Food and Flavor: A Gastronomic Guide to Health and Good Living

FOOD AND FLAVOR

Copyright, 1913, by
The Century Co.

Published, April, 1913

TO

LUTHER BURBANK

AND

HARVEY W. WILEY

THE TWO MEN
WHO HAVE DONE MOST
TO MAKE OUR DAILY FOOD
PALATABLE AND HONEST

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

• [Fred Harvey]
• [A Matter for the Health Department]
• [Harvey W. Wiley]
• [The Old-fashioned Way]
• [Horace Fletcher]
• [A French Chef's Culinary Alchemy]
• [An American Quick-Lunch]
• [How they do it in France]
• [Where Smoked Hams were Suspended from the Rafters]
• [Before Breakfast in the Garden]
• [Chafing Dish Cooking]
• [A fifteenth-century Kitchen in France]
• [Cooking Class at the Wadleigh High School]
• [Fireless Cooking in Hawaii]
• [The Tour d'Argent and Frederic Delair]
• [Carême]
• [Boeuf à la Mode]
• [Coming to Market, Brittany]
• [The World's Greatest Market Place]
• [Paris Market Porters]
• [Halles Centrales]
• [A bit of the great Paris market]
• [Macaroni Drying]
• [Deer in German Forest]
• [Menus on a German Steamer]
• [The Boar]
• ["Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese"]
• [London Bill of Fare]
• [The Sugar Bush]
• [Brillat-Savarin]
• [New York down town Lunch Menu]
• [Luther Burbank]
• [Burbank's Spineless Cactus]
• [Chinese Canal]
• [Javanese Tea-Picker and Porter]

[PREFACE: A BOOK FOR EVERYBODY]

It is not often that an author is so fortunate as to have a subject which is of vital importance to everybody, without exception. Everybody eats, and everybody wants to enjoy his meals; yet few know how to get the most benefit and pleasure out of them. The French are far ahead of us in this respect; they are a nation of gastronomers, understanding fully the importance to health and happiness of raising only the best foodstuffs, cooking them in savory ways and eating them with intelligence and pleasure. One of the main objects of the present volume is to show that we have the material for the making of an even more gastronomic nation than the French are, and that Americans, especially if caught young, can be taught to eat in a leisurely way and to refuse to accept anything that lacks appetizing flavor.

Flavor! In that word lies the key to the whole food problem. Undoubtedly the nourishing property of food is also of importance; without it we could not live. Yet, as Luther Burbank has keenly remarked, if we eliminate palatability (that is, flavor) from food, it is no more than a medicine, "to be taken because it produces certain necessary results." Moreover, a little of this medicine goes a great way. Horace Fletcher lived for years on eleven cents a day; and two university professors—Dr. J. L. Henderson of Harvard and Dr. Graham Lusk of Cornell—have demonstrated, independently, that a dime a day, intelligently expended, is enough to keep body and soul together. What more we spend on food—and we probably average five times that amount—goes chiefly for flavor. It is the flavor that makes us willing to pay more for good butter than for good oleomargarine, for fresh chicken than for cold storage fowl, for Virginia ham than for ordinary ham, and so on throughout the list of foods; for there is no difference in nutritive value in any of these cases.

This being so, it seems passing strange that while so many good books have been written on the nutritive aspects of foods, mine is the first volume in any language treating specially of this same flavor, on which we spend so much of our income, and which is so important to our health. The explanation lies in the fact that flavor is generally looked upon as something merely agreeable—like the fragrance of strawberries, or the vanilla extract we put into ice cream—but of no vital importance. It was this misunderstanding that prevented me from keeping the title "Flavor in Food" which I had intended to use. At a conference with the publishers we decided that (since, after all, the book also discusses many other aspects of the food question), it would be wiser to use the title "Food and Flavor." Nevertheless, Flavor (with a big "F" to emphasize its importance) is the principal theme, and the most important chapters are the second and the last in which I discuss its superlative value, not only as the source of countless wholesome pleasures of the table, but as a guide to health. The gist of the book lies in the sections "An Amazing Blunder" and "A New Psychology of Eating," in which I have shown that we need flavor as much as we need food if we wish to be well; for food without flavor is not appetizing; and when food is not appetizing it lies in the stomach like lead and causes dyspepsia, the national American plague. The final chapter considers the important difference between appetizing flavor and mere fragrance, the neglect of which has created no end of confusion and done so much harm.

In the pages concerned with "Ungastronomic America" and "Our Denatured Foods," I have dwelt on some of the evils which have resulted from the giving up of the old-fashioned condiments (especially woodsmoke) in favor of the much cheaper chemical preservatives which denature our food, that is, destroy its appetizing flavor, and give rise to countless adulterations and deceptions. It was not with any "muck-raking" intentions that these pages were written, but merely to increase the present wholesome discontent and pave the way for better things by making it clear to all what those better things are, and indicating ways of thwarting the unscrupulous adulterators and dealers. There is need of a good deal of hard fighting, for there are in many towns health officers who thrive on "graft" as well as wealthy manufacturers of undesirable preservatives who prevent the passage or enforcement of pure food laws; yet I believe the time is not very far distant when these two chapters will have little more than a historic interest. Pending that time, caveat emptor—let the buyer beware.

The rest of the book is mainly constructive, and under the head of "Gastronomic America" I have tried to paint a glowing picture not only of present pleasures of the palate but of keener ones to come, thanks to Luther Burbank and other educators of fruits and vegetables. Among these educators are the specialists of the Department of Agriculture. The Government of the United States has done more than that of any other country to give useful advice to the growers of food products—and to cooks, too! Throughout this volume I have missed no chance to call attention to its many helpful publications, besides summing up the matter under the head of "Governmental Gastronomy." It is a topic of tremendous importance to farmers, vegetable gardeners, dairymen, and all who are concerned with the growing or distributing of food stuffs. Farming is defined as "cultivating the ground in order to raise food"; and why farmers, quite as much as epicures, should be interested in the best foods, I have explained in the section headed "Commercial Value of Flavor," with illustrations showing how a tiller of the soil can double or quintuple his income or even make a big fortune by taking the demand for appetizing flavor as a guide.

Knowing that they do many of these things much better in Europe, I made a special gastronomic trip in 1912 to gather first hand information in the market places, gardens and restaurants of France, Italy, Germany and England. I have dwelt on the good things raised and prepared in those countries, such as the salads, the poultry, the bread, the butter, the cheeses, the wonderful cuisine of France; the olive oil, the economical substitutes for meat, and the macaroni (the real staff of life) of Italy; the diverse delicatessen of Germany (including live fish brought to the kitchen and genuinely smoked meats and fish); the Wiltshire bacon, the Southdown mutton, the cakes and marmalades of Great Britain. Information on many things like those, concerning which there is a widespread curiosity, has not before been brought conveniently between two covers, and I am sure I need not apologize for having followed the example of the gossiping Brillat-Savarin, in presenting this information largely in the form of a narrative of personal experiences, and with pertinent anecdotes.

To the chapters on the "Science of Savory Cooking" and "A Noble Art" I wish to call special attention because in them lies, I am convinced, the ultimate solution of the urgent problem of domestic help, as well as the problem of improving the average American cuisine, which is a still larger one, because in eleven out of every twelve families the women have to do their own cooking. Too many women, not to speak of men, do not know that cooking really is a science, (which electricity will soon make an exact science), and the practice of it a fine art, experts in which may well look down proudly on the mere factory and shop girls who foolishly think they are above them. Schools, women's societies, and society women have taken up the matter in England as well as in America, and great changes are impending—changes which, it is hoped, this volume, coming at the "psychological moment," will help to accelerate.

FOOD AND FLAVOR

[I]
UNGASTRONOMIC AMERICA

MARK TWAIN'S PATRIOTIC PALATE

MARK TWAIN swore by American food as he did by the American flag. When he got as far as Italy, on the trip which resulted in "A Tramp Abroad," he became discouraged, wrote a homesick panegyric on the good things he could not get in Europe, and made a list of viands to be ordered by the steamer preceding his, to await him on his return. Among these dishes were fried chicken Southern style, Saratoga potatoes, baked apples and cream, hot biscuits, buckwheat cakes with maple syrup, toast, oysters in various styles, softshell crabs, terrapin soup, wild turkey, cranberry sauce, canvasback duck, prairie hens, bacon and greens, catsup, green corn, hot corn-pone, stewed tomatoes and pumpkin pie. As he lived for years thereafter, it is not likely that he carried out his program.

These gastronomic specialties certainly are not to be sneered at; European epicures envy us most of them. It must be admitted, also, that American cookery has made considerable progress in the last decades, and that there has been an improvement in eating habits since Dickens, in "Martin Chuzzlewit" (1843), described the "violent bell ringing"; the "mad rush for the dining-room"; the "great heaps of indigestible matter" which "melted away as ice before the sun"; the "dyspeptic individuals" who "bolted their food in wedges, feeding not themselves, but broods of nightmares."

Such scenes still occur, but they are no longer typical. Nor, perhaps, would Emily Faithful have occasion to-day, as she had in 1884, to comment on the "joyless American face," due to chronic dyspepsia. We are still made unhappy, however, by the "indigestible hot bread" and "tough beefsteaks hardly warmed through" to which she referred, and by other gastronomic atrocities.

We must not overlook the fine cooking done in many American private families, hotels, clubs, and restaurants, and we have some good old Maryland, Virginia, New England, and San Franciscan traditions to boast of. Moreover, there are not a few who have reason to think that the culinary low-water mark is to be found on English steamships and in English inns. On the whole, however, what Pierre Blot wrote forty years ago is still true: "American cookery is worse than that of any other civilized nation." Our great national food expert and reformer, Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, put the matter in a nutshell when he said in a lecture before the General Federation of Women's Clubs, that "there is no country in the world where food is so plentiful, and no country in the world where it is so badly cooked, as right here in the United States."

FOOD MISSIONARIES IN THE FAR WEST.

One need not go to France or Austria for a humiliating contrast. In one of his books of travel Charles Dudley Warner declared that after leaving Philadelphia the tourist "will not find one good meal decently served" until he reaches Mexico. In a southwestern railway restaurant a miner once said to me he had not eaten such an abominable meal in all the years he had spent in the wilderness. To tell the unvarnished truth, he used a stronger word than abominable. One of the details I remember was that the tough steak had apparently been fried in the drippings from a tallow candle.

In the same part of the country a great change has been brought about by the culinary and executive genius of one man—Fred Harvey. He came to this country from England—score one for England!—when he was a boy of fourteen, with two pounds in his pocket. He got a job on a railway. There were no dining cars in those days and although in England he had not lived the life of a gourmet he was amazed by the wretchedness of the eating houses with their canned meats and vegetables, rancid bacon, oilclothed tables without napkins and incompetent service. Convinced that good eating-houses would advertise the railway and attract travel, he ventured to say so to the manager of the Santa Fé Railway, who, fortunately, not only approved the suggestion but gave him the opportunity to show what he could do. One historian relates that the manager "threw his arms around the youthful promoter and wept with joy." He had just dined at a railway station!

It was in the year 1876 that Harvey opened his first eating-house in Topeka. It made a sensation. Others soon were built along the line of the road from the Middle West to the Pacific Coast until, in 1912, there were a dozen large hotels, sixty-five railway restaurants and sixty dining-cars under the same management.

FRED HARVEY

That Harvey was a born epicure is evident from the fact that when he opened the Montezuma Hotel in 1882, he would not allow, as the Kansas City "Star" tells us, any canned goods to go on the table. He sent a man to Guaymas and Hermosillo in Old Mexico to get fruit, green vegetables, shell fish and other kinds of food. A contract was made with the chief of a tribe of Yaqui Indians to supply the hostelry with green turtles and sea celery. These turtles, which were secured for $1.50 each, weighed two hundred pounds and were full of eggs. Mr. Harvey selected a little pool near the hotel where he fattened the turtles. A feature of the bill of fare every day was genuine green turtle soup and turtle steak. The sea celery used is a spicy weed which makes a fine salad.

Naturally, such delicacies could not be served at the ordinary railway restaurants; yet these, too, had their pleasant surprises, and were unspeakably superior to what the travelers had been obliged to put up with in pre-Harvey days. On ordering tea, for example, you would get a separate little Japanese pot with the steaming infusion freshly made for you. This was as far as Harvey could go in these places in carrying out the perfect host's maxim that every diner should feel as if the meal he eats had been specially prepared for him. But there were other details that betrayed special intelligence and thought. Thus, in stopping one day for supper in one of the Harvey restaurants in the sizzling Arizona desert, I was delighted to find the table loaded down with the sour things that one craves on hot days—diverse vegetable and meat salads.

One of the amusing details in connection with the Harvey organization was that it became known as a marriage agency, because the neat and well-trained waitresses got married one after another, some of them to wealthy ranchmen.

Of greater importance was the fact that the Harvey eating-houses served as schools to all the Southwest, bringing about a general reform. The rival railway systems, naturally, could not persevere in their barbarian ways.

Fred Harvey is no more, but his influence survives and his name is one to conjure with throughout the Pacific slope.

In the East, also, one comes across a good meal now and then in a dining-car or a railroad station. There is one, says Edward Hungerford, up in the northern part of New York State that has never yielded its supremacy to any circuit-riding café on wheels. When a certain high officer of the busy road that spreads itself apart at that junction goes up there, he orders the cook of his private car to shut up the kitchen. "Do you suppose that I would pass by that town," he says, "and the best square meal in the whole State?"

Those things, alas, are exceptional. Taken the country through, railway restaurants and diners are to this day even worse than the average hotels and boarding houses. Flavorless, unappetizing meats, insipid vegetables, doughy pies and soggy cakes are the rule at our eating places everywhere.

The most astonishing thing about this is that the average American enjoys a good meal, if he can get it, not a bit less than the average European, as I have observed hundreds of times in our own best eating houses and in foreign hotels and restaurants during ten trips to Europe. And that the capacity to enjoy a civilized meal is inherent not only in those who can cross the ocean and pay for Parisian dainties, but in the humblest tiller of the soil or railway employee, was amusingly made manifest to me many years ago in the wild and woolly West. I was brought up in the village of Aurora, Oregon, which was inhabited chiefly by members of a German colony, who differed in no-wise from millions of poor but honest men and women in the Fatherland. One of the most precious things they had brought from the old country was the skill to cook a savory meal—a meal that one could enjoy to the full without feeling the pangs of dyspeptic remorse for hours afterwards.

The Aurora hotel soon became far-famed; and when the first railway was built from San Francisco to Portland, the astute makers of the time-table somehow managed it so that most of the trains stopped at Aurora, though it is but twenty-eight miles from the terminal, Portland.

Nor was that all. The popularity of the Aurora cookery suggested the idea that it might be profitable to erect a restaurant tent in Salem during the annual State Fair. The result was astonishing. All the other eating-places were soon completely deserted; the Aurora tent had to be enlarged, and there was such a mad rush for seats at the tables that in a few days nearly every man and woman and boy and girl in the village had been drafted to serve as cooks or waiters.

It was plain German bourgeois cooking; but the sausages were made of honest pork and the hams had the appetizing flavor which the old-fashioned smokehouse gives them; the bread was soft yet baked thoroughly, the butter was fresh and fragrant and the pancakes melted in the mouth. As for the supreme effort of Aurora cookery—noodle soup made with the boiled chicken (not cold-storage chicken) served in the plate—the mere memory of it makes my mouth water, four decades after eating it.

In justice to Portland, which in those days was in a benighted condition fully warranting the action of the railway men in making Aurora their culinary terminus, let me hasten to add that at present, with its Chinook salmon and Columbia River smelt, its hard-shell crabs and razor clams, its delicious Willamette crawfish—rivaling the best French écrevisses—its fragrant mammoth strawberries, its juicy cherries, and its world-famed Hood River apples, it is hardly second to San Francisco as a gastronomic center. In Oregon, as in Washington and California, the epicure fares particularly well because the luxuries of life are as cheap as the staples and quite as abundant, if not more so.

ARE WOMEN TO BLAME?

Inasmuch as an American is quite as capable of enjoying a good meal as any one else, why is it that we are so conspicuously ungastronomic as a nation?

It is obvious that the cooks are largely to blame. It is so difficult to procure a good cook that most of us give up the search in despair and resignedly eat what is placed before us.

In Europe it is still comparatively easy to find a young woman or a man who, by domestic training, has learned to prepare a savory meal and is willing to take the trouble necessary to get satisfactory results. In the United States few of the helpers available have any domestic traditions to fall back on. As a rule, they frankly admit, on applying for a place, that they know only "plain cooking." As a matter of fact, few of them can even boil an egg or a potato without spoiling it. They are not interested in their work, as they would be if they were experts, and their main object is to get as much money as they can for as little work as possible. To be sure, a cook's hours are long, but many of them are spent in dawdling.

It is unfortunate that most of our hired cooks are Irish. There are and have been excellent cooks of this nation, but as a rule the Irish are not so interested in this art as the French, Germans, Italians and Swedes, and the results are deplorable, especially when, as is usually the case, the mistress is herself so ignorant that she cannot tell the cook why the food is wrong and how it could be improved.

The worst of it is that if the mistress of the house does know enough herself to teach the new cook some tricks, the latter is likely to leave because, on account of this newly acquired knowledge, she can get higher wages elsewhere! Which reminds me of what happened to my wife's grandmother. She once had a cook who was absolutely green, but who wanted the highest wages. When asked how she could demand so much when she admitted her ignorance, she retorted:

"Ah, Mrs. Black, the larnin' is the sevarest part of it."

It will not do, however, to put all the blame on the domestic helpers. Only one family in twelve, even in our wealthy country, can afford to hire a cook. In the other eleven families the women of the house are personally responsible for the meals. Why are these generally so unsatisfactory?

Visitors from abroad who have asked themselves this question, usually answer it by saying that Americans have idolized and spoiled their women and are now paying the penalty.

"The European," says one of them, "takes it as a matter of course that the woman he marries will be his home-maker and housekeeper, able and willing, if necessary, to do the careful cooking on which his health and his enjoyment of life depend so largely. In America the main object of the women seems to be to throw off all the responsibilities of housekeeping so that they may either gad about socially or engage in outside employment. The necessary meals are hastily cooked, marketing is done by telephone, the grocer and butcher are foolishly trusted as to the quality of the raw material, and the results are such as we see—monotonous, unwholesome, insipid meals, followed by indigestion."

There is no doubt some truth in this foreigner's observations, though he takes no account of the many thousands of American wives who work as hard to make their homes abodes of comfort, health and happiness as their husbands do to supply the necessary cash.

On the American men falls a large share of the blame for existing conditions. Completely absorbed in their private and particular business they labored too long under the delusion that their whole duty consisted in supplying the cash needed for housekeeping. Their indifference to the sources and the quality of the raw material of the food they ate, brought into existence a horde of adulterators and poisoners on a scale never before witnessed anywhere—and that is another important reason why we are not a gastronomic nation. With such sophisticated material the best cooks in the world could not prepare appetizing, wholesome meals; and when meals are not appetizing, men lose interest in them, bolting their food, and passing on to things that seem more important and agreeable.

Adulterators and spoilers of food have existed since the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans and probably they flourished long before them; but never before had the far-famed "Yankee ingenuity" been brought to bear on the ignoble task of deceiving people as to what they were eating and drinking.

Of this ingenuity a striking illustration was given at Washington when the pure food agitators, headed by Dr. Wiley of the Department of Agriculture, gave an exhibit before Congress. On a table had been placed—along with other similarly fraudulent articles—a bottle of "honey." On the surface of it floated a bee. Now, the man who put that bee in the bottle had said to himself: "Nine persons out of ten will, on seeing it, conclude instantly that it got in accidentally and that it proves the honey to be genuine." But that bottle never contained any honey; it was filled with a sticky, sweet substance resembling honey in appearance, but instead of being made up of the products of the bee's beneficent floral industry, it contained ingredients some of which were injurious to health.

THE DANGER IN OUR FOOD.

That bottle was a sample of thousands of adulterated or entirely spurious "foods" for which American men and women had been for a long time spending good money in the belief that they were getting what they paid for.

A quarter of a century ago the food poisoners and adulterators spread a net of fraud across the United States, the like of which the world had never seen; and for a long time the American public, with the meekness (up to a certain point!) for which it has become notorious, submitted to this abuse, eating the drugged food and suffering the daily pangs of indigestion, wondering vaguely what was the matter—why Europeans found us a nation of dyspeptics—and paying fortunes to doctors, and to vendors of patent medicines, without being able to avert the final general breakdown.

Then something occurred which made the worm turn on its tormentors—the "embalmed beef" incident.

Major-General Miles, backed up by other officers, declared positively that most of the canned beef supplied to our soldiers during the war with Spain was unfit for human food, and that he was convinced that the refrigerated beef supplied was highly deleterious because of the introduction of chemicals for preservative purposes. The court which investigated these charges, while admitting some of the alleged evils, indulged, many people thought, in whitewashing; so the public at last made up its mind that "something was rotten in the state of Denmark."

Particularly was it impressed by the statement that the food supplied to the army was "not different from that generally sold to the public." That admission made people ask themselves: "What, then, are we eating?"

The result was a general awakening and investigation, a countrywide search which revealed the shocking fact that the community was harboring thousands of seemingly respectable citizens who were piling up fortunes by plying the deadly trade of modern Borgias, slaughtering infants and invalids and making even the robust feel uncomfortable most of the time.

The chemicals used were formalin, boric and salicylic acid, fluo-sylicate of ammonium, aniline dyes, and a number of secret compounds that were sold to packers and dealers, enabling them to doctor spoiled meats and other foods in such a way as to deceive the purchaser and consumer into thinking them fresh and wholesome.

To realize the full extent of this nefarious traffic one has to go back to the newspaper reports of the investigations and food tests, especially in the year 1899, after the "embalmed beef" inquiry. I have before me clippings that would fill fifty pages with gruesome details; but a mere peep into this culinary chamber of horrors must suffice.

