ia represented an ideal, which,
though preserved as a phrase, would hardly satisfy a modern epicure. The
ancients were poorly provided with pots and pans, except of a simple
order, or with the appurtenances of a kitchen, and they were sadly to
seek in the requisites of a modern table. So long as men ate with their
hands no dainty confection was suitable; the viands were set forth in a
straightforward style fit for their requirements. "Plain cooking,"
which, after all, can never become obsolete, was the only sort.
Oddities, no doubt, were the luxuries; and we can see to-day in the
ethnological accounts of contemporary savages and backward
civilizations, a fair representation of the cookeries of the ancients.
The luxuries of the Chinese are, in their way, a survival of long ages
of a cookery which to western civilization is grotesque. Even if it is
an historic impertinence, it is impossible for the countries of western
civilization to regard the fine flower of their own evolution as other
than the highest pitch of progress. _Autres temps, autres moeurs._ To
the Chinaman French cooking may possibly be as grotesque as to an
Englishman the Chinaman's hundred-year-old buried egg, black and
tasteless. The history of comparative cookery is bound up with the
physical possibilities of each country and its products; and if we
attempt to mark out stages in the evolution of cookery as a fine art, it
is necessarily as understood by the so-called civilized peoples of the
West in their culmination at the present day.

It is obvious that opportunity has dominated its history, for the art of
cookery is to some extent the product of an increased refinement of
taste, consequent on culture and increase of wealth. To this extent it
is a decadent art, ministering to the luxury of man, and to his
progressive inclination to be pampered and have his appetite tickled. It
is thus only remotely connected with the mere necessities of nutrition
(q.v.), or the science of dietetics (q.v.). Mere hunger, though the best
sauce, will not produce cookery, which is the art of sauces. For
centuries its elaboration consisted mainly of a progressive variety of
foods, the richest and rarest being sought out; and their nature
depended on what was most difficult to obtain. The Greeks learnt by
contact with Asia to increase the sumptuous character of their banquets,
but we know little enough of their ideas of gastronomy. Athens was the
centre of luxury. According t