This impression, however, needs
correction, as a few not very recondite considerations will show.
As a cook, Bridget is an admitted failure. But cooking is, it is
now generally acknowledged, very much an affair of instinct, and
this instinct seems to be very strong in some races and very weak
in others, though why the French should have it highly developed,
and the Irish be almost altogether deprived of it, is a question
which would require an essay to itself. No amount of teaching
will make a person a good cook who is not himself fond of good
food and has not a delicate palate, for it is the palate which
must test the value of rules. We may deduce from this the
conclusion, which experience justifies, that women are not
naturally good cooks. They have had the cookery of the world in
their hands for several thousand years, but all the marked
advances in the art, and indeed all that can be called the
cultivation of it, have been the work of men. Whatever zeal women
have displayed in it, and whatever excellence they have achieved
in it, have been the result of influences in no way gastronomic,
and which we might perhaps call emotional, such as devotion to
male relatives, or a desire to minister to the pleasure of men in
general.
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