DOMESTICATED FIENDS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2054, 15 April 1907, Page 4

DOMESTICATED FIENDS.

lii tliis highly practical town, which meditates a College chair of Domestic Science, it may seem heresy to report a recent protest against "the extraordinary prominence given to matters of housekeeping, both in literature and conversation.” It appears that since schools of cookery and the domestic training of girls became the fashion in England, English society has been troubled by an apparition to whom Miss Margarita Yates, in the Westminster Review, gives the alarming title, “The UltraDomesticated Fiend.” The holder oi twenty diplomas oi housewifery silences all good talk at a dinner-table by discussing the merits oi various patent foods. Her idea of converramm si a jiioiiiiiig cast ia j/- - - a series of domestic conundrums: “How you make a mustard plaster?” ''“Gan you draft a blouse pattern?” “Dp * you know anything about! sewage farms?” Accomplished and charming girls stand transformed by a short course of * learn-, ing to do in mediocre fashion what the ordinary woman without learning

(•nil do will,” into appalling compof;iton of cook-nursc-house-pnrlornuiids; ill short, tho Schools of Domesticity are alleged to dovclop a new horror of modern days, and ill marrying a man may find that ho has not only domesticated the Recording Angel, as Stevenson says, but also taken to himself tho ultra-domesticated fiend 1 This all sounds terrible, and we should tremble for tho future of Now Zealand whon Professors of Household Hygiene cast their spells, hut tho question arises, is there anything at all truly modern in this attack? Long before tho days of Cooking Schools lived Dr. Johnson, and yet tho “Rambler” gives a picture of tho “ultra-domesticated” quite as darkly brown as anything in tho Westminster. Review. Under that harmless litlo, “Tho Kniployniont of a Housewife in tho Country,” wo find described that lady whoso great business in life is “to watch the skillet on the fire, to see it simmer with tho iluo dogroo of heat, and to snatch it oil' at the moment of projection” ; who despises all hooks hut 1 recipe books; and resigns all curiosity alter other interests than tho art of scalding damascenes without bursting them, and preserving the whiteness of pickled mushrooms. She, too, if not yet advanced to patent foods, could “discourse for two long hours upon robs and gellies; laid down tho best methods of conserving, reserving, and preserving all sorts of fruit; told us of great contempt of tho London lady by whom these terms veto very often confounded; and hinted how much she would be ashamed to set before company, at her own house, sweetmeats of so dark a color as. she had often scon at Mistress Sprightly’s.” Miss Yates should read the “Rambler,” and learn patience with an occasional enthusiast to be met to-day.