"The use of antiseptics as preservatives is becoming alarmingly great," declared Prof. A. S. Mitchell, analytical chemist of the Wisconsin Dairy and Food Commission, before the Senatorial Committee on Pure Food Investigation. Among the preservatives he named was a liquid called "freezene," which he said, was almost pure formic-aldehyde, the substance that several chemists at the military inquiry had claimed to have found in the beef furnished the army. It acts disastrously upon the tissues of the stomach, but was often put into the milk and butter supplied to families. Butchers employed freely, especially in "Hamburger steaks," sulphite of soda, which not merely arrests digestion, but is, as another Government expert remarked, practically the same he had used as a medical student to preserve corpses, and later to disinfect houses where smallpox patients had lived.

The New York "Herald" of June 4, 1899, contained a page and a half of exposures, with these headlines:

POISON AND ADULTERATION FOUND IN ALL FOOD PURCHASED BY THE "HERALD." FORTY SAMPLES ANALYZED AND NOT ONE OF THEM WHAT IT PURPORTED TO BE. TEA THAT CONTAINED ALMOST EVERYTHING BUT TEA LEAVES. SOME FACTS THAT EVERY HOUSE-KEEPER SHOULD KNOW. THE CITY AUTHORITIES DO LITTLE.

One of the samples of what was sold as "tea" was "composed of refuse of many kinds—hair, mouldy leaves from everything that grows but the tea plant." Another sample contained "dust, seed-pods, foreign woody stems, and unidentified refuse."

To cite one more of the two-score analyses made by the "Herald's" expert (James C. Duff, consulting chemist to the New York Produce Exchange): "The sample of American macaroni contains artificial yellow coloring matter, egg-yolk color, composed of flour and the coloring matter. This coloring matter has as its base chrome colors—substances very poisonous. The genuine Italian macaroni contains nothing injurious to health."

"Reports from analysts in other cities show that 92 per cent. of the allspice examined is adulterated, 50 per cent. of cinnamon, 60 per cent. of ginger, 100 per cent. of mustard, and 70 per cent. of pepper.... It is a matter of record that the demand for the materials for adulteration has called into existence a branch of manufacturing industry having for its sole object the production of articles known as 'spice mixtures' or 'pepper dust.' They are sold by the barrel as 'P. D. ginger,' 'P. D. pepper,' or 'P. D. cloves.' These manufacturers openly advertise themselves as 'assorters and renovators of merchandise....'"

The New York "Tribune" printed a report of an address made by a representative of the Benchmen's Association of Retail Butchers who said, regarding the upper West Side: "Decayed meats are chemically treated to counteract odor and outer discoloration and are hawked on the street corners on Saturday nights. The shoppers of that locality are after something cheap, and here they get it. Resulting illness is ascribed to a mysterious Providence or anything rather than the 'nice tender broilers, two for a quarter,' that they had for Sunday's dinner. The police say the matter is one for the Health Department, and the Health Department refers your complaints to its inspectors. These are paid from $1,200 to $1,400 a year, and to my positive knowledge not one of them has entered our shops for the last seven years. For all the Health Department knows, we might have been selling spoiled meat all that time."

A Philadelphian investigator of adulterated food, H. Wharton Amberling, wrote: "There has been adulteration for ages. It is born of the same parentage as robbery, perjury, arson and murder. It has grown in enormity because the law has not dealt with it as it has with other crimes. The rapid progress of chemistry has attained most grateful accomplishments, but the leprous hand of adulteration is using it to fill our blood with the poison of disease and death."

"It is estimated," said the New York "Evening Post," "that the people of the United States spend no less than five billion dollars a year for food and that nine-tenths of this money is paid for articles of food which are more or less adulterated. All food adulterations are not injurious, though a great majority of them, probably nine-tenths, are so, in greater or less degree.... The art of adulterating food has been carried to a very fine point by American ingenuity and has proved immensely profitable to those who practise it, while it has undoubtedly worked great damage to the general health.... It is a wise man who knows what he is eating nowadays."

A matter for the Health Department

A report of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station called attention to the fact that eighty-nine samples of tea were all found pure as a result of the federal law of 1897, which established a board of seven experts to enforce the statute and forbade importation of the adulterated article.

The American products were on the other hand in a woeful condition. Sixty-three samples of fruit jelly examined showed adulteration in two-thirds of the cases by starch, glucose, aniline dyes, and salicylic acid. Pure jellies cost 25 cents a pound while these artificial jellies cost but five cents. Out of 40 samples of marmalades and jams only three were pure. Examination of nineteen samples of sausages and oysters showed "embalming" by boric acid.

WHY THE CANDY WAS NOT EATEN.

Miss Alice Lakey, chairman of the food investigating committee of the Food Consumers' League, made a collection, as the New York "Sun" reported, of squares of flannel, a dozen of them, in brilliant hues of green, red, pink, and other colors—all colored with the coal tar dyes that came out of eatables and drinkables, she explained, adding: "It's a wonder that our insides are not dyed all the colors of the rainbow.

"One of the meanest forms of adulteration I know," she further remarked, "is the blackberry brandy, because that is bought for invalids, aged and delicate persons, who hope to get a little strength and appetite from it. Out of 600 samples examined, 460 contained no trace of blackberries. They were made of crude spirits colored with coal tar dyes.

"Did you ever hear the story," she continued, "of the kind-hearted New York woman who invited a company of Italian girls who worked in a candy factory to a Christmas party? She had an entertainment and Christmas tree for them, and among other things was a box of fine chocolate creams for each one. When they went away every child left her box of candy on the chair behind her.

"'Why, aren't you going to take your chocolates?' said the surprised hostess.

"'Oh, no,' they said in chorus; 'we make those!'"

That tells the whole story. The slaughter of the innocents and the ruining of health of children by means of adulterated and poisoned candies was for decades a national crime that would have justified thousands of lynchings, if anything ever does justify such summary meting out of punishment.

Dr. Shepard, State chemist of South Dakota, framed a series of menus, on the plan of those published by the women's magazines, to assist housewives in catering for families. Here are three, which show how any family in the United States might have reasonably taken forty doses of chemical preservatives and coal tar dyes in one day:

BREAKFAST

Sausages containing coal tar dye and borax

Baker's Bread containing alum

Butter containing coal tar dye

Canned Cherries containing coal tar dye and salicylic acid

Pancakes containing alum

Syrup containing sodium sulphate

DINNER

Tomato Soup with coal tar dye and benzoic acid

Cabbage and Corned Beef with saltpeter

Corn Scallops with sulphurous acid and formaldehyde

Canned Peas with salicylic acid

Catsup with coal tar dye and benzoic acid

Vinegar with coal tar dye

Mince Pie with boracic acid

Pickles with copperas, sodium sulphate and salicylic acid

Lemon Ice Cream with methyl alcohol

SUPPER

Bread and Butter with alum and coal tar dye

Canned Beef with borax

Canned Peaches with sodium sulphite, coal tar dye and salicylic acid

Pickles with copperas, sodium sulphate and formaldehyde

Catsup with coal tar dye and benzoic acid

Lemon Cake with alum

Baked Pork and Beans with formaldehyde

Vinegar, coal tar dye

Currant Jelly, coal tar dye and salicylic acid

Cheese, coal tar dye

Physicians sometimes prescribe such chemicals, when they are indicated, in very small doses. The Food Commissioner of North Dakota, Dr. Ladd, reported in a bulletin that he found from five to fifteen grains of boric acid to every pound of ham, dried beef, etc., examined; while in hamburger steaks, sausages, etc., the amount ranged from twenty to fifty grains a pound. The maximum dose of boric acid prescribed by a physician is said not to exceed ten grains daily.

DR. WILEY'S POISON SQUAD.

Napoleon Bonaparte said that "soldiers march and fight on their stomachs." If our soldiers, fed on "embalmed" beef and other chemically treated food, had had much marching and fighting to do, Spain might have won. As it was, the American soldiers who were killed or invalided during that war, were martyrs to a nobler cause than that of humiliating poor Spain. It was their sufferings that, as already intimated, led to the national revolt against the wholesale poisoners and adulterators for commercial profit.

As a matter of course, the parties accused showed fight. One of the earliest battles was fought over borax, and it was in this battle that Dr. Wiley first came before the general public prominently. During the months from December, 1902, to July 1, 1903, he made a series of experiments on twelve young men in Washington as to the influence on the health of food containing boric acid or borax. Some of the conclusions reached were thus summed up briefly:

When boric acid or its equivalent in borax is taken in food in quantities not exceeding a half gram daily, no immediate effects are observed; after a time there occur occasional loss of appetite, a feeling of fullness in the head, gastric discomfort, and general ill-feeling. Only the more sensitive persons develop symptoms from the amounts named. When the drug is given in larger and increasing doses, these symptoms in accentuated form develop more rapidly; most common is persistent headache with slight clouding of the mental processes. The quantity of boric acid required to produce definite symptoms varies greatly with different individuals. In some, one to two grams daily produce decided distress; in others, three grams cause little if any discomfort. Conclusions regarding the use of less than half a gram daily were not reached, but from the effect of the larger quantities taken for a short time, it is reasonable to infer that smaller doses during an extended period would also prove injurious. The results in general indicate that it is not advisable to use borax in articles of food intended for common and continuous use. When placed in foods used only occasionally and in small amounts, the quantity of the contained preservative should be stated plainly, that the consumer may know what he is eating.

One of the most interesting facts, and one known to few, in connection with these experiments, is that Dr. Wiley actually began them with a bias in favor of borax. He did not believe, he said, that borax was a harmful preservative, but he was going to find out. This statement aroused my suspicion. Knowing how much "graft" and "politics" there are apt to be in such investigations, I made up my mind that Dr. Wiley was a fraud and that he would undoubtedly give a verdict in favor of borax. While in this frame of mind I wrote the following editorial for the New York "Evening Post" (April 8, 1903):

Dr. Wiley, of the Department of Agriculture, seems to require a long time to decide whether his "brigade of poison eaters," as the Washington wits have dubbed his free boarders, are really eating poison or only harmless food preservatives unjustly suspected of being injurious. It needed no elaborate experiments to prove that drugged food may be eaten without serious harm. Many of us are probably eating more or less of drugged food all the time without actually having to be taken to the hospital; but many others do suffer in health, vitality and capacity for work from eating it. In regard to salicylic acid and formaldehyde, Dr. Wiley himself wrote in "Leslie's Weekly" two years ago that there is no doubt of the pernicious influence of these preservatives in some cases. He also said, truly, that "the public supervision should look after the weak and diseased digestive systems rather than the strong and vigorous." Why, nevertheless, he chose to make his Washington experiments on the strongest young men he could find is a mystery he has not explained. In the "Lancet" of Nov. 30, 1901, an account was given of a series of experiments with boric acid made by Dr. Rinehart, in which the symptoms of poisoning disappeared as soon as the use of the drug was given up. Further evidence is furnished in the "Münchener Medicinische Wochenschrift" of Jan. 26. Dr. G. Merkel, of Nuremberg, experimented with boric acid on eleven patients, seven of whom promptly showed disturbance of the gastro-intestinal tract. The inevitable inference from such facts is either that the use of boric acid as a preservative of food should be prohibited by law, or, at least, that the law should require mention of its use on the label of canned goods, and in butter, cream, milk and meat, in order that those whose digestion is not as robust as that of Dr. Wiley's select boarders may take warning.

HARVEY W. WILEY

The fact that these remarks were widely copied showed that many other editors shared my suspicions. Then came Dr. Wiley's verdict, which proclaimed him the honest, bold, incorruptible champion of truth who was soon to become respected, admired, and idolized by the whole American public, with the exception of those who had commercial reasons for disliking him.

Perhaps I may be pardoned for inserting here a reference to an amusing incident that occurred during this controversy. Another article of mine, in which I had spoken disrespectfully of borax, resulted the following day in a visit to the office of the "Evening Post" by a man who wanted to see the "borax editor." He was shown to my room, and promptly proceeded to inform me that I was entirely mistaken in thinking borax harmful. I replied that I considered borax one of the most useful things in the world, the greatest of "dirt-chasers," indispensable on the wash stand and in the wash house; but as for internal use, I had had days of discomfort which made me look on it with feelings of genuine alarm.

"I'll tell you what I'll do!" retorted the man, who represented one of the large borax companies. "I am willing to take a glass of water, put in a tablespoonful of borax and drink it right before you." "That's nothing," I replied; "I wouldn't hesitate to do the same thing. Borax is not a deadly drug like arsenic or strychnine, it is a chemical which, taken into the stomach in small doses day after day, week after week, and month after month, acts as a cumulative poison, gradually weakening even the strongest stomach; and, inasmuch as the stomach is the source of most diseases, thus paving the way for all sorts of troubles."[1]

CONDIMENTS VERSUS CHEMICAL PRESERVATIVES.

Until about three decades ago it was customary the world over to cure meats with condimental substances, particularly salt, vinegar, sugar, and wood smoke. These not only preserved the meats but developed their inherent flavors, while adding others that were equally relished by consumers, thus enabling them to enjoy their meals without disagreeable and depressing after-effects.

The old-fashioned way

All at once, like a devastating avalanche, the wholesale use of non-condimental chemicals tumbled upon the country. Why the avalanche grew so fast may be gathered from a few lines on page 37 of the second edition of Dr. Wiley's admirable book, just referred to in a footnote; lines which deserve to be printed in italics, and which every reader should engrave on his memory:

The chemicals employed are those known as germicides. In the quantities used they neither impart a taste nor odor to a preserved meat, but by their germicidal properties prevent the development of organic ferments and thus make the preservation of meat far more certain and very much less expensive. By the use of some chemicals the salting, sugaring, and smoking of preserved meat may be done with very much less care, in a very much shorter time, and at a very greatly reduced expense. For this reason the practice has gained a great vogue, not as a means of benefiting the consumers, but rather as a means of enriching the packer and dealer. Chemical preservatives are also highly objectionable because they keep meats apparently fresh, while in reality changes of the most dangerous character may be going on. They thus prevent the display of the red light danger signal.

Concerning this last point the London "Lancet" has used another and equally forcible simile:

It is by no means certain that preservatives in small quantities can prevent decomposition. They do stop putrefaction and thus destroy the signs by which decomposition is made evident to the senses. Their effect resembles that of tying down the safety valve of a steam engine. The advocates of food preservatives seem always to ignore, or to be ignorant of, the opportunity afforded and advantage taken of their use for dirty and fraudulent practices.

These remarks are of the utmost importance, for they call attention to the fact that even if the chemical, non-condimental preservatives were not slow poisons, it would be necessary to forbid their use because they enable unscrupulous persons to make foods of the most nauseating substances. Let me quote another expert, who states the case vividly:

Milk, eggs and fish are three foods especially which become extremely dangerous when decomposition sets in. The chemicals placed in them by dealers destroy the offensive taste and odor, thus robbing nature of her means of protecting us from danger. Many little children killed from eating ice cream and bakery products never would have tasted them if the smell and taste of the rotten eggs and putrid milk had not been hidden by the chemicals. The vilest, most malodorous factory refuse may be made pleasant to the sight, taste and smell through the magical effects of benzoate of soda, saccharin and coal tar dye. The coal tar dye gives a clear, translucent appearance to the product; the saccharin sweetens it and benzoate of soda embalms it so it will keep for a decade without spoiling. These disguised putrid foods are additionally dangerous in hot weather.

SCOTCHED, NOT KILLED.

The great outcry raised by all these startling revelations concerning the unscrupulous methods of the food poisoners resulted in the passage, in 1906, of the epoch-making Food and Drugs Act, which gave the United States a most elaborate and minute set of laws for the protection of the public and the punishment of offenders. The result was an immediate and decided improvement in many departments, especially that of canned fruits, concerning which Dr. Wiley wrote in 1911 that "the time is now rapidly approaching when all such goods will be free of any imitation or adulteration, and this will add greatly to their value in the markets of the country."

In many other directions, however, the drugging of foods with slow poisons continued. The snake was only scotched, not killed.

"If you took all the food in New York City to-day and put it in a big tent down in Texas, I would throw away 40 per cent. of it," said Gaston G. Netter of the Geneva White Cross Society (which is the International Pure Food Association), in October, 1911. "The people here in New York City are being hourly poisoned by food labeled as absolutely pure. I buy it and test it every day and I know. I saw some sardines marked 'pure sardines in olive oil.' They were a disintegrated mass of decayed, poisonous fish, and the oil had never known an olive. A large percentage of the vinegar used for preserving such things as prunes is an acidulated preparation fatal to the lining of the stomach."

The vinegar sold by many grocers in defiance of the law is made with acetic acid, which is prepared by the destructive distillation of wood. So little of this is needed that the adulterator can make a gallon of "vinegar" at a cost of two cents, or a barrel for a dollar. This, sold in bottles, yields a profit of over $20 a barrel. Sometimes a trace of malic acid or concentrated apple juice is added to give a reaction which may fool the analyst. It is this poisonous stuff that is used in American homes to dress salads and is put into bottles of chow chow, chili sauce, and the pickles so dear to school children.

Concerning the cheap candies that are still dearer to the children, Harry P. Cassidy in an address before the wholesale candy dealers (reported in the New York "Sun" of March 10, 1912), said:

"We have found burnt umber in candy which is sold and guaranteed as pure to the small shopkeepers. We have found stearin in it which melts only at a temperature of 135 degrees Fahrenheit, whereas the temperature of the human body is only 98.6 degrees. We have found furniture glue and dangerous ether flavoring matter and paraffin and shellac and many other injurious substances which the members of this association handle."

Another speaker at this meeting, Prof. Charles La Wall, spoke of lampblack as being used to color so-called licorice and of marshmallows that had been blued with ultramarine, just as bluing is used in washing clothes. Poisonous sulphuric acid may be contained in molasses, glucose, shredded cocoanut and many other things. "As candies are often composed chiefly of these four products, a child in buying a penny's worth of candy may get four doses in one of the deadly sulphites such as the cleaner uses in whitening our straw hats."

America is specially noted, as Rutledge Rutherford remarks in the "National Food Magazine" (1912), for two things—its chemicalized food and its infantile mortality. According to the estimate of the New York food expert, Alfred W. McCann, three million persons in the United States were made ill by adulterated foods in 1911.

That was five years after the passing of the Pure Food Law. The trouble with that law is that it is not interstate. A dishonest man in one State can do all the food "doping" he pleases as long as he does not sell any of it in another State. Most of the States now have laws of their own on this matter, but often they leave much to be desired.

What is worse, these laws are not enforced; or, if the criminals are brought to bay, the punishment is so mild that it does not prevent a repetition of the offense. "If a grocer knew that a can of tomatoes or a can of sardines sold by him could be taken to the corner and analyzed and if found bad that he would be prosecuted, the pure food law would be a real thing," says Gaston G. Netter, who asserts that if New York City would bring about such a reform—at a cost of perhaps $150,000 a year—it would "do away with half the medical clinics."

Fines alone will not suffice to bring about a reform. We can hardly follow the example of the Turks who, if a baker gives false weight or adulterates his bread, cut off one of his ears and nail it to the door post. But we could follow the example of the wise municipal officials who compelled the Munich brewers to make honest beer, out of malt and hops alone. At first, fines were imposed for using other materials, and these fines were made larger and larger; but the brewers found they could pay the highest fines and still save money by using chemicals. Then the lawmakers changed their tactics; the "man highest up" was threatened with imprisonment. The millionaire brewers had a pardonable aversion to jail—and from that time on Munich beer became the best in the world. Ere long, whole trainloads of it began to be sent daily in all directions—to North Germany and Russia, to Paris and London, to Vienna, and to the cities of Italy. The brewers had been compelled, at pistol's point, to acknowledge the truth that, after all, in the long run, honesty is the best policy.

Some of the largest American manufacturing firms have followed this policy voluntarily, though the prices they have to pay for good fresh material places them at a great disadvantage to the adulterators who buy any rotten old thing and "renovate" it, or else make the article entirely of chemicals.

"In four years," said Alfred W. McCann (in March, 1912), "the Government has caught nearly fifty wholesale adulterators in the act of shipping bogus vinegar from one State into another. In every instance the Government won its case, but in every instance petty fines were inflicted by the courts and the same offenders were caught again and again.... Small fines have no deterrent effect on food frauds. The game is too profitable to suffer extinction under any other influence than jail sentences, and jail sentences have not been imposed in a single case brought by the Government against food or drug adulterators."

Food and drug adulterators are wealthy men, but they are not stingy. They gladly share their sordid earnings with the politicians who protect them. "Why do the States delay in enacting uniform laws patterned after the excellent national laws?" asks Mr. McCann; and his answer tells the plain truth: "Each State has some powerful pet food industry to protect and some weak legislators willing to do the bidding of the fakers."

Every reader of this book perused in the newspapers the story of the disgraceful conspiracy in Washington against Dr. Wiley, and remembers vividly the nationwide outburst of indignation which came to the rescue of the courageous chemist and made him a national hero. He remained for the time being, but his enemies were not punished, although the President promised to reform the Department of Agriculture. His failure to do so is one of the principal reasons why he was not re-elected. Dr. Wiley, seeing that his efforts to secure the enforcement of the Pure Food Laws were useless, at last resigned, and in "Good Housekeeping" for October, 1912, he gave some of the reasons for this step.

The Remsen Board was created for the express purpose of reviewing his decisions against food manipulators. It never missed a chance to reverse them, to the huge delight of certain manufacturers and dealers. Although the Moss investigating committee unanimously pronounced the Remsen Board as wholly without authority, its decisions were followed by officials of the Government; important matters referred to it were held in abeyance. For instance, an exhaustive report of the experiments made in the Bureau of Chemistry, which showed, in Dr. Wiley's opinion, "the injuriousness of copper sulphate when added to foods, has been hibernating in the Department of Archives for the past four years and its use permitted in the interim."

The opposition to Dr. Wiley's decisions brought about "practical paralysis in all matters pertaining to the addition of benzoic acid, sulphurous acid, saccharine, sulphate of copper, and alum to food products. As it was the addition of these bodies which constituted 95 per cent. of the total adulteration practised, it is easy to see that, so far as adulteration was concerned, the food law became practically a dead letter."

The physicians of the country, who, better than others, know the danger of using drugs indiscriminately, sided with Dr. Wiley. At a meeting in Pittsburg of the American Medical Association, representing 25,000 physicians and surgeons, that body "in spite of the decision of the referee board, pledged itself uncompromisingly against benzoate of soda and all other chemical forms of food preservatives."

