. A lack of accuracy and deference to rule is also a fault peculiar to women, and is one of the chief reasons why men make the better cooks. It is almost impossible for a woman to do the same thing twice in exactly the same manner. Women themselves—observant and candid women, who know what exactly means—have owned to this in our hearing. M. Pierre Blot's book is not open to the objections above mentioned, and his readers, therefore, if they have any natural aptitude for cookery, can hardly fail, under the instructions of such a master of the principles as well as of the practice of his art, to attain a proficiency therein just in proportion to their study of his pages and their observance of his instructions. M. Blot's book has two great merits, in addition to its exactness—it is full, and yet compact. He tells you, for instance, about poultry, not only how to buy and clean it, but how it should be killed, and how transported. He begins even before the beginning, and then follows his viand even into the stomach; and his instructions are very full upon the subject of serving up to table, a point upon which many housekeepers are much in need of his counsels. We notice one error, which is one rather in language than in cookery. M. Blot says that sauté has no corresponding word in English. "It differs," he says, "from frying, in this, that to fry an object requires fat enough to immerse that object, while to sauté (sic) it requires just enough to prevent it from scorching." Not so. To cook an object by immersing it in fat is to boil it in fat or in oil. Doughnuts and crullers are boiled,