COOKING THAT FAILS.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXII, Issue 8827, 31 May 1907, Page 4

COOKING THAT FAILS.

Results of rural school cooking clasp.cs, having made an amusing feature in light literature, are now promoted to form the substance of a “Special Report on the teaching of Cookery to Public Elementary School children in England and Wales.” Tiiis was prepared after special investigation by Miss M. A. Lawrence, chief woman inspector under the Board of Education, and her tour revealed enough to justify the London newspaper which discussed the subject under the heading “Cooking that Pails.” The main object seems, in many places, to secure the 4s grant while spending as little“as may be upon material. Tims in a Yorkshire school, at a class of twenty-one girls, “each group of two girls cooks only one dish in two and a half hours”—a rate of work not calculated to improve their domestic usefulness. At a centre in an industrial district of Lancashire, marmalade was the lesson in hand, ‘ and the work of seventeen ehldrou for the afternoon .consisted in cutting up four oranges —that is about a quarter of an orange to each child. ” Then, as the marmalade process required a second day. those children never saw the result of their work! The same zeal for minute quantities was observed in a Sheffield school, where “roast meat 1 ” looked quite satisfactory on the lesson programme, but the illustrative dish was a solitary chop weighing seven or eight ounces, prepared and cooked hy eighteen’ girls, and the strict economy of equipment was cvidcued by a school at Cardiff, where all the class carried on cako-making, measuring, mixing, etc, by the aid of one single spoon. In Wales, particularly, the instruction is chiefly confined to fancy cake making, tlic results being found most easy to dispose of. That it would bo very much more useful to know how to roast meat or make’ a pudding does not seem to have weighed with the framers of the 1 lessons. At one class, the children, with a practical energy worthy of Dotheboys Hall, spent the lasilhalf in selling the food previously cooked to the)J people ?iii the neighbouring street. “Tliis ’cau hardly be called a cookeryjlessou!” objects the instructor. The alternative lies, in fact, either in making cxjreusivo dishes which will soil, or in cooking such small quantities that the whole business is a farce. Only the London County Council is honourably ” exempt from blame, their classes being quite satisfactory. But one would like to know what" cooking school gave her certificate to that “Trained Teacher of Domestic Science” who was heard to praise the hygienic onion? “If you have cholera or scarlet fever in your house, put some onions under the bed, and they will sweep away all diseases.” The same teacher was heard to tell her class that the temperature of water for bread-making “should be as it tells us in the Bible—‘neither hot nor cold.’ ”