How bitterly the war against Dr. Wiley and pure-food legislation was carried on, not only at Washington but in various States with aid from Washington, is illustrated by the following extract from a letter written to Dr. Wiley by the Health Commissioner of Indiana:

It is not necessary to recall to you the tremendous difficulties under which the State labored when it endeavored to prevent the overthrow of its pure food law because of the activities of the Department of Agriculture in behalf of the firms who were seeking that end; how we were refused the assistance of yourself and your chemists; how we had to compel the getting of testimony by an order of the court of the District of Columbia, and how, on the other hand, employees of the Government known to be in sympathy with the firms bringing suit against us were sent to Indianapolis to testify against the State at the expense of the Department of Agriculture.

Another illustration of the war on the Pure Food Laws was given in the New York "Globe" of Oct. 24, 1912, by Alfred W. McCann. After pointing out that "there has been no let-up in attempts to deceive," and that "food ideals depend absolutely on the integrity and zeal of a few so-called fanatics like Dr. Wiley, who are thus far responsible for all the advance we have made," he goes on to say:

In the State of Pennsylvania one of the most active pure food workers, who has contributed energy and zeal to the cause of the people, H. P. Cassidy, special agent of the Pennsylvania Dairy and Food Department, after ten years of remarkable service has been removed from office by the same kind of pressure which finally disposed of Dr. Wiley.

Charges were made a few days ago against Mr. Cassidy, whose activity had resulted in more than 8,000 arrests for food adulterations in the City of Philadelphia alone. He demanded a hearing before the governor. The hearing was granted. The charges fell to pieces and Mr. Cassidy, like Dr. Wiley, was vindicated. Two days later the Pennsylvania authorities notified him that, although he was found guiltless, harmonious relations between him and his chiefs had been strained, and therefore for the good of the service it was decided that he should be dismissed.

If the pure food movement were making the kind of progress which it is thought to be making, such backward steps would not be tolerated by the people, for the dismissal from office of such a man as Cassidy will serve as a warning to other pure food officials not to be too zealous in the discharge of their duties.

The direct result of Cassidy's dismissal will show itself in the State of Pennsylvania by a long line of cowardice in applying the law. I make this prophecy and guarantee its fulfilment.

It is needless to dwell further on these disgraceful efforts to thwart the Pure Food Laws. Dr. Wiley did not exaggerate when in summing up the situation he printed the following, in italics:

No further blot upon the administration of law can, in my opinion, be found in the history of the United States than this effort of the United States Government to paralyze, belittle, and destroy a law passed in the interests of the people of the country.

[II]
VITAL IMPORTANCE OF FLAVOR

STARTLING as are the facts in the foregoing chapter, they do not tell the whole story. We have seen that the non-condimental chemical preservatives used by the food poisoners are highly objectionable on two grounds: (1) because they are usually injurious and often deadly; and (2) because they enable unscrupulous persons to use the filthiest, rottenest material and so doctor it as to deceive the consumer into believing it to be wholesome food, whereas it may, and often does, result in ptomaine poisoning.

But there is a third indictment against the food sophisticators. The chemicals they use, not only make the food they manipulate dangerous to eat, but they also diminish and often completely destroy its Flavor.

This destruction of the food Flavors may seem to those who have given no special attention to this matter a thing to be regretted, indeed, but not an actual crime. That it is a real crime, because it helps to undermine the consumers' health, I shall demonstrate in this chapter. It is necessary to know the facts now to be set forth in order to realize the full significance of the deplorable state of affairs to be revealed in the next chapter, entitled Our Denatured Foods. That chapter will continue the subject of Ungastronomic America, wherefore Chapter II may be regarded as an Intermezzo—but a most important one, for it contains truths that are of vital importance to everybody. Indeed, it is chiefly for the sake of impressing these truths on as many intelligent persons as possible that I am writing this book.

SENSUAL INDULGENCE AS A DUTY.

Too long we have been allowing covetous manufacturers and dealers and incompetent or indolent cooks to spoil our naturally good food. We have done this because we have not as a nation understood that there is nothing in the world on which our health and hourly comfort, our happiness and our capacity for hard work, depend so much as on the Flavor of food—those savory qualities which make it appetizing and enjoyable and therefore digestible and helpful.

It is not too much to say that the most important problem now before the American public is to learn to enjoy the pleasures of the table and to insist on having savory food at every meal.

There was a time when it would have been considered rank heresy to express such an opinion, and even to-day there are millions of honest folk who hold that the enjoyment of a good meal is merely a form of sybaritic indulgence.

When Ruskin wrote his "Modern Painters" he referred to the indulgence of taste as an "ignoble source of pleasure." He lived to realize the foolishness of this sneer; in one of those amusing footnotes which he contributed to the final edition of that great work, and in which he often assails his own former opinions with merciless severity, he denounces the "cruelty and absurdity" of his failing to learn to appreciate the dainties provided by his father. But his earlier opinion reflected the general attitude of the time toward the pleasures of the table.

Fortunately, in our efforts to fight the great American plague—dyspepsia—we are no longer seriously hampered by that Puritan severity which caused the father of Walter Scott, when young Walter one day expressed his enjoyment of the soup, to promptly mix with it a pint of water to take the devil out of it.

America's leading educator, Ex-President Eliot of Harvard, has expressed the more rational view of our time in these words: "Sensuous pleasures, like eating and drinking, are sometimes described as animal, and therefore unworthy, but men are animals and have a right to enjoy without reproach those pleasures of animal existence which maintain health, strength, and life itself."

We may go farther than that, asserting that not only have we a right to enjoy the pleasures of the table, but it is our moral duty to do so. The highest laws of health demand of us that we get as much pleasure out of our meals as possible. To prove this statement is the main object of the present volume, nearly every page of which bears witness to its truth, directly or indirectly.

GLADSTONE AND FLETCHER.

There is an old German proverb to the effect that if food is properly chewed it is half digested: Gut gekaut ist halb verdaut.

This is literally true, but in England and America, although physicians and others have long known it to be so, it was not impressed on the general public's attention until the newspapers began to comment—some seriously, others facetiously—on the statement that Gladstone, in 1848, adopted certain rules for chewing food to which he ever after adhered and to which some observers attributed his remarkable physical vigor. "Previous to that," said the "Pall Mall Gazette," "he had always paid great attention to the requirements of nature, but at that date he laid down as a rule for his children that thirty-two bites should be given to each mouthful of meat and a somewhat lesser number to bread, fish, etc."

Now Gladstone was wrong in suggesting that meat needed more munching than bread. The stomach takes care of meat if it is not swallowed in too large chunks; whereas bread, as well as potatoes, together with oatmeal and other cereals, no matter how soft, should be kept in the mouth some time to enable the saliva to partly digest them and prepare them for the lower viscera.

This error, however, did not detract seriously from the value of Gladstone's directions. The main thing was that his "home rule" called the attention of two nations to the unwisdom of bolting food and the advantage to health resulting from keeping it for some time in the mouth. In its far-reaching effect on millions in two worlds it was perhaps of greater and more lasting value than any of his acts as a statesman.

This assertion gains strength from the fact that it was Gladstone's example that started Horace Fletcher on his road as a reformer of the foolish eating habits of Americans, and others, but Americans in particular.

He has himself related (in the "Ladies' Home Journal" for September, 1909) how it was that his thoughts were first directed into this channel through an epicurean friend who had a snipe estate among the marshlands of Louisiana and a truffle preserve in France, and who faithfully followed Gladstone's rules in regard to the thorough chewing of food. In 1898 Mr. Fletcher began to work out the problem for himself, to the great advantage of his health.

At the age of forty he was an old man, on the way to a rapid decline. His hair was white, he weighed 217 pounds, he was harrowed by indigestion, and had "that tired feeling." At the age of sixty, after eleven years of experiment, he had reduced his weight to 170 pounds, felt strong and well, and had forgotten what it was to have the tired feeling.

His experience thus was similar to that of the Italian nobleman, Luigi Cornaro (1467-1566), who was a dissipated wreck at the age of forty, but who by reforming his way of eating, regained his health and lived to be nearly a hundred. After his eighty-third year he wrote four treatises on diet and longevity; his autobiography has passed through more than forty English editions. His wisdom might be summed up in these words: "As you grow older eat less."

Horace Fletcher is the Cornaro of the nineteenth century. Everybody who ever "knows he has a stomach" should read one or both the books he has written on this subject: "The A B-Z of Our Own Nutrition," and "The New Glutton or Epicure." The first named owes its value largely to the fact that it includes reprints of valuable papers by eminent men of science and physicians, the investigations of most of whom were in part prompted, or inspired, by Mr. Fletcher's writings. The most important of these are Dr. Harvey Campbell's Observations on Mastication, and Prof. Pawlow's articles on Psychic Influence in Digestion.

Most persons labor—or act as if they labored—under the delusion that the mouth was made chiefly for the ingestion of food and that the sole use of saliva is to lubricate it so that it can be easily and quickly swallowed. Mr. Fletcher did not discover the fact that the mouth is also a most important organ of digestion, with the aid of saliva; but he emphasized this important fact in his writings as no other writer had ever done, proclaiming it from the housetops till thousands began to listen and heed and learn and benefit by his preaching; and therein lies the importance of his name in the history of dietetic reform.

The gist of his doctrine may be given in a few words: keep all food (soft as well as hard, liquid as well as solid, moist as well as dry) in the mouth and chew it till it has become thoroughly mingled with the saliva, has lost all its flavor, and is ready to disappear down the throat without an effort at swallowing. Gladstone's directions in regard to thirty-two masticatory movements are all right for some foods, but others require no more than twenty, while for some (onions) seven hundred hardly suffice to remove the odor and make them digestible. Unless the mouth thus does its work, the lower digestive tract has to do it at ten times the expenditure of vital force, and the result is dyspepsia.

HORACE FLETCHER

Never, surely, was preaching more needed than these sermons of Horace Fletcher to the victims of America's national scourge of chronic indigestion.

It cannot be denied that there is a considerable amount of questionable faddism and exaggeration in his doctrines. He, himself, frankly apologizes for such details in them as "may suggest the scrappiness and extravagance of an intemperate screed," on the ground that "so-called screeds sometimes attract attention where sober statement fails to be heard"; which is unfortunately true.

Many of Fletcher's followers accept his exaggerations along with the sound parts of his doctrines. They endorse the statements that he, "in inaugurating the chewing reform has done more to help suffering humanity than any other man of the present generation"; or, as another writer, a physician, put it in a letter to him: "What you have done to unfold physiologic mastication means more for human weal than all the mere medical prescribes have given the world from Adam to the present day."

It cannot be denied that medical and other scientific writers were culpable in not enlightening the public on these important matters, and it serves them right, therefore, if Fletcher has got the credit and the fame for doing this. It is estimated that there are already more than 200,000 "Fletcherites" in the United States. In the hope of increasing their number, in the rational sense of the word, let me dwell on a few of the things in which, in my opinion, Mr. Fletcher is right, and some of those beside which readers of his books will do well to place question marks. In particular, I wish to call further attention to his valuable remarks on the necessity of doing more "mouth work" than most of us do, and on the importance of agreeable Flavor in food as an aid to digestion.

Many thousands of otherwise healthy persons bewail the fact that they have to avoid some of their favorite dishes because they find them indigestible. To these individuals Fletcherism, as endorsed by Dr. Campbell, brings the cheering message that they can eat anything they please provided they give it the proper mouth treatment.

Inasmuch as individuals differ in regard to the supply of saliva, no general rules can be laid down as to how many bites any particular mouthful requires. One person may dispose of a morsel of bread in thirty mastications while another may need fifty before it has disappeared down the throat without an effort at swallowing. Mr. Fletcher once had a tussle with a challot, or young onion, which "required 722 mastications before disappearing through involuntary swallowing." But when it was down it left no odor upon the breath and created no disturbance whatever.

Could anything more triumphantly proclaim the wonders of Fletcherism?

Here is another miracle: "Abundant experiment has been made by those to whom 'Boston brown bread' was formerly little less than a poison, to prove the assertion that, sufficiently mixed with saliva, it is perfectly digestible and that the delicious taste of the bread after forty or fifty bites—about one-half minute—gets sweeter and sweeter, and attains its greatest sweetness and most delicate taste at the very last, when it has dissolved into liquid form and most of it has escaped into the stomach."

THE HARM DONE BY SOFT FOODS.

Dr. Campbell, whose admirable articles on The Importance of Mastication cannot be too urgently brought to the reader's attention,[2] has pointed out a very important reason why at present, more than at any other time in the history of man, there is need of mouth digestion.

The art of cooking has had a beautifying effect on the human face. The jaws and teeth have become smaller because they are no longer called upon to bite off and chew raw, tough, and fibrous foods, as they were in primitive days. One of the results of agricultural progress has been to diminish the fibrous, cellulosic food and make it more easy to masticate. The food of to-day is for the most part soft and pappy, of a kind which does not compel thorough mastication; so much so that Dr. Campbell thinks we may speak of this as "the age of pap."

Beginning with the babes, we pour into their stomachs all kinds of artificial saccharine foods in liquid or semi-liquid form, following this up, later on, with such viands as mashed potatoes and gravy, rusks soaked in milk, milk puddings, bread dipped in bacon fat, pounded mutton, thin bread and butter, and the like. Food of this kind does not invite mastication (nor have mothers been taught to teach their children to keep it in the mouth, the doctor might have added). "Hence the instinct to masticate has little opportunity of exercise and not being properly exercised, tends to die out. Small wonder that the child nourished on such pappy food acquires the habit of bolting it, and learns to reject hard, coarse foods in favor of the softer kinds; everything, nowadays, must be tender, pultaceous, or 'short.'"

The evils resulting from the bolting of this soft food by children and adults alike are of the gravest and most alarming kind. Overeating and habitual indigestion are two of them. Morbid craving for food not needed is another. It is not improbable that the habitual bolting of food, by the prolonged irritation to which it gives rise, may predispose to cancer of the stomach. Napoleon was a notoriously fast eater and it is well known that he died from this disease.

Dr. Campbell also agrees with Sir Frederick Treves that the neglect of the mastication of food is a potent cause of appendicitis. Solid lumps, especially in the case of such articles as pineapple, preserved ginger, nuts, tough meat and lobster, are apt to pass beyond the pylorus and, escaping intestinal digestion, to lodge in the cœcum and precipitate an attack of that dreaded disease, the most common predisposing cause of which is a loaded cœcum, often preceded by constipation.

Summing up his extremely valuable paper on the Evils of Insufficient Mastication, Dr. Campbell comes to the conclusion that "an appalling amount of misery and suffering may be saved by the simple expedient of inculcating the habit of efficient mastication."

It is difficult to teach an old dog new tricks. I have noticed again and again how hard it is to teach adults to "Fletcherize." They begin it, find it irksome at first, and drop it. For thorough reform we must begin with infants; but adults cannot be urged too strongly to persevere till the habit—like that of breathing—becomes automatic. The rewards in increased health and enjoyment of life and work are glorious.

EPICUREAN DELIGHTS FROM PLAIN FOOD.

To return to Fletcher's own contributions to this subject. Next to his dwelling on the importance of "mouth-work" he deserves most praise for his remarks on the epicurean delights resulting from slow and rational eating. Herein again, it must be premised, he was far from being the original discoverer; but he probably did more to call the general public's attention to the matter than any one else had done, thanks largely to his habit of introducing vivid illustrations and details of personal experiences.

"My, but I never realized that potato is so good," exclaimed the young lady; and "Gracious! isn't this corn bully!" echoed the father.

These exclamations express the outcome of one of Mr. Fletcher's experiments in teaching others how to get delicious pleasure from the simplest and commonest foods if munched according to his directions.

If you bolt your food, he says, you get "none of the exquisite taste that Nature's way offers as an allurement for obeying her beneficent demands. The way of Nature is the epicurean way; the other way is nothing but piggish gluttony." It is the way of animals; and Fletcher named his book "The New Glutton or Epicure" to call attention to the two ways of taking food.

"An epicurean cannot be a glutton. There may be gluttons who are less gluttonous than other gluttons, but epicurism is like politeness and cleanliness, and is the certain mark of gentility." A remark worthy of the French epigrammatists!

Thackeray called attention to the exquisite enjoyment an epicure can derive from a slice of buttered brown bread. In the same spirit Fletcher writes: "For illustration, try a ship's biscuit—commonly called hardtack—and keep it in the mouth, tasting it as you would a piece of sugar, till it has disappeared entirely, and note what a treasure of delight there is in it."

Again: "The most nutritious food does not require sauces. It may seem dry and tasteless to the first impression, but, as the juices of the mouth get possession of it, warm it up, solve its life-giving qualities out of it and coax it into usefulness, the delight of a newfound delicacy will greet the discoverer."

HOW FLAVOR HELPS THE STOMACH.

In all cases, be the food simple or the outcome of a French chef's culinary alchemy, it is its Flavor that makes it agreeable and by so doing stimulates the flow of the juices necessary for proper digestion.

In the case of the mouth and its salivary glands this is obvious to all. Everybody knows that the fragrance of good food "makes the mouth water."

In the case of the stomach, the connection is much less obvious. Until a few years ago even the medical men were in the dark on this extremely important aspect of the question, although French and German physiologists had made important discoveries.

A French chef's culinary alchemy

It remained for Professor Pawlow of St. Petersburg to throw the bright light of scientific experiment on this subject.

He demonstrated in his St. Petersburg laboratory that the mere presence of food in a dog's stomach—which is like a man's in that respect—does not suffice to cause a flow of gastric juice, but that the psychic factor we call appetite—a keen desire for food—causes an abundant flow of that fluid, without which the digestion cannot proceed.

Now it might be said that there was really no need of laboratory experiments to tell us that food eaten without enjoyment lies like lead in the stomach and does more harm than good.

It is nevertheless a great advantage to have a scientific demonstration of the fact and an explanation of it, because it encourages us in the right way of eating.

Instinct showed that way long ago; it did its best to intimate that food should be eaten with interest and enjoyment.

Too often, unfortunately, no attention has been paid to this instinct. Among the Russians (who do not, in this respect, differ from other peoples) "an absolutely unphysiological indifference towards eating often exists," Professor Pawlow says. "In wider circles of the community a due conception of the importance of eating should be disseminated. How often do the people who have charge of the commissariat pay attention solely to the nutritive value of the food, or place a higher value on everything else than taste!"

Yet it is the "taste" (Flavor) of food that arouses the appetite. As the French say, "the appetite comes while we are eating." Medical men of various countries in former times paid special attention to the restoration of a patient's appetite. In more recent text books less attention is paid to appetite as a symptom; but Prof. Pawlow's experiments have again, and for all time, demonstrated its importance.

Those young ladies who think it is "nice" and "feminine" to pretend to have no appetite should read the Pawlow papers, and have all that nonsense knocked out of their heads. A poor appetite is a danger signal—a thing to arouse pity and to be cured, just like a headache or a fever.

"Appetite juice" is one of the suggestive names Professor Pawlow gives to the fluid which digests food in the stomach. There is little or none of it for the man who eats without noticing his food, unable to distract his thoughts from his work, as so often happens to those who live in the midst of the incessant turmoil of large cities. This inattention to the act of eating (to the Flavor of the food) prepares the way for digestive disturbances with all the various diseases following them. No medical treatment can help such a patient—unless he reforms and eats rationally.

Thus, the studies of Dr. Pawlow fully bear out my contention as to the Vital Importance of Flavor in Food.

An American quick-lunch

There is one more of his observations to which superlative importance attaches. One of his experiments on dogs showed that if food was given gradually in small quantities, it led to the secretion of much stronger gastric juice than when the animal was allowed to eat the whole ration at once.

This was a laboratory demonstration of the wisdom of the best medical treatment of a weak stomach; "and such a regulation of diet," continues the professor, "is all the more necessary, since, in the commonest disorders of the stomach, only the surface layers of the mucous membrane are affected. It may, consequently, happen that the sensory surface of the stomach, which should take up the stimulus of the chemical excitant, is not able to fulfil its duty, and the period of chemical secretion, which ordinarily lasts for a long time, is for the most part disturbed, or even wholly absent. A strong psychic excitation, a keen feeling of appetite, may evoke the secretory impulse in the central nervous system and send it unhindered to the glands which lie in the deeper as yet unaffected layers of mucous membrane."

Doubtless the very interesting physiological detail here pointed out by the eminent Russian professor, explains the dietetic as well as gastronomic wisdom of the old fashioned table d'hôte of the European hotels. Half a dozen or more courses follow one another leisurely in course of an hour or more during which the pleasant Flavor of one dish after another keeps the appetite on edge and gives plenty of time for the deeper as well as the surface layers of the glands to secrete their beneficent and comforting digestive juices.

From such a leisurely dinner, with courses skilfully made up of contrasting flavors to prevent the appetite from flagging, we rise cheerful and at peace with all the world, whereas an American quick-lunch, or a railroad dinner gulped down in ten minutes makes us feel like swearing off eating for all time.

AN AMAZING BLUNDER.

How far we have traveled away from that foolish, nay, criminal Puritan notion that enjoyment of the pleasures of the table is a reprehensible form of sensual indulgence—the notion which made Walter Scott's father pour hot water into the soup because the boy liked it!

That attitude was a blunder, a huge blunder, as the preceding pages prove.

A still bigger blunder, and one equally deplorable and mischievous, now claims our attention—a blunder so amazing, so incomprehensible that it seems almost incredible: the universal belief, among men of science as well as the laity, that the pleasures of the table come to us through the sense of taste.

How I happened to discover that this notion is a blunder, I now beg the reader's permission to relate briefly.

In 1878 Harvard University rewarded me for my hard work in the philosophical department (under Professors Bowen and Palmer) by giving me the Harris Fellowship, which enabled me to continue my study of physiological and comparative psychology for three years at the universities of Germany.

I recall vividly my boyish delight in the pleasures of the senses of sight, hearing, and smell. During my college course and afterwards I diligently studied the phenomena of these senses in man and animals in all the books and scientific papers I could find; and thus it came about that my first magazine articles were on the Æsthetic Value of Odors, and The Development of the Color Sense. The first of these was accepted by W. D. Howells, for the "Atlantic Monthly" (December, 1880); the second, by Alfred Russell Wallace, for "Macmillan's Magazine" (London, December, 1879). I mention these things to show that the senses of man and animals have been a subject of special interest with me for more than four decades, and that when I went to Germany, I took up the study of them not as an amateur but as one prepared (as well as eager) to make original researches.

