THE ALPHABET OF HOUSEKEEPING.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 1927, 28 April 1880, Page 3

THE ALPHABET OF HOUSEKEEPING.

[“ Prairie Farmer.’’] To the ambitious but uninitiated housekeeper, the average cook book is a volume of mysteries—a puzzling and complex piece of literature, bristling with interrogation points. If people were born cooks there would be no necessity for learning to boil, fry, stew, broil, roast, and bake. Since they are not, it would be convenient for those who know nothing at all about these processes to have more definite rules than cook books usually give. Half of the musses and messes with which the world is plagued result from the lack of clearness and reliability in rules and recipes. The other half maybe laid at the door of the woman who don’t want to be bothered with cook books or rules either, and who is too careless to attend to her work. She just slings things together, hit or miss, and gets the victuals out of the way as soon as possible. If she boils a piece of meat, she boils it furiously; the faster the better, so as to get it done. If it is tender, well and good ; if it is tough, she can’t help it, so she says, and many others say the same because they have never learned better.

There are a few fundamental principles on which good cooking is grounded. Simple enough, easily acquired, and when once learned not readily forgotten. The woman who can cook a joint to the proper degree of juicy tenderness, broil a chop to a turn, fry a outlet crisp, and brown without drying it to a chip, and bake a tender, toothsome loaf of bread, can attempt anything she pleases in the way of ornamental cookery with comparative certainty of success ; if she pleases to cook only the plainest of dishes they will always be palatable. Reverse the rule, and the result is different. One may excel in making cakes, desserts, and fancy dishes, and still be ignorant of the important and more substantial ones that are in constant use. I know some girls who are proud of their culinary attainments, and they know no more about making bread than they do of building a locomotive ; as to getting a dinner, why! they would almost as soon fondle a porcupine as to handle raw meat or dress a fowl; but then, you just ought to see what lovely cakes they can make. Almost all girls delight in the poetical part of housekeeping. They dust the parlors, arrange the flowers, put the finishing touches to the house and its belongings, and attend to the desserts. They are good daughters, helpful and useful; we would miss the daintiness and beauty which their thoughtful presence gives, but it is a pity that domestic education so often begins and ends with these graceful finishing touches, thst simply serve to embellish the plain and unattractive prose ; the bread and butter realities of every day life. If all mothers were as wise and judicious as they should be, they would feel their duty unfulfilled until their daughters had been faithfully instructed in the rudiments of housekeeping, and fitted to assume the responsibility of managing a house of their own. Then fewer young wives would find the kitchen a valley of humiliation, the oookstove an instrument of torture, the cook-book a blind guide, and their dreams of comfort and peace and a cheerful, happy home, fading into the dullness and dreariness of a higgledypiggledy, work-a-day life.