William Kitchener and the Magazine of Taste
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William Kitchener and the Magazine of Taste
William Kitchener loved footnotes. They're peppered throughout his book, The Cook's Oracle (1817). Reading my copy, the 7th edition (1840), is an exercise in restraint: I love underlining in books, making marks, scratching out marginalia in response to my frenzied thoughts as I read. But with Kitchener's work, I hold back,* perhaps because his many footnotes, which call to mind Brillat-Savarin's writing (and who would was alive around the same time, too), give me plenty to digest. Like Brillat-Savarin, Kitchener was not a culinary professional: The former being a lawyer, and the latter an optician.
Is the fact that food was a passion, not profession, make both feel like they had greater license to muse and meander than some of their contemporaries? Did both draw the connections and conclusions they did because they weren't siloed within a culinary profession, and thus perhaps felt less encumbered by that profession's norms and perceptions of taste? Certainly part of the equation, at least, is that both were white men, relatively wealthy and well-educated, which made whatever they said more likely to be listened to.
Both were eating and writing during the very latter part of the Enlightenment, the significance of which would require a different post (and the significance of that period's name, too: it certainly doesn't speak highly of those 'unenlightened' folks in the Middle Ages, does it?)
But while Brillat-Savarin's work is much more about his personal philosophy of eating and understanding of food's various roles in our lives, Kitchener peppers such musings within a manual that's grounded in the practical. You can take Kitchener into your kitchen with you, and many other writers, including the famous Mrs. Beeton, did just that.
Kitchener's footnotes, and his approach in general, tends to be more didactic than Brillat-Savarin's, and tends to not throw its tendrils out quite so far into other fields of inquiry.
He leaves me with questions, too, and I scribble notes that feel to me like entering into a conversation with the author: Why did you say this? What do you mean by that?
But sometimes answers and ideas emerge, too: Where Kitchener suggests cayenne, I offer the possibility of substituting with my own fire cider powder (or elsewhere, I might suggest fire cider itself). Instead of zest and lemon juice, I opt for more shelf-stable preserved lemons. And on and on.
In this way, my own Magazine becomes very much 'inspired by Kitchener' rather than 'exactly like Kitchener': Something that builds on the foundations set by the cooks that came before me (and that reminds me of the many conversations I've read and had the last few years, including those by Nigella Lawson, Alicia Kennedy, and others, on recipe creation and re-creation as active, reflective, and experimental).
Like a cabinet of curiosities for your palate, the Magazine of Taste was Kitchener's attempt to compile a ready-made suite of ingredients encompassing whatever flavors he needed to employ.
Having them at hand made seasoning easier, certainly, but also more expansive: When I don't have to rummage around for the flavors I want to layer into a dish, I'm more likely to layer with abandon.
I tend to have a similar (though less organized) suite of ingredients on hand, and my experiments that led to the magazine themes and ingredients below really helped me be more intentional in my kitchen: Both in terms of what I'm making and stocking, but also in expanding my own practice to connect flavors together I otherwise may not have.