My most ardent desire was to work in the laboratories of the University of Berlin under Professor Helmholtz, whose monumental books on the sensations of tone and on the phenomena of sight had revealed so many secrets to the world of science. Unfortunately he was not lecturing on those subjects at that time. Moreover, reperusal of his books made me feel as if he had covered all the most interesting ground. I therefore looked about for a region in which I could do some exploring on my own account, and soon found it in the functions of the senses of smell and taste.

Concerning these two senses, the most absurdly incorrect notions were current at that time even among leaders in science. Grant Allen, known as "the St. Paul of Darwinism," voiced the current biological opinion when he wrote that with man "smell survives with difficulty as an almost functionless relic"; and Darwin himself wrote that this sense is "of extremely slight service" to man.

The king of German philosophers, Kant, who was an epicure, maintained that smell is the least important of our senses, and that it is not worth while to cultivate it. Nay, the king of epicures, Brillat-Savarin, wrote a famous book the very title of which, "Physiology of Taste," is a scientific blunder. Like everybody else, he believed in the existence of an infinite variety of tastes, and never suspected that, with the exception of sweet, sour, salt and bitter, all our countless gastronomic delights come to us through the sense of smell.

A NEW PSYCHOLOGY OF EATING.

The French physiologist Longet and the German anatomist Henle were, so far as I could find, the only experts who had an inkling of the gastronomic importance of the sense of smell; but they did not go so far as to formulate the theory I have just expressed in italics. My experiments showed me that not only is it impossible, with the nose clasped (or closed by a cold), to tell the difference between various kinds of meats, or cheeses, or cakes, or vegetables, but also—which no one had ever pointed out—that even in the case of sweet and sour substances which do gratify the palate, the sense of smell is much more important than the sense of taste.

Vinegar, for example, is absolutely uninteresting unless it has a "bouquet"—the aroma of the cider, wine, or malt of which it is made. And why is it that we are willing to pay from five to twenty times as much for candy as for plain sugar? Because the sugar appeals only to the taste, whereas the candy is usually perfumed with the aroma of sarsparilla, wintergreen, vanilla, chocolate, and a hundred other flavoring ingredients the fragrance of which we enjoy by exhaling through the nose while eating it.

The emphasis lies on the word exhaling. It is considered a breach of etiquette to smell of things at the table in the ordinary way, because it implies a doubt as to the freshness of the food. But there is a second way of smelling of which most persons are unconscious, although they practise it daily. Anatomy shows that only a small portion of the mucous membrane which lines the nostrils is the seat of the endings of the nerves of smell. In ordinary expiration the air does not touch this olfactory region. But when we eat in the right way we unconsciously guide the air impregnated with the Flavors of the food we are munching, into that region, and that is the way we enjoy our food. We do this unconsciously, I say; but now try and do it consciously, guiding the expired air very slowly through the nose, and your enjoyment of a meal will be quintupled.

Obviously Kant made the mistake of his life when he said the sense of smell was not worth cultivating. It not only provides us with additional table pleasures, the hygienic and tonic value of which has been sufficiently dwelt upon, but it is a fact of unspeakable importance that the more we educate the nose, the more discriminating we make it, and the more stubbornly therefore we insist on having wholesome food only.

This new psychology of eating I set forth for the first time in the "Contemporary Review" (London, November, 1888), under the title of "The Gastronomic Value of Odors." It was commented on as a psychological curiosity, but otherwise attracted little attention. At that time there was not the same general interest that there is now in the food question. Even Gladstone's directions regarding eating were more frequently smiled at than followed.

Since his day many things have happened to give the food question an aspect of superlative importance, particularly the wholesale adulterations described in the preceding pages. That among those who have helped to awaken the public to a realizing sense of the importance of this subject no one deserves more credit than Mr. Fletcher—who has been immortalized in the dictionaries by the inclusion of the verb "to Fletcherize"—has been stated before. So beneficent, on the whole, has been his influence that I hesitate to point out any of his mistakes; but as some of them obscure the truth, I will do so.

He first made public his views, in a crude form, eleven years after the appearance of my article on the gastronomic value of odors. That article anticipates some important details of his doctrines, but he evidently never saw it, because in his books he makes only one brief reference to the sense of smell and perpetuates all the old errors regarding that insolent pretender, the sense of taste. This is to be regretted, for it left his followers groping in the dark as to the best way of getting the most pleasure and benefit out of their food, at home and at their "munching parties."

There is one detail of Fletcherism which every epicure will fight with his last drop of ink. If we all followed his example, living on griddle cakes, butter, and syrup (at a cost of eleven cents a day), or some other equally simple menu, as he advises, what would become of that delectable variety which is the spice of gastronomy, and what of the farmers, and the hundreds of industries which supply this variety?

True gastronomic progress, I maintain, lies in the direction of multiplying the pleasures of the table—an important phase of our subject which will be discussed in a later chapter.

We must now turn the limelight once more on Ungastronomic America.

[III]
OUR DENATURED FOODS

BEARING in mind the superlative importance to our well-being of Flavor in the food we eat, the reader is now in a position to appreciate the full force of a third indictment to be brought against those who spoil our food. The first indictment was that they use chemical preservatives which arrest digestion and often act as cumulative poisons; the second, that they use chemicals which enable unscrupulous persons to sell foods made of nauseating and dangerous raw material, so disguised as to fool the buyer.

The culprits now to be arraigned are those who, from ignorance, indolence, or greed to get rich quick, adopt devices which spoil the Flavor of our food and thus destroy our appetite and undermine the health of the community.

Denatured is the word used for alcohol that has been made unfit to drink by the addition of chemicals, and denatured is hardly too strong a word to apply to many if not most of the foods offered in the American markets and stores, the offense being aggravated by the fact that the prices usually asked for these are quite as high as those asked for foods preserved by the wholesome old condimental methods, although the cost to the maker is only a fraction of what it would be if those methods were followed.

Palatable, appetizing smoked bacon and hams are still to be found in our markets by those who know a thing or two, and sternly insist on getting what they ask for; but for the vast majority of consumers smoked meats have disappeared. Meats lose weight—up to 20 per cent.—during the process of smoking, and therefore bring the dealer less profit. What he offers is usually denatured—unappetizing and indigestible. The same holds true of smoked fish, which used to make an epicure's mouth water. Why it does so no longer is shown by the following paragraphs from Philadelphia, printed in the New York "Evening Post":

Fish Was Dyed, not Smoked

The dairy and food bureau of the State Agricultural Department has discovered that a large number of delicatessen and other stores of this city have been for a long time selling "dyed" fish as a substitute for smoked fish. When Harry P. Cassidy, the agent of the bureau told the retail store proprietors what they were doing, they were surprised, as they had purchased the stuff as genuine smoked fish.

Cassidy's attention to the food article was attracted by its rich red color. Purchasing some, he had it examined, and the expert reported that he could dye wool with the coloring matter extracted from it. In smoking fish there is a loss of fifteen pounds to every hundred, it is said, but in dyeing there is no loss at all. This permitted the violators of the law to undersell their competitors in the smoked fish industry.

Nor is our fresh fish usually more palatable. New York, for instance, ought to be a paradise of fish eaters, yet how seldom is it served in prime condition, even in leading restaurants! In Germany they have various ways of bringing fish to market alive, even in interior towns; over here they are kept in cold storage for weeks, months—indeed years, although fish deteriorates by this process much more rapidly than even poultry—of which more anon; and everybody knows that the poorest kind of fish just out of the water is better than the best kind after it has been out a day or two.

Were we a gastronomic nation we would rise in revolt against the wholesale denaturing of our food to be presently described in more detail. We should insist on always having real French or German-style bread, with crisp, tasty crust, refusing the soggy loaves made of bleached, bolted flour robbed of its nutritious phosphates and sources of Flavor; refusing also the machine-polished rice deprived of its nutritious outer parts, in which lies the delicate Flavor of this cereal, leaving it pretty to look at, but, as one of the Government's agricultural experts, David Fairchild, has forcibly expressed it, "as tasteless as the paste that a paper-hanger brushes on his rolls of wallpaper."

We should exclude the chemically greened teas dumped into our groceries because they are not wanted in any other country. We should protest against the peaches and pears and other fruits formerly brought into our markets soft, sun-ripened, luscious, but now offered to us hard, unripe, flavorless.

The melancholy list of gastronomic misdeeds might be prolonged indefinitely.

In all these cases, let me emphasize this fact once more, that what is eliminated from the food is its very soul, its precious Flavor, which makes it appetizing and enjoyable and therefore digestible. We allow covetous or ignorant manufacturers as well as incompetent or indolent cooks to spoil our naturally good food because we do not as a nation, realize that on its pleasurableness depend our health and comfort, our happiness and capacity for hard work, more than perhaps on anything else—a point which cannot be emphasized too often.

Now for a few details, beginning with the treatment to which our poultry is subjected, which has long been a national calamity and a scandal of the first order.

FOUL FOWL.

Perhaps more than anything else, what makes us stand before the world as a deplorably ungastronomic nation is our tolerance of the tainted, unpalatable, cold-storage poultry served in public eating places as well as in private houses in nine cases out of ten.

We spent the months of May to September, 1912, in Europe, traveling in France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and England. Nearly every day we ate chicken, or some other kind of poultry and not once did we have any that was in the least like our cold-storage fowls; everything was fresh, sweet, juicy, and appetizing. Again and again I said to my wife, or she to me: "I wish we could get such chicken in New York!"

An American lady of wealth said to me a few years ago that one of the reasons why she went to Europe every summer was that she liked good things to eat and could get them so much more easily and regularly abroad—particularly butter, and her favorite dish, chicken. She knew of the poulet de Bresse—that explained it all. I shall never forget, though I live another half-century, my first taste of that particular brand of fowl. I had arrived at one of the leading Paris hotels too late for the table d'hôte, and thinking I was not hungry, ordered nothing but a portion of chicken and a bowl of salad. The waiter brought an enormous portion, and I had hardly tasted it when I found I was ravenously hungry. Not a shred of it was left.

The delicious taste of that sort of fancy poultry is due in part to the particular breed, but more still to the use of special kinds of food which give a rich and delicate flavor to the flesh, as the so-called wild celery of the Chesapeake Bay does in the case of our best ducks and turtles.

Nature provides our canvasback and redhead ducks and terrapin—not too bountifully, it is true—but when it comes to mortal man's treatment, in this country, of the poultry that has to take the place of the formerly abundant game, what do we see? A state of affairs that would not be tolerated one week on the European continent.

It is officially estimated that from 75 to 90 per cent. of all the poultry produced in the United States is preserved in cold storage for months, often for years. What is worse still, "only a very small percentage of the fowls which are placed in cold storage are drawn," the result being that by a physiological process known as osmosis the meat becomes tainted in a most offensive manner. The warehouse men and dealers have for years been fighting furiously against the health boards of various cities and states for the privilege of perpetuating this state of affairs, which greatly simplifies the poultry business and enables them to sell the entrails of a fowl at the same price per pound as the meat; but the long-suffering public has at last become thoroughly aroused, convinced that many obscure disorders of the digestive tract are due to the consumption of undrawn and other cold-storage poultry, not to speak of the horror of eating such stuff.

A young woman informs me that one day she went into a butcher's shop (in a part of town where prosperous families live) and ordered a chicken. The butcher took one down, but when he cut it open such a stench came from it that she stepped back in horror. Yet the man tried to persuade her to take it, remarking: "That's all right! Just wash it in a solution of borax, or in vinegar and water and the odor will disappear."

This happened in New York City in the year 1912; it was not an exceptional case; thousands of such offensive carcasses are sold in American cities daily. Nor is it necessary to cut them open to know that they are unfit for food. Their greenish, mummified, rigid appearance reveals their unpalatable condition. Daily, for years, as I have walked along the streets of New York and seen these hideous bird corpses brazenly exposed for sale, I have wondered at a community which will tolerate such a thing. As the authors of Bulletin No. 115 of the Bureau of Chemistry[3] say, a careful inspection of cold-storage fowls before cooking "would do much to destroy any appetite which might otherwise have been manifested for these birds when cooked."

On pages 100-101 of his monumental work on foods and their adulteration which should be read by all consumers as well as dealers because of its impartial statement of the case, Dr. Wiley remarks pertinently that "the keeping of chickens with the intestinal contents undisturbed does not appeal to the imagination of the consumer any more than would the freezing of the carcass of a beef or hog with the viscera remaining in it."

Elsewhere the great reformer put his finger on the most vulnerable and undeniable aspect of the storage business: "Palatability is one of the elements of wholesomeness, and we find in cold storage a tremendous decrease in palatability."

From this kind of tainted, unappetizing, unpalatable chicken to the poulet de Bresse, what a long road we have to travel. Under present conditions, as a matter of course, it makes no difference what we feed our fowls; all are foul alike, and will remain so as long as the American public remains content to fall so far below the European gastronomic level.

The packers and dealers, of course, laugh at Dr. Wiley's statement that, under the present scientific methods of production, poultry can be furnished in a fresh state all the year round (as it is in Europe). They do not want it fresh; they want it in their refrigerators so they can regulate and artificially raise prices. The worst offenders are the men who speculate in storage fowls, making, say, $10,000 or $20,000 in one day. That enables them to cross the Atlantic and eat edible chicken in Paris.

The simplest way for the consumer to thwart the conspirators against his appetite and stomach is to buy of genuinely Kosher butchers, who by their tenets are not allowed to handle cold-storage fowls; or direct of the farmer, with whom an arrangement can be made to send the freshly killed and promptly cleaned poultry to one's home. In this way the total cost does not exceed regular city prices, and oh! the difference in the effect on our well-being, not to speak of getting even with the "icemen."

The introduction of parcel's post greatly reduced the cost of this method of securing fresh poultry. In European countries, particularly France and Germany, the parcel's post has done much to eliminate middlemen, and many thousands of consumers make use of this chance to get provisions fresh and direct from the producer.

There are reasons to believe that the present high prices of beef and mutton will never come down again, but will climb higher still because the former vast grazing-grounds of the West are being cut up into farms. But to the raising of chickens there is no limit. By applying the methods of intensive farming the supply can be steadily increased and prices lowered. Chicken day is destined to become more and more frequent, and it is for the consumer to decide whether his chicken dinner shall be appetizing, enjoyable, and beneficial, or remain what it is now in most cases, a gastronomic calamity.

From the point of view of Flavor, which is the main theme of the present volume, this subject is of such importance that a few more pages must be devoted to it.

THE FRENCH WAY VERSUS THE AMERICAN.

In Paris one eats the best chicken in the world; in New York, as a rule, the worst. How do they do it in France? The answer will be given in the chapter on French Gastronomic Supremacy; here let us anticipate only a few details as supplied to the Government of the United States by Newton B. Ashby, special agent of the Bureau of Animal Industry and published in its Sixteenth Annual Report (1899).

The French, he notes, "are economic people, and the system of sending young and immature chickens to market is not practised. The fowls sent to market are from 4 to 8 months old. They are carefully fed and grown for market instead of being allowed to scavenge. For instance, the chickens are given clean water instead of being allowed the run of filthy pools and puddles."

The method of slaughter, he goes on to say, "seems to be chiefly by cutting the jugular vein. The fowl is then dry plucked very carefully to prevent tearing the flesh, and is drawn through the vent."

How they do it in France?

Note those last six words. They show that the French do not allow chickens to remain undrawn even one day; for, as Mr. Ashby continues, "the fowls are packed the afternoon or evening of the day of slaughter, and despatched to Paris by special express train that night. They are due in Paris before five o'clock in the morning. They are delivered at once to the market, and are sold on the day of arrival, so that French fowls are generally disposed of in the market within twenty to twenty-four hours after being killed.... In July and August many French fowls come to the market alive."

"The Paris markets, and French markets generally," we are further told, "do not take kindly to foreign poultry or meat." Such poultry would of course have to be brought in cold storage, and what the nation which knows most about eating wants is fresh chicken. "Foreign poultry is not in demand in Paris," because the French know and have known for generations that to freeze meat is to spoil it. On this subject I shall have some further remarks in a later section on the Roast Beef of Old England.

Now look at the way much of the poultry consumed in American cities is gathered. Dr. Cavana of Oneida, N. Y., who found no fewer than eleven distinct groups of bacteria in the flesh of a single undrawn fowl, remarked, in a lecture delivered in 1906, at the Annual Convention of Railway Surgeons, that poultry stocks are collected for eastern cities from all parts of the country. He goes on to say that after slaughter the feathers are removed and the carcasses packed in barrels, generally without further dressing. The head, feet, and legs, as well as the craw of partially digested food, therefore, is left in the sealed cavities of the fowls, forming conditions which force the general infection of the tissues by the flagellated, or rapidly swimming intestinal bacteria, which double their quantity and numbers every forty minutes, a single bacillus being capable of developing over forty-two billion germs in twenty-four hours. Their shipments are made by rail and steamship, and cover transit periods of several days before reaching the cold atmospheres of the storage warehouses.

"To determine the activity of these germs and the period required for their permeation of the tissues in the slaughtered undrawn fowl, we caused to be made a series of experiments, the results of which justify the belief that a great percentage of the infected poultry and game stock in storage became so infected before reaching the low temperature of the storage warehouses."

Nor does ordinary cold storage destroy the noisome bacteria. They are merely scotched, to revive and multiply at the first opportunity.

One of the principal objections to cold-storage poultry is that after being taken from the storehouse they decompose much more quickly than fresh birds.

Some dealers aggravate the evil by soaking the poultry when taken out of storage in cold water for the purpose of thawing. This adds to its weight, to the profit of the dealer, but it "causes heavy bacterial infection," as Dr. Charles Harrington, secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Health, has pointed out. Dr. Pennington, in an article on Changes in Chickens in Cold Storage, to which we shall recur, refers to a case in which a frozen fowl, after being immersed in water, had increased in weight eleven per cent. (to the dealer's profit).

In Bulletin 144 of the United States Department of Agriculture we read:

"Under precisely the same conditions of temperature and humidity, drawn fowls will keep from twenty to thirty days longer than those not drawn. The presence of undigested food and of excrementitious substances in animals which have been killed most certainly favors the tainting of the flesh and general decomposition. The viscera are the first parts to show putrescence, and allowing these to remain within the body cannot do otherwise than favor infection of the flesh with bacteria and ptomaines, even if osmosis does not actually carry putrid juices to contiguous tissues. Hunters know the value of drawing birds as soon as possible after they have been shot, in order to keep them fresh and sweet and to prevent their having a strong intestinal flavor."

Read also the following weighty remarks reprinted from Senate Report No. 1991, March 22, 1906:

The process of decomposition and putrefaction begins at once after the death of the animal. Cold storage and freezing may limit the rotting process, but do not entirely stop it. When poultry or animals are taken from cold storage and are thawed out for exhibition and sale, the decomposition continues with marked energy, impregnating the flesh with poisons—and this decomposition is exceedingly rapid even when the poultry is kept in the market or grocery refrigerator, the temperature of which is much higher than that of the cold-storage warehouse. Flesh in which the blood has been permitted to remain is particularly susceptible to such decomposition, and this susceptibility is increased by the long period of freezing and thawing.

Even with poultry which is "freshly killed" there is frequently a period of several days between the time of slaughtering and sale. Not only is it dangerous, but it is repugnant to our sense of decency, that the flesh we are to eat shall lie for several days in close contact with putrefying animal matter.

Undoubtedly undrawn poultry, fish, and game have caused many cases of poisoning which have been wrongfully attributed to other sources. The poisoning resulting often resembles that caused by other poisons administered by persons or taken with suicidal intent. Many sufferers from digestive troubles—headache, nausea, colic, and diarrhea after eating, owe their ailments to tainted foods.

We are advised that the reason for slaughtering poultry without thorough bleeding is the saving in the weight of the fowl, and this reason is doubtless also one for the storing of poultry and offering it for sale without removing the viscera. There is, however, no reason why the consumer should be compelled to purchase a large percentage of excreta, offal, and refuse with his poultry. We would not tolerate the addition of a certain percentage of weight in the form of entrails of the steer with each beefsteak we buy. The consumer purposes to buy edible food and not the disgusting waste which should be eliminated in the process of slaughtering and dressing. It is just as reasonable to ask the consumer to buy hogs, calves, and lambs without the intestines removed as to solicit his purchase of undrawn turkeys and chickens.

WHY DO WE EAT POULTRY?

After the appearance, in "The Century Magazine" of November, 1911, of my article on Ungastronomic America, in which I denounced the practice of offering the public undrawn, cold-storage poultry, I was bombarded with abusive letters from packers and others, and a periodical, called "The Steward," fancied that it had completely demolished me by quoting the results obtained by Dr. Mary E. Pennington, in collaboration with Evelyn Witmer and H. C. Pierce, during a series of observations described in a circular entitled "The Comparative Rate of Decomposition in Drawn and Undrawn Market Poultry" published in 1911 by the Department of Agriculture. This result of these observations was that "undrawn poultry decomposes more slowly than does poultry which has been either wholly or partially eviscerated."

This statement does not agree with the conclusion reached and printed in the Bulletin No. 144 to which I have already referred, that "under precisely the same conditions of temperature and humidity, drawn fowls will keep from twenty to thirty days longer than those not drawn."

This statement is doubtless correct—provided the fowls have been eviscerated in such a way as to keep the cavity absolutely free from contamination. If this is not done, the drawn fowl will, for obvious reasons, spoil even sooner than the undrawn. It is not usually done by the American packers; and the moral is, not that undrawn fowl is preferable to drawn fowl for packing, but that these packers should send their men to France or Germany to learn how properly to draw fowls.

The consumer, anyway, is not interested in "keeping qualities." What he wants is chicken that is good to eat, and the shorter a time it has been kept, the better for him, in every way.

Dr. Wiley refers to experiments which have "shown the advisability of packing drawn poultry in tin cartons, carefully closed"; adding that "fowls thus treated preserve to a remarkable degree their freshness and palatability."

If that degree of freshness and palatibilty is sufficient to satisfy the consumer, then cold storage has a future. If not, cold storage is doomed, for undrawn, frozen poultry will, I feel sure, not be eaten much longer by the American public.

