You may think that this column is an attempt to shirk my duty and take it easy for my first column of the New Year. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! I simply wish to impart to you a passage from an old cookbook that I find refreshingly simple and yet profound.

            One of my passions is collecting old cookbooks. Jordan and I found this one several years ago at a yard sale on Gabriola. The book, titled Cooking for Profit by Jessup Whitehead, was published in 1893. It was originally purchased from a bookseller in Chicago, and I often wonder how it ended up on Gabriola Island. Maybe someone reading this will be able to shed some light on this mystery. The book was written as a technical manual to aide managers in running profitable hotels, boarding houses or resorts. Whitehead intersperses practical advice, recipes and costing (There are dinners costing as little as seven cents a plate!) with witty anecdotes about staff and guests.

            Here is just one excerpt that I enjoy taken from this book.

 “Trouble in Planning Dinners

            The last dinner was not well planned; there were good things in plenty but they ought not to have met in the same bill of fare; there were too many fries; came near being all fried; the fish in batter with potatoes and onions fried, chicken cutlets breaded and fried, croustades the same, croutons too, and the apricots a la Colbert. It was a mistake to have it so, and such mistakes are being made wherever bills of fare are written continually. . . . The cook does not intend to get several dishes of the same nature or appearance in the same dinner and generally does not know it till it is too late to make a change; perhaps his time for reflection was short or he was thinking about the butcher’s bill, or had found one thing he intended to use was spoiled, and an unsuitable substitute was put in hastily. While one bill may be all fries, perhaps another time it will be all cream—cream soup, fish with cream sauce, macaroni a la Bechamel, onions in cream, fried cream fritters, cream cakes and ice cream. . . . Another day the dinner will be all dough, with nudel soup, fish in batter, meat pie risoles or kromeskies, fritters of some kind or pancakes and a batter pudding, or fruit cobbler. Still again there may be a surfeit of oysters; oysters raw, oyster soup, fish with oyster sauce, oyster stuffing in the turkey and oyster patties. So it goes about planning a dinner. One of Thackeray’s novels has a French chef for a character, who goes off and plays the piano while composing his bill of fare and seems ludicrous to the reader but there is nothing extravagant about that. Most cooks make up the bulk of the bill of fare for tomorrow whilst carving or dishing up their entrees today when their thoughts are upon the subject; but some must go off and smoke or sit alone, and there is no reason why a piano or a banjo might not come in useful at such a time and help to prevent the bad arrangement which makes a dinner be all cream or all dough, or of any one thing more than its due proportion. And we have not touched the still higher consideration of how some dinners are all heaviness and indigestibility, beginning with a heavy soup and stuffed fish running on through dishes that allow no relief by contrast to plum pudding, mince pie and tutti frutti; while others are as uniformly thin and meagre, going from weak consommé through water, and more water to a finale of lemon water ice. If a piano will help the proper planning of dinner, every house ought to have one.”

Happy New Year to all, from Jordan and Kerry.