COOKERY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 August 1940, Page 8

COOKERY

RAISE TO STATUS' OF CAREER. Cookery has rightly been raised within recent years to the status of a career. This is due largely to the revival of interest in first-class English cookery and the consequent training of girls belonging to all classes of life in the household arts, says an English writer.

Today the debutante who decides to take up cooking as a career will find many interesting and out of the ordinary branches open to her. She may become a dietitian, an expert taking charge of a diet kitchen in a hospital school, nursing home or institution and working out anything from 50 to 100 different diets a day. Diet Experts. .

Training for this work means a two years’ social science course or a university degree in chemistry and physiology, followed by a dietetic course taking a year. The latter includes six weeks in a hospital kitchen and six months in a hospital diet kitchen. It is interesting that woman dietitians are now being employed not only in hospitals, but also by local authorities to supervise and plan meals for school children. Boys’ schools employ them to supervise the catering of boarding houses.

In hospitals and nursing homes the woman dietitian goes round the wards to see how the patients were liking the diets, she arranges diets for outpatients and often lectures to the nurses on hospital kitchen work generally. Salaries vary from £2OO to £350 a year, non-resident.

Good Opportunities. The girl who has the human touch, plenty of courage and common sense, as well as a taste for cookery, will like the new career of Home Service Adviser. Such advisers arc e.mploycd by the public utility companies to find out how hostesses and their staff are using modern electric and gas devices for cooking, heating and washing. The giving of lectures and demonstrations in an up-to-the-moment kitchen, the trying-out of recipes and new cookery apparatus before it is put on the market, talks to women at welfare centres, visits by appointment to replan kitchens; all this is part of the work, as well as the judging of cookery competitions.

Training should take a year at domestic science school and voice production classes should be taken concurrently. Salaries rise to £5OO a year. Domestic Science.

Educational cookery is a very worthwhile branch of this career for the ambitious girl who is willing to take a two or three years’ course at a domestic science college and to acquire a University Teacher’s Certificate. Under educational officers, those cooks teach cookery, plan school meals and rise to being inspectors at salaries of £•100 and over.

With the increased interest in cookery as an essential part of the subdebutante's education, there are few schools whore an expert cook is not employed, and domestic science finishing schools need the type of cookery teacher, who can also explain to them how to plan their household and manage their stall’.