Why do we eat poultry, anyway? Surely not merely because we want food. If that were the case, why waste money on expensive chicken or turkey, when we could get the same amount of nourishment from many other foods at a mere fraction of the cost? The reason why we eat chicken in preference to those other foods is that we want to enjoy its flavor. And we do not want frozen, undrawn poultry, not only because the freezing spoils the flavor but because the leaving of the entrails in the animal makes it unwholesome.

One of the main arguments of the packers in favor of leaving fowls undrawn is that they dry out sooner when drawn. A more deadly boomerang it would be difficult to throw. There is only one way in which the drying carcass of a fowl can get its moisture: from the contents of the entrails. That is what is meant by osmosis. Thus out of their own mouths the packers stand convicted of offering the public fowl which is disgustingly tainted.

The best part of the fowl—the second joint—gets the taint soonest, because it lies nearest the intestines. The wings and drumsticks get it last. It is important to know this, because it explains why experts may differ as to the time it takes to spoil the flavor of a stored bird. Usually the process is quite rapid.

The whole question of the tainting of meat by osmosis deserves much more attention than it has received. A wild boar has to be eviscerated at once after being killed. If this is not done, none of the meat is fit to eat except the head—which explains why "wild boar's head," and the head alone—often figures on bills of fare in France and Germany. My wife, who was brought up in Southern France knew a wealthy silk merchant, a great hunter in his own domains, who always promptly removed the entrails of the boars he killed, before the carcass grew cold, the consequence being that all the meat was good to eat, as his friends were given many a chance to find out.

For several years some of the New York butchers have indulged in the custom of exhibiting in their windows the carcasses of lambs with their pelts still on. If a Paris butcher did that, the first of his customers coming along would ask him if he didn't know that unless the pelt is taken off at once after killing a mouton, the meat gets from it a disagreeable "sheepy" flavor—which is a very different thing from the unique and delicious flavor properly dressed mutton has.

Perhaps the most striking illustration of the rapid action of osmosis is provided by venison, which is unfit to eat if the deer has been tortured by a cruel chase. Its terror affects the digestive juices, and the whole body becomes tainted.

IS COLD STORAGE A BLESSING?

In an editorial entitled "Cold Storage Hardly a Blessing" the New York "Times" called attention during the holiday season of 1911 to the fact that the price of cold-storage turkeys was six cents a pound less than that of the fresh-killed birds. "This difference of almost 25 per cent. is an admission by the cold-storage people, forced from them by unalterable public opinion, that their much-wanted wares are to just about that extent inferior to those which they vociferously declare to be no better."

Quoting the happy expression that cold-storage fowls taste "as if they had been buried and dug up again," the same writer remarks: "None of us really knows how fowls do taste after they have gone through that process. We can imagine the flavor, however, and do, noses helping tongues."

Were it not for the storage people, chickens and eggs would come into our markets fresh, cheap, and in abundance at the time when they are at their best. But it is precisely when they are at their best and cheapest that the storage men corner the market and hold the goods till they are good no more; whereupon they sell them at their own prices, largely increased through gambling. In view of such facts the "Times" refers to cold storage as "a baleful invention."

A baleful invention it certainly is—and a needless one, too. To quote Dr. Wiley again: "Poultry is a food product which under the present scientific methods of production can be furnished in a fresh state all the year. The necessity for cold storage, therefore, is not so apparent in this case as in that of fruit and other perishable foods."

The American public, surely, will not much longer tolerate the present condition of affairs. There are packers and packers. Some are more careful and cleanly in their methods than others; but cold-storage fowl at its best is more or less denatured, and at its worst it is worse than denatured, putting us almost on a level with the African Bushmen who, when they kill a sheep, eat the entrails with their contents. I would no more eat such undrawn storage poultry as is placed daily before thousands of my countrymen than I would the flesh of a hyena or a vulture.

It was estimated that, in 1912, $75,000,000 worth of poultry was consumed in New York City. Of this, only $1,500,000 represented the business done in live chickens, and nearly all of this went to the Kosher butchers of the East Side. Surely Christians cannot afford to be less cleanly than Hebrews in regard to what they put in their stomachs.

The time has come for Christians to gird up their loins and fight for untainted food on their tables, too. There is encouragement in the information that in one season 1,100 more cars of live poultry were shipped to New York City than the season before (1910), and that plants were being established near the city for providing poultry freshly slaughtered and dressed. The consumer must, however, make sure that the fowls are not only freshly killed but drawn within a few days; the second joint is sometimes tainted on the second day. Butchers and poultry dealers would make friends if they gave up the habit of charging for fowl at so much a pound including the intestines. Let them charge more per pound for the meat alone, refusing under any conditions to have an undrawn bird in their shops, and the poultry business will soon be doubled, nay, quintupled.

The fact that fresh fowl costs more than frozen is due to artificial conditions which can be remedied and must be remedied. For the present, if you cannot afford a six-pound fowl, try one weighing three pounds. If your dealer understands—as mine understands—that you will not under any circumstances eat a cold-storage bird he will supply a fresh one. What you want is not quantity but quality—particularly the true chicken Flavor. In the chapter on Savory Cooking it will be shown how a few pounds of fresh chicken can be made to yield their delicious flavor to a dish much larger and much cheaper than would be afforded by a fowl double its size cooked in the usual way.

In Europe, most persons travel third class on the railways because they cannot afford first or second. In this country, nearly everybody can afford to travel first class. Americans are always bound to have the best of everything—if they know how to get it. Only in the gastronomic world are they—with the exception of the Jews—traveling third class—eating third-rate poultry prepared by third-rate cooks. This cannot last. We can afford the best. Let us have it.

SPOILING THE AMERICAN OYSTER.

Nowhere in the world are oysters more abundant than in America. Nowhere are they cheaper or better. As a rule, too, we cook them well, in various styles; but in the opinion of most epicures a cooked oyster is an oyster spoiled. Its food value in any case, raw or cooked, is very small, and it is chiefly as a relish that those who know how to eat value it. But for years the public has been allowing the men who market oysters to eliminate the very elements which give them relish by soaking them in fresh water, which makes them bloated, blonde, and tasteless.

The dealers declare that many consumers demand them that way; floating makes them bigger. There are such consumers; they sacrifice quality for quantity; they know not that usually the best oysters by far are the small brunettes straight from the deep sea; and they further demonstrate their gastronomic obtuseness by smothering their oysters under several strong condiments, which in themselves would destroy their delicate, natural Flavor.

In some of our States the government has come to the rescue of the epicure—who is in despair at this wholesale denaturing of his favorite delicacy—by enacting laws against the soaking of oysters because few of the streams in which this is done are free from typhoid and other deadly germs; but many of us do not feel sure that the health boards (because of indolence or "graft") exercise the necessary supervision, and therefore we deprive ourselves of the cheap luxury which Europeans have most reason to envy us. At banquets, where everybody used to eat oysters on the half-shell, it is noticeable how many plates the waiters remove that have not been touched.

Having thus summed up the indictment, let us consider a few of the more important details.

The London "Lancet" of April 22, 1911, had an editorial article on Shell Fish and Disease in which it pointed out that while from the nature of the case the testimony is usually of a very circumstantial kind, "which only becomes convincing in its cumulative aspects," there are instances on record like the outbreaks following certain banquets in Southampton and Portsmouth which admitted of no doubt as to the source of the disease.

Dr. H. T. Bulstrode made a comprehensive report upon enteric fever and gastro-enteritis in England to the Local Government Board of London, in 1906, in which he showed by means of maps how many of the mussel, oyster, and cockle beds were exposed to contamination, his revelations being, as the "Lancet" remarks, "decidedly disquieting." Even in cases where the shell-fish were collected from locations relatively remote from contamination by sewage they were likely to be "brought back and cleansed on shore much too near the mouths of sewers." England is thus in the same predicament as the United States, but that is small comfort for us.

In an address before the New York Academy of Sciences delivered by Dr. George A. Soper, President of the Metropolitan Sewerage Commission and reported in the "Times" of March 14, 1911, it was pointed out that there are over 500 sewer outlets discharging into the rivers and harbor of New York each day a volume of sewage that would fill the channel of the East River from the Brooklyn Bridge to a distance of fifteen miles. "New York gets many of its oysters from Jamaica Bay—about a million bushels a year. The water at this section is heavily polluted, and to this can no doubt be traced a great part of the typhoid that breaks out in this city. The Board of Health has found that 15 per cent. of all typhoid is due to the eating of polluted shell fish."

James L. Kellogg, professor of biology in Williams College, in his admirable book on Shell Fish Industries[4] sums up the results of his thorough study of this subject in a chapter on Bivalves in Relation to Disease. It may be stated as a fact, he says, that "epidemics are sometimes caused by eating uncooked oysters. Several times they have been traced directly to that source. The evidence collected on that point in this country and abroad is conclusive."

There are four reasons for objecting to the process of "floating" oysters. The first—the danger of conveying a deadly disease—has been sufficiently dwelt on. Let us now consider the second:

Were all oysters taken from the ocean and not near the mouths of harbors or rivers that bear sewage, no one need ever hesitate to eat them raw. The trouble lies in the fact that, as Professor Kellogg puts it, "before food mollusca are marketed they are almost invariably placed for a few hours in fresh water to undergo what the oystermen term the drinking process. Oysters sold in shell as well as those that have been shucked are usually subjected to the fresh water treatment. To make delays and the cost of transportation as light as possible, the localities selected for this are almost without exception in harbors or river mouths near large markets. In very many cases such waters bear the sewage of cities of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants."

With these facts—which have often been pointed out—before him, is it necessary to call the reader's attention to the circumstance that even if it had never been proved that oysters can serve as conveyers of deadly diseases, the process of floating them—that is, bloating them with sewage—must be condemned as unspeakably vile and disgusting?

What aggravates the matter is that oysters have what Professor Kellogg calls "wonderfully efficient mechanisms for straining dangerous organisms out of the water." "Several gallons of water every day pass through the gills of every full-grown oyster or clam, and every solid particle is removed from it and remains in the body." "It is thus plain that even if relatively few in the water, the chances are that a dangerous number of disease organisms will be strained out of it by these shell-fish."

Indeed, were it not for the fact that most of these disease organisms are destroyed by the digestive fluids of oysters and those who eat them, there would be vastly more typhoid fever than there is now from the thirty million bushels that are sent to our markets every year from our shore beds. The danger comes from the organisms on the gills, or on the shell, which, in that case, it is not safe to handle.

Berlin has its Rieselfelder—vast meadows and gardens made fertile with the city's sewage. This liquid sewage is subjected to such thorough chemical treatment that ere it reaches its destination it is perfectly harmless. When the Rieselfelder were opened, the city fathers had such confidence in their chemist that they ceremoniously drank some of this water. It was a disgusting, though perfectly safe thing to do. The eating of our sewage-bloated oysters is both disgusting and unsafe.

"Cleanliness is next to godliness" is a motto which it is even more important to apply to the inside of the body than to the outside.

After this demonstration of the dangers and the filthiness of the process of floating oysters, it is needless to advance further arguments. But in order to complete the rout of the "floaters"—who have long fought so fiercely for the privilege of spoiling the American oyster—reference must be made to the two other indictments against them, because of the interest and importance attaching to them. One is moral and legal; the other, gastronomic.

Dr. Wiley sums up the two in one sentence: "Not only does it (floating) deceive the customer in regard to the size of the oyster but it deprives the oyster of its proper taste and flavor."

Osmosis comes into play in "floating," as he further points out: "By this process the body of the oyster affects a plumpness and largeness which materially increases its selling qualities, as it increases its weight and size and, therefore, the profits of the dealer. The principle of this process depends upon the fact that when a soft substance like an oyster, containing a mineral salt in its composition, is brought in contact with water, a process of diffusion takes place which is known in chemical physics as osmosis, whereby water passes through the cell walls and enters the cells of the oyster and the mineral substance thereof is forced out into the external water. Larger volumes of water pass into the cells than accompany the particles of mineral matter to the outside of the cells and the result is a swelling of the oysters and consequent increase in the size and weight by the addition of pure water, but at the expense of the natural salt, mostly chloride of sodium or common salt, which the oyster contains."

Thus does science confirm and explain the epicure's perception that oysters are denatured by being soaked in fresh water—deprived of the tang of the sea, which tang to any one who knows anything about the art of eating constitutes ninety-five per cent. of the value of an oyster.

There are exceptions to my statement that small oysters are the best. Some epicures prefer the large, adult Lynnhavens to the small Blue Points; and the Lynnhavens certainly are among the finest in flavor. But men who do prefer the naturally large oysters, or oysters that have been legitimately fattened in salt water, ought to be the first to fiercely resent the floating which is done to deceive them as to the real size of the oysters they pay for, and gives them denatured oysters, bloated and sickened with sewage water.

Three centuries ago Massachusetts boasted oysters a foot in length, and in Maine a shell has been found measuring three inches over a foot. We need not worry, however, at the decreased size of our bivalves; it makes them more tender—though, to be sure, also less nutritious. In any case, however, the nutritive value of an oyster is so insignificant as to be practically negligible. How ludicrously small it is, is shown by Dr. Wiley. For one hundred pounds of shelled oysters, he says, only about ten pounds of meat are found. In ten pounds of the meat there is over 80 per cent. of water; so that "the actual nourishment contained in 100 pounds of oysters is reduced to a little over one pound!"

Could anything more triumphantly demonstrate the comparative importance of Flavor over nutriment in this, the most delicious of all sea foods?

Yet it is to this all-important Flavor that our dealers show such brutal indifference, not only in the various ways pointed out in the preceding pages but in other ways. For instance, oysters spoil even more rapidly than fish and should therefore be kept alive to the last possible moment before serving. Yet how lamentably seldom is this done! It can be done not only in cities on the coast, but in those of the interior, it being possible to keep oysters alive and in excellent state for consumption for a week or ten days or even longer.

It would be unjust to the oystermen to accuse them of perpetrating all their crimes against shellfish from sheer greed for extra gain. Ignorance also comes into play. Only one opener in fifty seems to know that the best thing by far about an oyster is the liquid in its shell. Watch the other forty-nine and you will see them wantonly wasting this precious, fragrant liquid, and in many cases they will serve the oyster on the flat shell, so that you get no juice at all. Always ask for them on the deep shell and don't be afraid, after you have transferred the morsel to your mouth to drink the liquid from the shell. It may not look elegant, but elegance be hanged!

Dealers who wish to get rich quick by creating an unprecedented demand for oysters with the real tang of the sea should bear all these things in mind and further prepare themselves by reading pages 158 to 164 of Dr. Wiley's Foods and their Adulteration. Then let them remember that honesty is the only profitable policy. The public is not in a mood to be fooled and trifled with any longer.

In the autumn of 1912 Dr. Wiley called attention (in "Good Housekeeping" for November) to the important fact that under present conditions not only is it seldom safe to eat raw oysters, but that they are particularly risky in two of the "R" months—September and October—because of the danger of pollution due to the crowding at the seashore, which is becoming greater and greater as the summers wear on, many of the resorts being near beds in which oysters thus become sewage-contaminated even before they are "floated" by dealers.

In September, 1912, the Bureau of Chemistry published its Bulletin 156 on Sewage Polluted Oysters as a Cause of Typhoid and other Gastro-Intestinal Disturbances, by George W. Stiles, Jr., Chief of the Bacteriological Laboratory. He reviews the literature on the subject, showing how in many cases epidemics of typhoid and other diseases were traced to the eating of raw shellfish, and then relates how, with a detective ingenuity worthy of a Sherlock Holmes or a Burns, seventeen cases of typhoid and eighty-three cases of gastro-enteritis following a banquet held at Goshen, N. Y., in October, 1911, were traced directly to eating Rockaway oysters floated at Indian Creek, and twenty-six other cases, ten of them typhoid, were traced to the eating of Rockaways, some of which came from the same lot furnished for the Goshen banquet.

The Rockaway oysters thus got a "black eye," but if perhaps the worst offenders, they are by no means the only ones. "All the oysters of New York Bay, Narragansett Bay, and the Potomac River, the waters near Norfolk, Va., and the mouth of the James River, the mouths of the Connecticut and Merrimac Rivers, and other industrial streams, and the continental border of Long Island Sound, are open to suspicion," says Dr. Wiley, and should not be eaten raw. More and more, too, will object to eating them cooked. Boiled filth does not appeal to the imagination.

The plain and distressing truth is that our great shell fish business, the pride of Gastronomic America, will be ruined altogether unless the barbarous custom of discharging the sewage matter of cities and villages into rivers and the ocean is stopped. It seems incredible that we, with our incalculable wealth, should be so far behind Europeans, especially Germans, in this matter of keeping our sea food clean and edible. The disposal of sewage matter after German methods is the most important problem now before the American public, more important by far than tariff questions, warships, irrigation projects and Panama canals.

Typhoid fever could be reduced to a minimum were the sewage disposed of scientifically as it is in some German and English cities. The startling assertion that in 1909 there were more cases of typhoid in the United States than of plague in India was made by Dr. Allan J. McLaughlin, of the United States Public Health Service at a meeting in New York, December 5, 1912, of the Association of Life Insurance Presidents. The typhoid fever rate per 100,000 is, in Berlin, only 2.9; in London it is 3.3; in Vienna, 3.8. In Boston it is 11.3; in New York, 11.6; in Chicago, 13.7; in Philadelphia, 17.5; in Washington, 23.2; while in Milwaukee and Minneapolis it rises to 45.7 and 58.7 respectively. The annual loss to the country from these fever cases is put at $100,000,000.

"SMOKED" HAM, BACON, AND FISH.

Some Americans have an inexplicable prejudice—which, however, is fast disappearing—against fresh pork and against sausages, but bacon and ham are relished universally, and it is therefore of national importance that they should be made appetizing. But they fare as badly as our bivalves and our fowls. Time was when a crisp slice of bacon would give zest to a whole breakfast, but the bacon served now in nineteen cases out of twenty has no more flavor than sawdust; it is eaten without pleasure, and therefore burdens the stomach for hours. Virginia ham has maintained its supremacy and there are a few packers of other hams and bacon who uphold a high standard; but most of them have succumbed to the temptation of curing their pork products with cheap preservatives which denature them, making them as flavorless as floating makes the oysters, and cold storage the poultry.

Has the reader ever spent a summer in a farmhouse and casually come into a corner of the woodshed where smoked hams were suspended from the rafters? If so, he will remember the appetizing fragrance which suddenly made his mouth water and make him long for breakfast. Some persons think they do not like smoked meats; but they almost invariably do when they thus come across the real thing.

Where smoked hams were suspended from the rafters

Smoke is not only the best of all preservatives, it is also the most valuable of condiments, imparting to meats or fish a delicate aroma without altering their natural flavor. A famous Austrian physiologist, Professor Brücke, pointed out many years ago that smoked meats are more digestible than fresh meats; but he did not give the reason, which is that the delicate yet penetrating Flavor added by the smoke creates an appetite and thus causes a flow of digestive juices to the stomach. The American consumer is now usually deprived of this healthful condiment and wholesome pleasure because those who handle pork products have discovered that they can save much time, trouble, and money by soaking them, as just intimated, in cheap solutions of chemicals instead of smoking them in the old-fashioned way, carefully and slowly.

Farmers are busy folk and therefore naturally eager to learn ways of lessening their labors. They consequently succumb readily on reading an alluring advertisement like the following, clipped from a paper published in a Western village:

"Smoke Your Meat With a Brush

There's a new and better way of smoking meat. You accomplish in but a trifle of time all that you can by the tedious old fashioned process. Your meat will be hard and firm, it will be protected from all germs and insects and it will have a more delicate flavor than if smoked in the old way. Use

Brown's Condensed Smoke

It contains all the preservative elements of the smoke, without the rank, disagreeable elements. You simply apply it with a brush or sponge, giving the meat one or two coats, and the smoking is done. Price 75c."

In England, also, long famed for its deliciously flavored smoked hams and bacon, the farmers and packers have been approached by the tempter. "A case in point," says the "Lancet" of February 5, 1910, "is seen in a rapid method of making hams, bacon, and certain fishes appear to be smoked by applying to them a fluid called 'smoke essence.'"

Is it straight dealing, it asks, to call an article painted over with smoke essence "smoked"? "We had occasion recently," this leading medical journal continues, "to examine a specimen of smoke essence in the laboratory, and the results of the analysis were interesting. We found it to consist chiefly of creosote, analine dye, and a salt of iron." Even if such a mixture is harmless "that fact does not justify leading a consumer to suppose that a bloater, a tongue, a rasher of bacon or ham, treated by this simple process, had been adequately cured by the operation well known as 'smoking.' There can be no question at all that the color is added to complete the disguise, and we feel bound to admire the ingenuity of the inventor of a mixture who puts into it a salt of iron which is calculated to give a side of bacon an appearance of natural rustiness."

In conclusion, the "Lancet" expresses its regret that such matters as these affecting the purity of the food supply were not "strongly dealt with" when the Departmental Committee on Food Preservatives and Coloring Matters issued its recommendations nearly a decade previously.

It is passing strange how patiently the average Englishman, and still more the average American, allows himself to be fooled by food manipulators whose chief aim is to save time, trouble, and expense.

The familiar definition of genius as "a capacity for taking pains" is incorrect, but such a capacity is certainly necessary for the production of the best foods, including bacon and ham. We Americans, speaking collectively, lack it and that is one of the main reasons why we must be branded as an ungastronomic nation.

A striking illustration of the importance the Bohemians, for instance, attach to such matters is found in the village of Wallern, where a coöperative society has been formed for the sole purpose of getting meats smoked in the best possible manner, with beech wood.

The point I wish to call special attention to is that the pork products in this model house are smoked, according to the size of the pieces, for a period of two to three months.

In a recent American book on pigs these directions are given: "If the hams are to be smoked they should be hung in the smoke stoves at least three days."

Three days! In Germany and Austria, where the world-famed Westphalian and Prager hams are cured, six weeks is the minimum time for a good article. The maximum, for the highest-priced hams, is three months.

We are now in a position to understand why so many Americans imagine they do not like smoked meats. They have in mind either such meats as have been chemically "smoked," miles away from any smoke house or stove, or such as have been actually smoked, but too briefly, or in too strong smoke.

Dealers have slyly taken advantage of the naturally growing aversion to "smoked" meats. "Slightly Smoked" is a label one often sees now, and ere long, if not checked they will have the audacity to say to a housewife asking for smoked ham or fish or bacon that they have "none in stock," there being "so little demand for it."

That is the way many of the best things are crowded out of the market.

In conclusion, let me whisper in the reader's ear the secret why those who handle pork products and fish are so eager to get rid of the smoke house that during the process of smoking the ham and bacon may lose up to twenty per cent. of its weight.

"But why does the dealer not charge more, to make up for loss of weight?" He does, dear Madam. He charges more every year and saves the full weight, too, by avoiding the smoke house. The joke is on you. He will do this as long as you meekly tolerate it. He will tell you with a look of injured innocence that you are "the first one to complain"—and perhaps you are, though merely one of many thousands who have been fooled.

As I have said, there are exceptions. A few firms are selling real smoked ham and bacon, and they are coining money. Others will perhaps find out ere long that it pays better to please the public than to fool it.

At present, the outlook seems hopeless. Some years ago, when there were still a few dealers left who did not try to get rich quick at the expense of your stomach and health, I used to lunch often on smoked fish. But in the year 1912 you could not—at least I could not—get a genuine smoked fish for love or money. One day in December, I walked into a delicatessen store in which I saw through the window a plateful of whitefish, a variety which is particularly good smoked. They were choice specimens, but after a sniff at them I beat a retreat with, I presume, a disgusted expression. "What's the matter with those fish?" asked the dealer. "They are a first-class article." "Fine fish," I retorted, "but they are not smoked." "They may not be smoked enough...." "They are not smoked at all," I interrupted, "they are chemically preserved and dyed to save weight." "You seem to know more about it than I do," he said. "I certainly do," I answered: "If they were smoked I would take a dozen of them."

Fancy the situation—to be unable, in the second largest city of the world, to get smoked fish! I have tried dozens of places, always with the same result. If others refused to buy the denatured stuff offered, smoked fish would soon be in the market again.

The best foreign methods of smoking meats are described in No. 3655 of the Daily Consular and Trade Reports (Washington, December 8, 1909). Fortunes are in store for all American packers who will follow those methods and advertise honestly:

"We give our pigs clean food, feeding a fine flavor into our hams and bacon; we do not destroy this flavor with chemical preservatives but intensify its appetizing qualities by the use of beechwood smoke."

Where beechwood or hickory, oak, or maple are not available, corn cobs make a cheap and satisfactory substitute.

FLAVOR IN BUTTER.

On every table in the land, except that of the very poor, there is one article which appears two or three times a day all the year round, and that article is butter. More than $300,000,000 worth of it is consumed every year in the United States. One would therefore suppose that the public would insist with all its might and main on having its butter good. It does no such thing, but meekly accepts the indifferent and often vile stuff offered by dealers—an unpalatable lubricator which I would no more think of eating than I would axle grease.

A few years ago Miss Alice Lakey, chairman of the food investigating committee of the National Consumers' League, said that "ninety-five per cent. of all samples of butter submitted were adulterated. We are eating practically no pure butter."

While there is evidence to show that butter was made four thousand years ago, it seems to have taken some nations a long time to "catch up with the procession." We are a long way ahead, on the whole, of the Spaniards, who, as late as the seventeenth century, kept butter in medicine shops "for external use only" (doubtless there were good reasons!) and who to this day hardly know what edible butter is; or of the Irish of that same century who are spoken of by James Houghton as rotting their table butter by burying it in bogs. But we are lamentably behind some of the European nations, notably the French, Germans, Austrians, and Swiss, in the making and the appreciation of first-class butter.

In some of our leading restaurants and hotels, as well as in expensive clubs and the residences of wealthy families, one may come across such butter; but one is not sure of getting the real thing even after paying the highest price. I seldom eat it at home—there are too many disappointments—and when I travel in the United States I rarely have the courage to try it. In rural summer resorts we have found that the only way to get edible butter is to make it ourselves.

As regards Europe, on the contrary, I can repeat what I have said about poultry: that during a five months' trip in 1912 I did not once have butter placed before me which I could not eat with pleasure.

The unwillingness of Americans to take pains in the preparation of foods to which I have referred as one of the main indications of our being an ungastronomic nation is strikingly illustrated in the department of butter-making, wherein it is the chief cause of our inferiority.

Our Government has done its best to enlighten the butter-makers. In 1904 the Department of Agriculture published, for free distribution, Farmers' Bulletin No. 241: "Butter-making on the Farm," by Edwin H. Webster, Chief of Dairy Division, Bureau of Animal Industry; and, in 1905, Circular No. 56 of the same Bureau: "Facts Concerning the History, Commerce and Manufacture of Butter," by Harry Hayward, assistant chief. These pamphlets contain in concise form invaluable information which, if generally utilized, would revolutionize the butter business.

Mr. Webster refers to "the great amount of poor butter made on the farm," and Mr. Hayward also confesses that "a very small percentage of all dairy butter made is of really high grade."

When one reads of all the diverse precautions that must be taken to ensure a good article, and bears in mind the characteristically American unwillingness to take pains with the things that are put into our stomachs, one wonders not that our butter is so inferior.

A few of the hundred-and-one precautions necessary to secure a first-class article may be briefly mentioned. The cow must be kept carefully cleaned, particularly the udder, and so must the hands of the milker, and the pail which holds the milk. "The habit of some milkers of wetting their hands with milk just as they begin is a filthy practice and the cause of much bad milk and poor butter." There must be no hidden, inaccessible places in the pails, nor must rusty tinware be used, because it imparts a metallic flavor to the milk. Some of the so-called washing powders are very objectionable. The walls of the barn must be whitewashed, and the ventilation such that the air is changed every few minutes. The pails must be rinsed first with cold, then with boiling water. The milk must be removed as soon as possible from the barn, where it readily absorbs dust or bad odors from the air, and then stored in a cold place, far away from decaying vegetables or fruits or other things, the odors of which it might absorb. The sun should pervade the cold storage room but not look on the milk. If possible, the cream should be collected by means of a separator, for the proper handling of which there are a number of rules, the neglect of any one of which will spoil the butter. It is absolutely necessary to cool the cream thoroughly, immediately after separating, and to avoid mixing of cold with warm cream. Then there are a number of directions concerning churning; working the butter to get out the milk and water; packing; marketing; feeding the cows, and so on, none of which can be disregarded with impunity.

This complexity of the art of butter-making may help to explain the situation in America, but does not excuse it, for in the gastronomic countries of Europe people are not too lazy, ignorant, or indifferent to turn out a first-class article every day in the year.

What I wish to call particular attention to is that all these precautions necessary for the making of first-class butter relate to its Flavor. Persons buying butter for any other purpose than the enjoyment of its Flavor are extremely foolish, for they can get the same amount of fat and general nourishment very much cheaper in a hundred other ways.

It is for the sake of securing an agreeable aroma or Flavor that all the rules just enumerated, and two-score more, must be observed. If this is not done—if only one or two of them are neglected—there are developed in the milk, or the cream, or the churned butter, bacteria of a very disagreeable kind, which will convert butter that might have been of the highest grade into a second, third, or fourth grade article, or one quite unfit for human consumption, because of excessively rancid, fishy, smoky, tallowy, leeky, soapy, cheesy, or other flavors. The art of butter-making consists in eliminating all disagreeable flavors and fostering the agreeable ones.

Renovated or process butter is made of butter in which, on account of careless manufacture or storing, the disagreeable bacteria have so got the upper hand of the agreeable ones that even those persons who, because of a slender purse or an imperfectly developed sense of smell, are contented with fourth-grade butter, refuse to buy it. This stuff (often sold, horribile dictu, as "cooking butter") is subjected to a process of purification, which makes it a wholesome and nutritious article of diet. Yet it is sold at a much lower price, for the reason that it is inferior in Flavor to good butter.

The long and fierce fight between the butter-makers and the manufacturers of oleomargarine is also in the final analysis, a question of Flavor.

Oleomargarine is a mixture of vegetable and animal fats, diversely mixed. This mixture is churned with milk to impart a butter Flavor; or there is added to it more or less butter, in which case it is known commercially as butterine, although legally it is classified as oleomargarine.

If made honestly, of clean material, and unadulterated with borated Chinese egg-yolks, or with preservatives, oleomargarine is a perfectly unobjectionable and wholesome food. The trouble is that, as Dr. Wiley has pointed out (1911), "there has been a constant disposition on the part of dishonest manufacturers and dealers, since the time when oleomargarine became a commercial commodity, to sell it as butter. Although the penalties of National and State laws are very severe in this respect the practice is continued. The opportunity for gain is so great that the cupidity of the manufacturer overcomes his fear of punishment and disgrace."

There has been much outcry because of the special tax on oleomargarine and the severe laws against selling it as butter. As a matter of fact these laws should be even more severe and much more rigidly enforced. The practice of selling it as butter not only defrauds the consumer but it tends to drive real butter out of the market, since such butter cannot be produced at nearly so low a cost as margarine, especially if made with the care and expenditure of time necessary for the production of first-class butter. The best butter costs five or six times as much as the best margarine. It is needless to say that in the compounding of "butterine" the best butter is not likely to be used.

By mixing milk or butter with his fats, the manufacturer of margarine confesses that his own product lacks the one thing which gives butter its advantage, for table use, over a dozen other fats that might be chosen—its appetizing Flavor, which makes it digestible and enables us to eat it with relish every day in the year. It is owing to this superiority that pure butter is entitled to legal protection against unfair competition.

It might be argued that the American farmer, whose butter is, as we have seen, usually of a low grade, does not deserve the protection the Government gives him against the underselling of the margarine maker, because good oleomargarine is preferable to bad butter. Such protection is, however, due to the associated system of manufacture known as creameries. The creamery, which in 1900 had already usurped one-half the butter business in the country, "has done much," as Mr. Hayward remarks, "to improve the quality of American butter, and if all butter came direct from creameries there would be no such quantities sold by producers at prices which are often actually below the cost of production, as is the case at the present time."

SWEET BUTTER VERSUS SALT.

There are now a number of model creameries in the United States turning out butter which would probably equal the best European were it not habitually spoiled by the injudicious use of a "starter" to turn the cream quite sour, and by the addition of salt. The subtle and much disputed question of sour cream versus sweet will be discussed in the chapter on French Supremacy. That of "salt or no salt" must be disposed of now.

The assertion frequently made that unsalted butter tastes insipid to most users is not confirmed by my own experience. No doubt the subtle aroma of sweet butter escapes many who are partially anosmic (a frequent defect analogous to color-blindness), or who have neglected to train their sense of smell, or who have deadened their olfactory nerve by excessive smoking or drinking of strong liquors, so that they cannot appreciate the delicate aroma of European butter. But I have come across many Americans at home and abroad who, given a fair chance, instantly and emphatically preferred the unsalted butter.

Once I made a special experiment at a rural boarding house in Maine. Of a dozen persons at the table only one liked salt butter better; two had no decided preference, while the other nine voted, after a fair trial and comparison, for sweet butter first, last, and all the time.

The only trouble was that much more was consumed of the sweet than had been eaten of the salt; which shows the folly of those dealers who think they are smart in selling pounds of salt at the price of butter, whereas in truth they would sell twice as much butter if they left it sweet, because that kind is so much more palatable and tempting. Boarding house keepers will always order salt butter.

Undoubtedly the vast majority of Americans at present prefer, or think they prefer, salted butter. To convince them that this preference simply proves that their gastronomic education has been neglected, let me add a few significant details.

Dr. Wiley, in whose taste, judgment and knowledge we all have so much faith says that "the best grade of butter is that which receives no treatment other than the washing and working process to which attention has been called. This kind of butter is known as natural or unsalted or uncolored butter, that is, a fresh, sweet product of an agreeable aroma, palatable, of fine texture and grain, and is the best product of its kind for human consumption. It also brings the highest price on the market."

Until a few years ago it was almost impossible, even in New York City, to get unsalted butter. To-day it is usually served in the most expensive hotels and restaurants, some of the wealthy folk use it at home, and the general customer has a chance to buy it in a few places, at fancy prices. It is seldom as good as the same product in the humblest inn of Continental Europe, but it is improving from year to year.

In connection with this fact it is interesting to read the words of Chief Hayward, in the Government publication already referred to.

"What is known as the highest class trade demands a much lighter salted butter than is demanded for the lower grades. Furthermore, there is an increasing tendency on the part of the best trade to ask for a butter containing less and less salt. Butter which has a clean, pure flavor needs little salt; that which is off-flavor or tainted in any way is improved by being strongly salted."

In other words, the worse the butter, the more salt it needs, and the better the butter the less salt it needs. From this it follows logically that the best butter needs no salt at all.

The notion that salt "brings out" the Flavor is ridiculous; it spoils it. In the gastronomic countries of Europe the consumer would no more allow salt to be put into the butter he eats than into the cream he puts in his coffee, or the ice-cream he takes for his dessert.

There is absolutely no excuse for continuing the barbarous practice of denaturing American butter by the addition of salt. It does not even help to make it keep. On this point Dr. Wiley remarks: "It is a common supposition that salt in butter is a preservative. This is true when used in large quantities, that is, in quantities which render the butter somewhat unpalatable. The very small quantity of salt used purely for condimental purposes cannot be regarded as aiding in any material way the preservation of the product."

There is also a comic side to the question and the joke is on the butter-maker and dealer. I have already pointed out that we are tempted to eat much more of the sweet butter than of the salt. There is another weighty reason why the makers would profit by leaving out the salt. Dr. Wiley observes that "there is a tendency on the part of the greedy manufacturer to add excessive quantities of salt because it is very much cheaper than the butter itself and thus he hopes to add to the profit of the industry. On the contrary this practice usually results in loss, since such highly salted butter naturally brings the lowest price."

The funniest part of the story remains to be told. By throwing in handfuls of salt the maker not only lowers the market price of his butter but also decreases its weight! Read Assistant Chief Hayward's explanation of this seeming paradox:

"Butter will usually weigh less after the salt has been added and the butter worked than before. This is due to the fact, already mentioned, that salt unites, or collects, the small drops of moisture into drops so large that they can be separated from the butter, and, as the total weight of the water or brine thus separated exceeds the weight of salt added, the butter consequently loses weight by reason of salting."

If, in spite of all this, the butter-maker and dealer persist in foisting strongly salted butter on you, beware! It can only be because, as Chief Hayward has pointed out, "that which is 'off flavor' or tainted in any way, is improved by being strongly salted." Do you wish to habitually eat bad butter thus "improved"? Can it be possible that you do not resent being the dupe of the astute butter men?

[IV]
THE SCIENCE OF SAVORY COOKING

DESIRABLE RAW FOODS.

NOBODY wants a boiled or fried orange or grapefruit for breakfast. Other fruits, such as apples, pears, peaches, plums, cherries, grapes, and diverse berries are often cooked, in many ways; but when ripe, sound and of good stock, they usually "taste" better raw than cooked. We do not boil our melons, nuts, or radishes, nor, as a rule, our celery and green-salad leaves of various kinds, or our cucumbers. Tomatoes make an excellent stew, but they are better still sliced raw, with vinegar and oil, and best of all eaten out of hand right off the plant.

These things nearly everybody knows. Many, however, are not aware that the best thing about a cabbage is the core, eaten raw, and that carrots, turnips, and particularly peas, when young and tender, are far better raw than cooked. Raw carrots taste a little like celery. One of my chief delights when on a farm is to stroll about the garden and orchard, sampling the various vegetables, berries, and fruits just before breakfast.

A tolerable case might thus be made out for those faddists who preach the gospel of raw food. Like all fads, it is nevertheless foolish. Were we to accept it, we might still eat sun-dried meat, or ham, sausages, and fish thoroughly smoked, but we would hardly care to eat raw bacon, or veal, or mutton, or poultry, or beef (though a "beefsteak à la Tartare" is edible when buried under diverse "trimmings" from the delicatessen store). I should like to see a faddist eat a raw potato or beet, or a plateful of raw pumpkin, squash, or beans!

Were we to live on raw foods altogether, we might survive to tell the tale, but we should have to give up that infinite variety which is the chief spice of our diet. At the same time one of the great arts of civilization would vanish from the earth—an art which does as much to distinguish us from animals as the fine arts do—more so, in fact, for birds sing and beavers build houses, but no bird or other animal ever cooks its food.

FLAVOR AS THE GUIDING PRINCIPLE.

"Cookery is an art which almost more than any other has civilized mankind," as President E. B. Tylor of the British Anthropological Association has truly said.

Before breakfast in the garden

Nor is it only an art; it is also a science—or rather, it is becoming a science. From time immemorial cooks have, by instinct or accident, often done the right thing; but in the absence of a guiding principle, scientifically formulated, they have much more frequently made a mess of it.

There are four reasons for cooking food: to sterilize it; to make it more nutritious; to make it more easily digestible; and to improve or vary its Flavor.

Cooking destroys the germs of typhoid and other diseases which may lurk in food products, and it also retards the general decomposition which may result in ptomaine poisoning.

It has long been believed that raw or semi-raw meat is more nutritious than meat which has been moderately cooked; but this is not true. It is true, on the other hand, that in the ordinary methods of cooking there is often a considerable loss of nutriment. The United States Department of Agriculture has had a number of experiments made to place this question on a scientific basis.[5] Much remains to be done, but in the end it will doubtless be found that there is no appreciable loss if French methods are followed.

That cooking makes most foods more digestible it is needless to prove. Even fruits which taste better raw, digest more readily when cooked. A great many persons who cannot, for instance, eat apples, find them not only agreeable but easily assimilated and most beneficial to health when stewed or baked. Cereals (particularly oatmeal) and many vegetables and meats need cooking—sometimes hours of it to make them easy to masticate and digest.

The main object of cooking, however, is to preserve and develop the countless savors latent in good raw material, to combine them or to add others where the material is deficient in natural Flavor.

This is the guiding principle to the science of cookery. Strange to say, there are cook books in which the word Flavor is not to be found! The recipes given in such books may be correct, but to follow them mechanically is like playing the notes of a piano piece without knowing anything about expression marks. Flavor is the soul of food as expression is the soul of music.

Born cooks know this instinctively and act on it. But cooks can also be made. Tremendous improvement could be effected in our kitchens in a short time by attending to the elements of the Science of Savory Cooking, long since discovered, but usually ignored.

Much has been written about the wastefulness in our households. A French family, we have been told a thousand times, could live on what is thrown away in an American kitchen. True; but as long as we enjoy our present national prosperity this waste is a far less deplorable matter than the criminal way in which ignorant or careless persons habitually denature our best food materials by allowing the healthful Flavors to escape during the process of cooking.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOUP MAKING AND EATING.

In each of the processes of cooking, such as boiling, roasting, frying, stewing, steaming, baking, it is necessary to observe certain elementary rules which can easily be taught.

Boiling. In boiling meat, everything depends on whether the object is to keep the juices within the meat or to get them out; in other words, whether the meat is intended to be eaten, or simply used for the purpose of making a rich, flavorful bouillon or soup. If the meat is to be eaten, it is plunged at once into boiling water, which coagulates the protein on the outside and prevents the loss of the juices. The bigger the chunk, the better.

If the meat is not to be eaten, it is put into a pot of cold water and the temperature is raised gradually. In this case the richest broth is obtained if the meat is cut up into small pieces and cooked a long time.

It is almost universally believed that "soup meat" (usually beef) boiled in this way has lost most of its nutritive qualities and that these have gone into the soup. In reality, it is all a matter of Flavor. We prefer the soup to the meat boiled in it, merely because the Flavor of the meat has been transferred to the soup. The nutritive matter remains in the meat; the soup stock has very little of it—from one to five per cent. only. It is evident, therefore, as Dr. Wiley points out, that "the soup stock is valuable as a condiment and flavoring and not as a food."

The same is true of beef extract, which is simply a concentrated soup stock—thirty-four pounds of beef boiled down into one pound.

Here we have the whole philosophy of soup making and soup eating, reduced to the simplest terms. Soup contains the essence of meat Flavor, and we eat it at the beginning of a meal because this Flavor stimulates the appetite, which in turn causes the digestive juices to flow freely. The richer the soup is in Flavor, the more it stimulates the appetite. The beef extracts sold in little jars are, if made by reputable firms, among the most valuable appetizers—invaluable, in fact, in a country in which the science of making savory soup is so little understood or practised as it is in the United States.

The makers of meat extracts have laid themselves open to censure by making extravagant claims as to the nutritive properties of these extracts, instead of dwelling principally on their importance as flavorful appetizers. This, to be sure, they could hardly have been expected to do until the all-importance of Flavor in Food had been impressed on the public in a special monograph.

WHEREIN LIES THE VALUE OF VEGETABLES?

Except for the making of soup stock, and of extracts and beef tea, boiling of meats is not much in vogue in America. Vegetables, on the other hand, are usually boiled—and thereby hangs a melancholy tale.

Boiled they should be, but not in the careless, unscientific way generally practised in America and England, where they usually are served at table entirely denatured, that is, deprived of their Flavors.

Villainous and idiotic are the only adjectives that adequately describe this method of cooking vegetables, for their utility as food lies chiefly in these Flavors, the nutritive value of green vegetables being small.

How small it is may be seen by the analysis given in Dr. Wiley's "Foods and their Adulteration," Part VI, where he says, for example: "There is very little nourishment obtained in eating a turnip which perhaps is 95 per cent. water,—yet its palatability, its condimental character, and its general salutary effect upon digestion is such as to make it worth while to pay even a high price in proportion to its nutriment."

If the reader wants more evidence on this point he may find it in Sir Henry Thompson's valuable book, Food and Feeding. Speaking of "the entire cabbage tribe in great variety; lettuces, endives, and cresses; spinach, sea-kale, asparagus, celery, onions, artichokes, and tomato," he remarks that all these are "valuable not so much for nutritive property, which is not considerable, as for admixture with other food chiefly on account of salts which they contain, and for their appetizing aroma and Flavor."

Therefore, to boil green vegetables without the slightest attempt to preserve or develop their natural Flavors, as is almost universally done in our country, is, I repeat, villainous and idiotic.

Americans undoubtedly eat too much meat. Preaching about the injuriousness of this excess may do some good, but a much more effective way would be to cook vegetables more temptingly.

If peas and string beans are succulent and fresh, they are delicious when simply boiled in salted water. In cities they seldom are quite fresh, and, as a rule, it is well to add soup stock or butter to develop the Flavor. In any case, it is of importance that the water should be already boiling when the vegetables are put in. If this is not the case, there is a loss of valuable salts and Flavors. Some loss there must always be; that is, the water always absorbs some of these juices and Flavors; but note the difference. French cooks preserve this vegetable stock, as they do the meat stock, for diverse combinations. Our cooks pour it down the sink.

It is fortunate that the United States Government has undertaken to establish the principles of savory cooking by scientific methods, which will lead to more satisfaction and generally helpful results than the empirical, haphazard methods hitherto followed by cooks.

An interesting glimpse into the kitchen laboratories of our Government experts is given by Murray in his "Economy of Food."

"It is obvious," he says, "that the loss of nutrients will be increased by cutting the vegetables into small pieces, and by soaking them in cold water before cooking. In the case of potatoes, turnips, and similar products, the loss might be greatly diminished by cooking them whole with the skins on, but as a rule this method is not practicable.

"These conclusions are confirmed by the experiments of Snyder,[6] Frisby, and Bryant. They found that when potatoes were peeled, cut into pieces in the usual way, and soaked in cold water before boiling about half the total nitrogen—including about a quarter of the true albuminoids—was lost. When put into cold water and cooked at once, only about a sixth of the total nitrogen—including a twelfth part of the true albuminoids—was lost. When the potatoes were put, at once, into boiling water, the loss was only about half the amount recorded in the last case; but, for some reason, this method is not suitable for some kinds of potatoes, as they 'go to smash' if so treated. The loss from potatoes boiled in their skins was quite inconsiderable, being less than one per cent. of the total nitrogen.

"In boiling carrots which had been scraped and cut into pieces, the amount of the loss was found to depend almost entirely upon the size of the pieces. Small pieces lost about 40 per cent. of the total nitrogen and 26 per cent. of the sugar. With large pieces, the loss of nitrogen was about 20 per cent. and of sugar, 15 per cent."

A number of useful hints for the practical cook are supplied by these scientific experiments.

It is needless to say that in potatoes and beets, and in dried vegetables, like beans, corn, and peas, the proportion of nutriment is greater than in the succulent greens. In the cooking of dried vegetables the preservation and development of Flavors is also of great importance, with a view especially to digestibility. Unlike the green, the dried vegetables should be cooked by putting them into cold water; and prolonged cooking is necessary in order to soften and otherwise prepare them for the alimentary canal.

Our benevolent Government a few years ago engaged one of the country's chief cooking experts, Maria Parloa, to write a brief treatise on the Preparation of Vegetables for the Table for free distribution by the Department of Agriculture as Farmers' Bulletin No. 256. Like all these documents, it is excellent; in less than fifty pages it explains the best ways of cooking potatoes, beans, peas, carrots, asparagus and two-score more of the products of the garden; and these pages are followed by others on vegetable soups, seasoning and sauces for vegetables, and salads and salad dressings.

Every cook, urban as well as rural, should have a copy of this pamphlet and mark with a red pencil the more important directions. If every cook in the country knew and practised only the following directions given in this useful document, what a transformation there would be in our dining-rooms!

"All green vegetables, roots, and tubers should be crisp and firm when put on to cook. If for any reason a vegetable has lost its firmness and crispness, it should be soaked in very cold water until it becomes plump and crisp. With new vegetables this will be only a matter of minutes, while old roots and tubers often require many hours."

"All vegetables should be thoroughly cooked, but the cooking should stop while the vegetable is still firm." "Over-cooked vegetables are inferior in flavor and often indigestible." "Badly cooked, water-soaked vegetables very generally cause digestive disturbances, which are often serious." Cabbage "is apt to be indigestible and cause flatulence when it is improperly cooked. On the other hand, it can be cooked so that it will be delicate and digestible."

Steaming is one of the best ways of cooking vegetables. It is largely practised in France and Germany, but neglected in England as it is in America. Potatoes have more of their natural Flavor when steamed than when cooked any other way. An English writer says on this point: "Steaming has the double advantage of conserving the Flavor and making the food more digestible. Its only drawback is that it takes more time, and this is probably the reason why it has somewhat fallen into disfavor in England."

BROILING, ROASTING, BAKING, FRYING.

As this volume is not intended to be a practical cook-book, no attempt is made to give rules for all the various processes of cooking food; nor is it necessary, for nearly every family owns a cook-book giving the required directions. What I wish to emphasize is that in all these processes the rules given by the best chefs refer directly or indirectly to the preservation and development of the food Flavors. A few brief paragraphs will suffice to prove this point.

Broiling. As one expert puts it: "The ideal to be reached in broiling steak is to sear the surface very quickly, so that the juices which contain the greater part of the flavoring of the meat shall be kept in, and then to allow the heat to penetrate to the inside until the whole mass is cooked to the taste of the family. To pass the point where the meat ceases to be puffy and juicy and becomes flat and hard is very undesirable, as the palatability is then lost. Exactly the same ideal should be kept in mind in broiling chopped meat. If this were always done, hard, compact, tasteless balls or cakes of meat would be served less often."

The three words I have italicized show that in this case, as in all others, my contention is borne out that Flavor is the guiding principle in all scientific cooking.

The use of the gridiron for a broil, or "grill," as the English call it (after the French griller), also imparts to the meat a slightly burnt taste relished by epicures.

Roasting. Why is our roast beef usually so insipid and unappetizing?

Sometimes the inferior quality of the meat is to blame, but more frequently our disappointment is due to the cook's indolence or the substitution of baking for roasting.

Real roasting is like broiling in so far as it requires exposure of the meat to an open fire. It differs from broiling in that it also calls for frequent basting, that is, taking up with a spoon the fat which flows from the meat and pouring it over the surface, thus aiding the initial searing in keeping in the juices, on which the Flavor depends.

Ordinary cooks are too lazy to baste and therefore this precious juice escapes into the pan, where it is in turn spoiled by a deluge of water and an uncooked mass of flour, the resulting liquid being a sorry substitute for real, savory gravy.

In place of roast meat most families now have to put up with baked meat. Baking in an open pan in a modern range results in the tainting of the meat with the disagreeable flavor of charred fat spattered by the cooking process against the top and the sides of the oven. The oven being unventilated, and not easily washed, the result is a permanent "oven taste" in the roast beef, mutton, veal, pork, or chicken, which is almost as exasperating to a discerning diner as the taint of cold-storage poultry.

This objectionable oven taste can be eliminated by using a double roasting pan, which also has, to a certain extent, the advantage of being self-basting. A conscientious cook, who knows the value of Flavor and of real gravy, will nevertheless look after the basting personally.

The value of gravy is far too little understood. Nothing is more appetizing in association with a good plain roast than the gravy made from its fat and some of its juices. In starting a roast it is of prime importance to expose the meat at once to a very high temperature so as to sear the surface and (as already stated) keep the juice in the meat. But before the searing process is completed, enough of the juice usually escapes to make, in combination with the fat which continues to ooze out, a delicious gravy.

The French do not add flour to gravy; if it is added, it should at least be used sparingly, and cooked five to eight minutes in the gravy.

Frying. Give a dog a bad name, etc.! Frying has been denounced as an invention of the devil, a source of countless digestive disorders. As ordinarily practised it fully deserves its evil repute. From a dietetic as well as a gastronomic point of view nothing could be more objectionable than the fried steaks, bacon, potatoes, and diverse deadly fritters daily placed on hundreds of thousands of American tables. But frying on rational principles is an entirely wholesome and most desirable branch of the science of savory cooking.

Success or failure in this branch is chiefly a matter of temperature. At the moment the meat, fish, or vegetable is put into the fat, this must be sufficiently hot to coagulate the surface so that (as in the processes of roasting or broiling) the juices with their Flavors are kept within.

If the fat is not hot enough, the food comes out soaked with grease and highly indigestible. On the other hand, care must be taken that the fat is not scorched. This point is best explained in one of the Agricultural Department's helpful publications.[7]

"The chief reason for the bad opinion in which fried food is held by many is that it almost always means eating burnt fat. When fat is heated too high it splits up into fatty acids and glycerin, and from the glycerin is formed a substance (acrolein) which has a very irritating effect upon the mucous membrane. All will recall that the fumes of scorched fat make the eyes water. It is not surprising that such a substance, if taken into the stomach, should cause digestive disturbance. Fat in itself is very valuable food, and the objection to fried foods because they may be fat seems illogical."

The temperature required varies with the different foods and styles desired. On this point, as well as on the relative merits of the various baths to be used, sufficient information is given in cook books. The best frying baths are made of suet and veal fat, fresh butter, and pure olive oil. For the sake of economy, and variety in flavor, it is also advisable to use the drippings from fried bacon, ham, or sausage—but not from fish.

In speaking of broiled meat I referred to the slightly burnt taste which is relished by epicures—somewhat as dissonances are by music-lovers. In the case of fried and roast meats, properly browned on the surface, there is a somewhat similar but less dissonant flavor which comes from browning the meat with fat. If the browning has been done scientifically many persons (I am one of them) prefer the outside slices of roast meat to the inside.

COMBINING THE FLAVORS OF MEATS AND VEGETABLES.

Apart from the adventitious browned flavors just referred to there are in broiled, baked, and roast meats usually no combination flavors except such as come from the butter and salt that are added after the meat is done.

Two most important details to know are that if the salt is put on meat before it is broiled, it allows the juices to escape; but that in frying a steak (which is not a barbarism if properly done) salt added at once helps to make a delicious gravy.

In the frying of meats or of vegetables (parsnips, carrots, egg plant, oyster plant, and particularly potatoes) a desirable extra flavor can also be added by using the fat previously fried out of bacon, ham, or sausages, or the fat from a pot-roast or the soup kettle.

Endless possibilities for combination Flavors are offered by two of the cooking processes: boiling and stewing. The first of these has already been briefly considered under the head of the Philosophy of Soupmaking.

Stewing is not usually considered one of the most "high-toned" of cooking processes; yet, if scientifically done—think of a real Irish stew!—it provides dishes second to none in savoriness—dishes fit for gods, kings, and epicures. And a man might live a hundred years and have a new variety of stew every day, so great are the possible permutations and combinations of vegetables and meats.

More savory results can often be secured by stewing than by any other process of cooking. It is well-known that the "sweetest" (that is, the most highly flavored) meat is that near a bone. Moreover, the bone itself, thoroughly cooked, yields most agreeable flavors of its own. Now, in making stews, the bony parts (shoulder, neck, end-pieces of ribs) are used, and the prolonged cooking called for by this process results in extracting all the sweetness from the bones and the meat nearest them. Boiling yields similar results, but the savors pass into the liquid, leaving the meat almost flavorless, whereas in a stew the flavors enrich the gravy, the vegetables, and the meat alike, in a particularly appetizing manner.

In ordinary stewing—the method of preparing the French boeuf à la mode, or the Irish stew—the meat and the vegetables are put into water and allowed to simmer slowly.

A more elaborate method of stewing is known as braising. In this process a strong liquor of vegetables and meats is used in place of water, and it is usually advised that both the vegetables and the meat be fried in a little fat before being placed in the pot to braise.

This does not seem altogether scientific, because in a stew the object is not to keep in the juices but to get them out and combine them.

A less objectionable way, which some consider the last refinement necessary to produce a first rate braise is thus described: "Have well-fitted to the braise-pot a sunk copper or iron cover, in which some hot coals or charcoal are placed, in order to transmit downwards a scorching heat to the top of the portion which is uncovered by the liquid in the pot below. In this case it is usual to cover the portion, especially if a fowl, with a piece of white paper, which serves to shield a delicate morsel from a too fierce heat."[8]

SAVORY FOOD FOR EVERYBODY.

It is to be greatly regretted that in America, as in England, the process of making diverse savory stews is so little understood. For not only do such dishes appeal to the most fastidious epicures, but a thorough and general knowledge of correct stewing would go far toward solving the problem of providing savory food for everybody.

Too many Americans look on the ability to buy the most expensive cuts of butcher's meats as the gauge of prosperity, if not respectability. Now, the difference between these expensive cuts and the cheaper ones lies much less in their nutritive value than in their texture and flavor.

Inasmuch as I am preaching throughout this volume that the Flavor is all-important, this ought to justify the general scramble for the more expensive cuts, but it does not; for in truth these differences in Flavor and tenderness can be obliterated by skilful cooking, especially in the stew pan.

It has been well said that "the real superiority of a good cook lies not so much in the preparation of expensive or fancy dishes as in the attractive preparation of inexpensive dishes for every day and in the skilful combination of flavors."

Has not the French chef been praised a thousand times for his alleged ability to prepare a host of toothsome dishes from thistletops?

The Government at Washington, which so kindly looks after our welfare in many ways, has not overlooked this matter. In a pamphlet (to which reference has already been made,) issued as Farmers' Bulletin 391 for free distribution, and entitled "Economical Use of Meat in the Home," two of the Government's experts in nutrition, Dr. C. F. Langworthy and Caroline L. Hunt, have given forty-three pages of practical information and advice, which, if generally heeded, would not only go far toward solving the high-cost-of-food problem, but toward making us a gastronomic nation. It is a document which cannot be too highly commended to the attention of all who are interested in cooking and eating.

The object of the pamphlet is to show that the number of "tasty" dishes which a good cook can make out of the cheaper cuts of meat or meat "left over" is almost endless. Directions are given for developing the natural flavor of meat even in the cheapest cuts and for further heightening the savors by the judicious use of condiments and sauces; and these general directions are followed by a number of special recipes, for making stews with dumplings; meat pies; meat with macaroni, or beans, or eggs; meat with vinegar, casserole cookery; pounded or chopped meat, etc.

In conclusion the authors refer to the strange prejudice which some housekeepers seem to have against economizing in the ways suggested by them; upon which they comment that surely "the intelligent housekeeper should take as much pride in setting a good table at a low price as the manufacturer does in lessening the cost of production in his factory."

The trouble with most cookbooks is that they are so bulky that few have the patience to wade through them to get at the general remarks to be found here and there. This Government bulletin is so short, and yet covers so much ground, that it is likely to do a vast amount of missionary work in American kitchens.

MEAT EATING OF THE FUTURE.

Boycotting the butchers may be an effective way of temporarily lowering the price of meat, but to make it permanently cheaper another method must be followed: we must eat less and thus decrease the demand.

This we can do without depriving ourselves of any of the coveted pleasures of the table. We like to eat meats because we enjoy their Flavors; but it is possible and easy to enjoy these same Flavors in a way which makes our meals not only more economical but also more nutritious.

This method has long been in use, but not to such an extent as it should be. It consists in extending the flavor of meat to other material which costs less but has a higher nutritive value.

The most valuable pages of the Bulletin referred to in the last section are those exemplifying the diverse methods of thus extending the flavor of meat. The recipes are preceded by these illuminating words:

"Common household methods of extending the meat flavor through a considerable quantity of material which would otherwise be lacking in distinctive taste are to serve the meat with dumplings, generally in the dish with it, to combine the meat with crusts, as in meat pies or meat rolls, or to serve the meat on toast and biscuits. Borders of rice, hominy, or mashed potatoes are examples of the same principles applied in different ways. By serving some preparation of flour, rice, hominy, or other food rich in starch with the meat we get a dish which in itself approaches nearer to the balanced ration than meat alone and one in which the meat flavor is extended through a large amount of the material."

Dr. Wiley, in discussing this aspect of the question, goes so far as to express the conviction that "the meat eating of the future may not be regarded so much as a necessity as it has in the past, but that meats will be used more as condimental substances than as staple foods."

Meats as condiments rather than as foods! There is a revolutionary doctrine for you!—a doctrine subversive of all the beliefs and practices of the past! Yet it is a doctrine which meat-eaters may accept calmly in view of the fact that what delights them in meat is its Flavor, and that even with a minimum quantity of meat this flavor can be preserved, developed, and extended in the diverse ways hinted at in the preceding pages.

In view of this truth, meat-eaters should ponder what Dr. Wiley says in favor of our eating less meat than we do and using it as a condiment:

"In all meat, for instance, that costs twenty-five cents a pound, such as steaks, there is over one-third or a half of it which is inedible, so that the edible portion really costs double the amount. On the contrary, when a pound of flour or maize is purchased, the price of which is perhaps only one-eighth that of meat, the whole of it is edible. Thus, from the mere point of economy as well as nutrition, the superiority of cereals and other vegetable products is at once evident. On the one hand, a cereal is almost a complete food containing all the elements necessary to nutrition, and it costs only a few cents a pound. On the other hand, a steak or roast is only a partial food and it costs much more than cereals."

THE FOLLY OF VEGETARIANISM.

The vegetarians who would banish all meat from our diet must not infer from the remarks just quoted that Dr. Wiley endorses their doctrine. He is an epicure as well as a man of science, and no epicure will ever advocate exclusive vegetarianism. While conceding that man "cannot be nourished by meat alone," but that he "can live and flourish without meat," he holds that he "is an omnivorous animal both by evolution and necessarily by heredity"; and he has written much, and con amore, about the pleasures of the table provided by meats cooked in savory ways.

It is needless to dwell on the fact that most persons find meats more appetizing and digestible than any other foods, and that it would therefore be ridiculous as well as harmful to banish them from our tables.

The chief argument against vegetarianism is that it would deprive us of thousands of the delicious plain or combination Flavors which make our food appetizing and digestible; and this argument is so irrefutable, so crushing, that not another word need be wasted on the subject. The Flavor Test settles it for all time, as it does everything relating to food.

WHEN TO USE CONDIMENTS AND SAUCES.

Salt has been defined humorously as that which, if not put in the soup, spoils it.

Potatoes, eggs, and many other foods are thus "spoiled" if eaten without a pinch of salt. It is, in fact, added to most cooked foods, by whatever methods prepared.

Bread requires a considerable amount of salt to make it tasty. American bakers usually put in too little, and that is not only one of the reasons why our bread is so inferior to the best European, but explains the prevalence of the habit of eating salted butter, which, as previously pointed out, is as great a gastronomic barbarism as it would be to eat salted ice cream or drink salted coffee or tea, although under the circumstances it is more pardonable than it would be if the bakers were not such bunglers.

In many countries some of the most important condiments—salt, sugar, vinegar, mustard, and pepper—are placed on the table so that every one may season his food to suit his individual taste. Yet in most cases these condiments do not give such good results when used at table as when added to the food while it is cooking.

It is well known that nothing so exasperates a French cook as to see some one (Americans and Englishmen are the chief sinners) take a salt shaker in one hand, a pepper box in the other, and sprinkle their contents over the dish he has prepared, without even trying to find out whether he had properly seasoned it in the kitchen.

Our addiction to such a habit is, of course, a lamentable confession that our cooks usually know not how to season food. It comes to us generally in such an insipid condition that we take it for granted that we must do something to make it palatable.

Apart from the table condiments just named there are many others which are usually reserved for the kitchen. Among these are allspice, bay leaf, capers, celery seed, cinnamon, cloves, curry, garlic, onions, ginger, nutmeg, sage, thyme. Also, a great variety of bottled sauces and of flavoring extracts, such as the essences of vanilla, lemon, almonds, etc.

At the risk of wearying the reader by seeming always to harp on the same string, I must call attention to the fact that, with the sole important exception of sugar, all these diverse condiments have practically no direct nutritive value but are used the world over simply because of their agreeable Flavors.

If they lose these Flavors—as they do if their volatile essences escape, or if they are adulterated (which is frequent, because so easy) the only thing to do is to throw them into the garbage pail.

Greater even than the number of spices and condiments is that of sauces. These, also, are of two kinds: some of them, like tomato, walnut, or mushroom catsups, Worcestershire sauce, pickles, and tabasco, are served at table, while another very large class of sauces is usually made fresh in the kitchen for each meal.

All of these sauces—once more it must be parroted—like the spices and condiments just discussed, are valued solely because of their Flavors—their importance to the Science of Savory Cooking.

One of the most important branches of this science relates to the proper use of sauces and condiments.

Many persons commit the gastronomic sin of pouring a bottled sauce over a plate of meat or fish without previously ascertaining whether it needs any seasoning.

Surely, among all the food Flavors, nothing is more delicious than the natural savor of fresh sole or salmon, or a juicy steak or chop just off the grill. To put any kind of sauce—be it the best in the world—on such a dish is as unpardonable as it would be to pour cologne over a bunch of fragrant violets.

It is when the fish is a trifle "tired," or the meat without much flavor of its own, as so often happens, that these commercial sauces come to the rescue. Used only on such occasions, they have their value; and they are also desirable because of the variety they supply in the combination of flavors.

The French make hardly any use of bottled sauces; theirs are domestic, made in their own kitchens, and they attach more importance to them than to anything else in culinary art.

"Sauces, by the care and labor they require, by the costly sacrifices which they necessarily involve, ought to be considered as the essential basis of good cookery," according to Dubois-Bernard. "A man is never a good cook," he adds, "if he does not possess a perfect knowledge of sauces, and if he has not made a special study of the methodical principles on which their perfection depends."

The sauces provided in Parisian restaurants and private houses are certainly delicious; yet the French often err—and that is almost their only serious gastronomic fault—in sacrificing to them the delicious natural Flavors of diverse prime meats, just as Americans and Englishmen do by pouring on their bottled sauces.

Butter has among its many virtues that of developing the natural Flavors of meats and vegetables and may therefore often be used as a sauce in plain cooking à l'Anglaise. But, except for occasional variety, other sauces should be allowed to assert themselves over the natural food flavors only when these are not of the best.

COOK BOOKS.

Theodore Child—an American gastronomic missionary who unfortunately died young while traveling in Persia—remarks in his book, Delicate Feasting, that while there are hundreds of cook books, many of them admirable in their way, and bought by many, few are read or used, for the reason that most of them consist of a vast number of recipes, and "a cook must be already very learned in his art in order to know how to use them with advantage."

In other words, these books fail to explain the principles of the art of cooking—the ways of preserving, developing, and combining Flavors—as I have attempted to do in this chapter.

There are exceptions, and the best of these, so far as I know, is Mary Ronald's Century Cook Book in which various methods of cooking are explained lucidly, so that those who boil, fry, broil, and so on, not only may know what to do but why to do it thus and not otherwise. The different sections, on meats, fish, vegetables, entrées, breads, desserts, etc., all have prefatory pages of most useful condensed information.

A fairly complete list of the best cook books and other treatises on gastronomic topics may be found in Ellwanger's Pleasures of the Table.

No fewer than 2,500 books and brochures, mostly French, are listed in George's Vicaire's Bibliographic Gastronomique.

Probably the best and most widely used of the French cook books are those of Urbain-Dubois. There are seven of them: Cuisine Classique, Cuisine Artistique, Grand Livre des Patissiers et des Confiseurs, Patisserie D'Aujourd'hui, Cuisine D'Aujourd'hui, Ecole des Cuisiniers, and La Cuisine de tous les Pays, which includes recipes of all the nations who know how to eat.

To another French classic, Richardin's La Cuisine Française (L'Art du Bien Manger) with its 2,000 recettes, its menus of historic as well as gastronomic interest, I shall refer in the next chapter.

The Germans and Austrians not only have books on the special ways of preparing food prevalent in different parts of the country, but books about the specialties of other countries, such as the making of marmalade in the English way, etc.

The author of Die Kunst des Essens, Emil Weissenturn, took the trouble to make lists of the still surviving cook books of various countries. Of 17 written in the fifteenth century, 10 were Latin, 1 English, while Germany, Italy and France each contributed 2. In the sixteenth century Latin was still in the lead with 42, followed by Germany with 30 and France with 21. Italy contributed 16, Spain 5, Greece 2, England 2.

In the seventeenth century France heads the list with 104 books; Germany printed 39, 31 were in Latin, 18 Italian, 10 English, 7 Dutch, 1 Portuguese, 1 Swedish. In the eighteenth century Germany comes to the fore with 96, France following with 60 and England with 34; 14 are in Latin, 11 Dutch, 5 Italian, 4 Spanish, 3 Swedish.

In the nineteenth century Germany's lead is still more remarkable—374 books as against 152 contributed by France. England makes a spurt with 118. Italy rises to 15; Sweden contributes 10, Holland 8, Poland 7, while Latin survives with 7.

Of recent English and American books that have come to me for review I liked particularly Nicolas Soyer's Standard Cookery, Marvin H. Neil's How to Cook in Casserole Dishes and Practical Cooking and Serving, by Janet McKenzie Hill, which is a complete manual of not only how to cook food, but how to select and serve it. The author is the editor of the "Boston Cooking School Magazine," and she has a great deal of interesting and valuable information to impart.

In 1911 Soyer's Paper Bag Cookery was published. In it the famous chef who originated paper bag cookery—which has many advantages provided the right kind of paper is used—explained his method. His Standard Cookery includes the substance of the smaller book while at the same time covering all the branches of cooking, with over four hundred pages of menus. Hors-d'Œuvres are here treated more fully than in any other English book, fifteen pages being given to them. No fewer than seventy pages are given to this subject in Escoffier's excellent Le Guide Culinaire.

Chafing dish cooking

French raffinement is shown in many of Soyer's recipes. Under "Fried Eggs," for example the average American cook will read with astonishment that they should be dealt with one at a time and that, with a wooden spoon, the yolk should be quickly covered up with the solidified portions of the white in order to keep the former soft. Imagine Bridget taking so much trouble. She might, perhaps, be induced to heed these directions in making an omelette: "Heat the pan until nearly a brown color. This will not only lend an exquisite taste to the omelette but will be found to ensure the perfect setting of the eggs." Such seeming trifles make perfection.

Casserole Cookery is quite important enough to have a book to itself; it is the cookery of the future, and Mme. Neil's monograph of 252 pages should be, like the Century Cook Book and Soyer's Standard Cookery, or Mme. Hill's book, in every kitchen.

In French restaurants more is always charged for casserole dishes than for others and they are decidedly worth it. The Flavor of food is particularly rich and appetizing when it has been cooked slowly in earthenware pots. For braising, pot roasting, and stewing, which are slow-cooking processes, the casserole is far superior to metal pans in every way.

Chafing Dish Cooking is treated in Chapter XIV of the Century Cook Book, and there are several smaller volumes specially devoted to this interesting branch of the art—dining-room cooking it might be called—one by Alice L. James.

Who has not enjoyed a welsh rarebit made in a chafing dish—or terrapin, or lobster à la Newburg, or chicken livers, or crab toast, smelts, venison, etc.?

For housekeepers of moderate means who want to know what wonders of palatable cooking can be achieved with scraps and left-overs, among other things, no guide is better than The Helping Hand Cook Book by Marion Harland and Christine Terhune Herrick. It contains menus for every breakfast, lunch and dinner from the first of January to the last of December.

While purchasers of fireless cookers are always provided with brief printed instructions, I would advise every owner of such a box to get a copy of Margaret J. Mitchell's Fireless Cook Book, which contains full directions, with recipes and menus. The question of seasoning is discussed; there are chapters on meats, vegetables, desserts, etc.; hints as to how to tell good material from bad; directions to prevent over or under cooking, etc.

[V]
A NOBLE ART

NO one who has read the last chapter, and Chapter II can fail to be convinced that cooking is not only a science, but the most important of all sciences—the science on which our health depends more than on any other; a science concerning which Sir Henry Thompson has truly said that an adequate recognition of its value in prolonging healthy life and in promoting cheerful temper, prevalent good nature, and improved moral tone, "would achieve almost a revolution in the habits of a large part of the community."

Nor is cookery merely a science, it is also an art. It can and will be classed in the future as one of the fine arts.

A famous French lawyer once declared that he would not believe in the advent of real civilization until a chef had been elected a member of the Institute of Arts and Sciences.

The details given in the preceding chapter show how a good cook can vary the Flavors of food as a composer varies his orchestral colors; and if she does her work with intelligence and con amore she can get genuine artistic delight therefrom. At the same time she will have the moral satisfaction of knowing that she is giving gastronomic pleasure to those who benefit by her art.

A cook can be genuinely creative, inventing new sauces, new flavors, new combinations, new dishes, with appropriate names for them, thus acquiring universal fame, as did Carême and many others, among them Béchamel, whose name has become a household word the world over, not because he was a marquis but because he invented a new sauce.

From a moral point of view, cooking is one of the noblest of the arts. The old adage that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach is often sneered at as being materialistic if not coarse. It is no such thing; it simply hints at the truth that it is extremely difficult for a man to be amiable and loving when he suffers the pangs of dyspepsia. On this subject one of the 30,000 persons who wrote to the London "Telegraph" in answer to the question, "Is Marriage A Failure?" made some remarks which every young woman who is, or expects to be, a wife should ponder deeply:

Where the husband is an intellectual man, and engaged in intellectual pursuits, good cookery assumes a tenfold importance, as the want of physical exercise entailed by most intellectual occupations renders it imperative that all food eaten shall be of first-class quality and cooked to perfection. The most intellectual man in existence ceases to be intellectual while he has a couple of pounds or so of bad food slowly decaying in his stomach instead of digesting. Is "A Young Girl's" ideal of married life to have the man she loves always bright and cheerful, always intellectual, and generally at his best, and to have as strong and healthy, and even brighter and better company, at sixty and seventy than at twenty-four? I am sure it is. Then let her give him a chance of realizing that ideal by giving the utmost attention to his dinners, so that the food he eats is on his stomach and brain like feathers, and not like lead. If she wishes him to degenerate into an ill-tempered, exacting grumbler before forty, or to prefer dining anywhere rather than at home, then let her devote herself wholly to the drawing-room department of the house, and leave the kitchen and the dining-room to hired servants. Good cooks quickly become bad ones where the mistress neglects personal superintendence, and just so long as ladies have a soul above cookery will ill-temper and dyspepsia, with all their consequent train of ills and discomforts, be the rule, and not the exception, in middle-class English homes.

THE SOCIAL CASTE OF COOKS.

One of the most amazing phenomena in the United States is the great number of girls of all classes who consider kitchen work beneath them and not worthy of serious attention.

Girls of the working classes are not in the least ashamed to confess their absolute ignorance of the art of cooking, though they know that after marriage they must cook for their families. Then they bewail their fate if their husbands, tormented by dyspepsia, seek relief in strong drink. France, it has often been said, is on the whole a sober nation because it is a nation of good cooks.

American girls should remember that, as a Chicago expert has testified, "few men abandon or get a divorce from a woman who is a good cook."

The most amazing of our young women are the factory workers and shop-girls who imagine they are of a higher social caste than cooks, and look down on them.

What makes this attitude the more ridiculous is that the mothers of all these girls were cooks (mostly very bad ones!) and that all of these girls themselves, when they marry, must spend much of their time in the kitchen.

To be sure, they are not paid for this work, as professional cooks are.

Some of the social "reformers" are now demanding that husbands pay their wives for domestic work. If that point should be carried, what would be the social status of the wives—nine out of every ten in the country—who cook for their families?

In future, if there is any looking down, it will be done by the cooks, whose work is infinitely more elevating, refined, scientific and artistic than that of factory and shop girls, who, instead of enjoying the cooks' splendid opportunities for exercising their brains, their taste, and their inventive powers, are reduced to the level of mere machines by the deadly monotony of having to make so and so many dozen shirt-waists or paper boxes, or ruining their health by standing behind a counter, serving the same things, day after day and year after year, to customers most of whom look down on them as being of a lower social status.

That settles the foolish notion that American girls refuse to become cooks because they do not wish to lose social caste. Society women are no more addicted to inviting the girls who wait on them in stores to their banquets or teas than they are the girls who wait on them at home or preside over their kitchens.

Moreover, no mistress would dare to treat her cook so contemptuously, so insultingly, as shop girls and factory girls are often treated, or as chorus girls are treated habitually on the stage.

French supremacy is demonstrated in many ways, not the least of which is the recognition, generations ago, of the noble status of the cook, domestic or professional.

It may not be literally true that French girls read cookery-books with the avidity with which ours read novels, but certainly they are proud of their ability to cook savory dishes.

An article in the New York "Times" (February 11, 1912) on the most exclusive clubs in Paris, where the chefs receive the salaries of ambassadors, states that members "have obtained permission for their daughters—young women, belonging to well-known French families—to be present in the kitchen while the head cook is preparing dinner every afternoon. While the chef officiates in front of the huge furnace which stands in the center of the kitchen he is surrounded by a group of fashionably dressed young women, who follow all his movements with the greatest interest and listen eagerly to his explanations as he initiates them into the mysteries of his art."

The French cuisine is preëminent to-day because a century ago the daughters of the best French houses were taught to cook. And, as Anatole France has remarked, these girls knew that "there is no humiliation in washing dishes."

To be sure, dish washing, as done at present, is monotonous and hardly entertaining. But if we tried to avoid all things in this world that are monotonous and not entertaining, what would happen?

My own work includes some hours of daily drudgery. What busy man's or woman's doesn't? Why discriminate against the kitchen? Read Marion Harland's delightful little book on Household Management (New York: Home Topics Publishing Co., 23 Duane St.); you can do it in an hour and you will benefit particularly by the chapter on "Fine Art in 'Drudgery,'" in which, writes the distinguished author, "I give a recipe for dishwashing as carefully and with as much pleasure as I would write out directions for making an especially delicious entrée or dessert."

Women and men who prepare for the stage, dramatic or musical, have to undergo an enormous amount of drudgery and keep it up all their lives. In the summer of 1912 I heard the greatest of all pianists, Paderewski, daily practising elementary "five-finger" exercises, and he admitted that it took great strength of will to keep it up; but he knows the truth of the remark once made by Hans von Bülow that if he neglected his practicing one day he knew it; if two days, his friends knew it; if three days, the public knew it.

That is a kind of drudgery compared with which dishwashing is a picnic. Most dishwashers, moreover, dawdle dreadfully. They could do their work in one half if not one quarter the time it takes them. See the remarks of the astonished Isabella Bird Bishop in her book on the Rocky Mountains on the way she saw two young bachelors disposing of their kitchen work in the twinkle of an eye.

ROYALTY IN THE KITCHEN.

England is in a state of transition. As the London "Times" (October 29, 1910) remarked, there are in that country many women who would be proud, and even consider it rather smart, to cook a dish of savory eggs in a chafing-dish on a silver-strewn sideboard, but who would nevertheless be ashamed to say that they could knead and bake a loaf of bread which could rival that made by their cooks.

A change is, however, impending, and the good example comes from those socially highest up. Queen Victoria's daughters had to spend many hours in the kitchen, and the present Queen also is, as the "Times" informs us, an expert cook, and altogether "a pattern mother and a skilled housekeeper, who would put many middle-class mistresses to shame by her accurate and up-to-date knowledge of details."

Queen Alexandra was the chief patroness of the Universal Cookery and Food Association, founded in 1885.

Noblesse oblige. The English royal family feels that it is its duty to set a good example to the women of the whole country in this matter, and the example is being followed widely. There is, indeed, a nationwide awakening in the United Kingdom regarding the importance of the culinary art, as we shall see in a moment, in considering the subject of cooking in schools.

Sarah baked and cooked for Abraham, though she could command as many servants as a queen.

It would be easy to give a long list of queens and other women of the highest nobility who recognized the nobility of the art of cooking by their interest and participation in it.

Kings, too, have not held it beneath their dignity to prepare savory dishes with their own hands. Louis XVIII invented the truffes à la purée d'ortolans, and always prepared the dish himself, assisted by the Duc d'Escars.

Frederick the Great was too busy with his political work and his flute to spend his time in the kitchen, but he wrote a poem in praise of his cook.

In Germany, as in England, it is obligatory on the princesses of the Empire to learn how to cook a good meal; and the daughters of the aristocracy of all grades follow their example.

Louis XIII prepared his own game, and prided himself on his preserves, while Louis XV also was an amateur cook. He was particularly fond of making rich sauces.

Under Louis XIV Condé won international fame as inventor of an improved bean soup. A Papal Cook Book was printed in Venice in 1570 by order of Pope Pius V. Richelieu and Mazarin invented dishes still named after them. The philosopher Montaigne wrote a book on the science of eating (Science de la gueule). Sauce Colbert is named after the statesman who originated it. Béchamel was immortalized by a new sauce of his concoction. When Carême went with Lord Stuart, the English Ambassador to Vienna, he was treated as a personal friend. Louis XVIII, George IV and other crowned heads vied for his allegiance but he preferred to bestow the benefit of his supreme art on Rothschild in Paris to whom he had been presented by Prince Louis Rohan.

Volumes might be written regarding the personal interest in culinary art taken by rulers of all kinds. The highest form of royalty is genius.

In France, particularly, the rulers in the world of science, art, and literature have been as devoted gastronomes as the political rulers; and with astonishing frequency these great men have taken not merely an epicurean interest in the pleasures of the table, but have endeavored to multiply them.

Striking confirmation of this statement may be found in "L'Art du Bien Manger," by Gustave Geffroy and Edmond Richardin, 375 pages of which are devoted, under the heading "Ecrivains Cuisiniers," to the recipes of dishes originated and promulgated by well-known men of letters, among them such eminent writers as Alexandre Dumas, father and son, André Theuriet, Jules Claretie, Edmond Rostand, etc.

Lord Bacon thought it no shame, as Frederick W. Hackwood recalls, "to bend his mighty intellect to the problems of the kitchen."

David Hume, on retiring from public life, declared that he would devote the remaining years of his life to the science of cooking.

Henry VIII made a gift of a manor to his cook for originating a good pudding, and royal honors have been paid to many culinary inventors. By the ancient Romans Apicius was "almost deified for discovering how to maintain oysters fresh and alive during long journeys." In Athens Dionysos was highly esteemed as the inventor of bread; in his honor there were street processions of men carrying loaves.

A fifteenth century kitchen in France

ROSSINI, CARÊME AND PADEREWSKI.

Just as Caruso is prouder of the caricatures he draws than of his achievements as the leading tenor of his time, so Rossini prided himself more on his skill in dressing a salad than on his having written successful operas. He frequently delighted his guests with dishes prepared by himself, and used to declare, half seriously, that he had missed his vocation.

One day, when a friend, taking him at his word, asked him why he had not become a cook, he replied that he would have done so had not his early education been too much neglected.

A famous French chef, proud of his profession, declared that while there have been musicians and other artists who were already famous at the age of twenty, preëminence in cooking has never occurred under the more mature age of thirty.

Carême, at an early age, had the ambition, as he relates in his memoirs, of elevating his profession to an art. For ten years he studied with the most eminent chefs, besides reading books and taking notes like a scholar.

Like all genuine artists, he was grateful for true appreciation of his art. Of Talleyrand he wrote: "He understands the genius of a cook, he respects it, he is the most competent judge of delicate progress, and his expenditures are wise and great at the same time."

Why do not great culinary artists abound in America?

Because there is too little appreciation of their art.

Paderewski, in his château on the shores of Lake Geneva, where he lives like a king of epicures, thanks to the intelligent and artistic housekeeping of his devoted wife (the Baroness of Rosen), told me an anecdote which illustrates this point.

During one of his first tours in the United States he enjoyed a dinner which was equal to anything he could have expected in one of the best Parisian restaurants. He was so surprised and pleased that he sent his thanks and compliments to the chef.

A few years later, happening to be in the same city, he again went to that restaurant. The meal he got was still far above the average, but was not as good as before. However, on the occasion of a third visit, he again tried the same place. The food was uninteresting from the beginning of the meal to the end.

He asked the head waiter whether the former chef had left. He had not left, the waiter informed him; and, on being pressed for an explanation of the change in the quality of the meals, he said:

"If you had to play, night after night, before an audience of barbarians who did not appreciate the best things in your performances, would you continue, year after year, to play as well as you do now?"

Paderewski had to confess to him that, in all probability, he would not.

LOOKING DOWN ON OTHERS.

In my career as a musical critic I have found that I could do much more toward improving the artistic doings of singers and players by praising their best things than by finding fault with their poorest.

In the culinary art, likewise, the reader will find that far better results are reached by praising the cook for her successes than by never speaking to her except to find fault. It makes her try to earn more praise, not only in the making of that particular dish but in the making of others.

Above all things, a mistress who expects artistic dishes from a superior cook should never appear to be looking down on her.

This looking down business, perhaps more than anything else, stands in the way of our getting good cooks.

At the same time, perhaps more than anything else, it shows what fools these mortals be.

All over the country, but particularly in the West, I have found that most families look down on other families. It is chiefly a question of money. Those who have an income of $3,000 look down on those who have only $1,000 or $1,500, while those who have $10,000 do all they can to show their superiority to three-thousanders, only to be, in turn, snubbed by those whose income is $20,000; and so on.

One day in a California village where I was spending the winter, I was surprised at the rudeness of a storekeeper with whom I had had some pleasant chats. He hardly answered my questions; in fact, he snubbed me. I found out next day that he had just inherited a large fortune, a piece of luck which he celebrated by promptly looking down on everybody he knew.

As a rule, however, I regret to say, the women are more addicted than the men to this preposterously silly habit of looking down on others. Not to speak of its being extremely ill-mannered it is the most deadly obstacle to the solution of the problem of domestic help.

We shall never have a sufficient supply of good helpers until mistresses recognize the fact that cooking is a fine art, and that those who practise it should be treated, not as servants, but as practitioners of the most important profession in the world—a profession which stands to the medical in the relation of prevention to cure; and that prevention is better than cure we all know. It's cheaper, too.

An old English writer has justly remarked that "the kitchen is the best pharmacopœia."

F. W. Hackwood calls attention to the suggestive fact that all the best old cookery books in the English language were written by medical men. Sir Kenelm Digby and Dr. Mayerne in the seventeenth century, Dr. Mill and Dr. Hunter in the eighteenth, and Dr. Kitchiner in the nineteenth gave to the world "the best English cookery books of their respective eras."

Queen Anne's physician, Dr. Lister, declared that "no man can be a good physician who has not a competent knowledge of cookery."

That is the opinion prevalent among the best medical men of to-day, who hold correct advice in regard to diet and the proper cooking of the food recommended to be usually of more importance than drugs.

Many thousands of invalids have been killed by improper or badly cooked food.

The foolish factory and shop girls who look down on kitchen work should be reminded of the fact that none of the contributors to the pages of the various women's journals are more honored than those who are famed for their skill in cooking and giving others the benefit of their experience. Some of these women, like Mrs. Rorer, Marion Harland, Mrs. Lincoln, Christine Terhune Herrick, Janet MacKenzie Hill, Mary Ronald, and Helen S. Wright, have won international repute.

It is a curious fact that whereas in Europe most of the cook books have been written by men, in America the authors of such books are mostly women. From American women, with their keen intelligence and good taste, great things may be expected in the way of gastronomic progress.

After the appearance in the "Century Magazine" of my brief remarks on the nobility of the art of cookery I heard of a wealthy young lady (I hope and believe there were many others) who was impelled, after reading them, to take up cooking and found it so fascinating that she neglected all her other pet diversions. I know educated young ladies who would rather cook than do anything else except, perhaps, go to the theater; they find it "so entertaining and engrossing."

Many anecdotes might be related of women known to fame who love kitchen work. To take only one case: Mrs. Champ Clark, who came so near being first lady of the land, is a noted cook and domestic science expert. One who knows her writes that "she does much of her own cooking, especially when intimate friends dine with her and they rave over her dishes. It has the good old Southern taste, and is minus the fingle-fangle garnishments often employed to cover up inferiority. Mrs. Clark's bread is a delight, and when she has the opportunity she always bakes it herself. She took first prize in a bread-baking contest once. She holds that such labor is not undignified for any of the first ladies of the land. The word 'servant' has been much abused, its early meaning 'to serve' being beautiful, and certainly there is nothing better than to do something for somebody."

There are signs that the ladies of our time will take up the culinary art as a fashionable cult, as did the ladies of the French aristocracy in the seventeenth century.

Many American society women are expert cooks and delight in inventing and concocting diverse dishes. One of the wealthiest women in the world is Mrs. George J. Gould. In summer, in her Adirondack camp, she spends much time in the kitchen helping to cook and to make preserves and jams. She has, it is said, "a perfect genius for combining things and creating new sensations of taste." Her children, boys as well as girls, understand cooking in all its branches. Grace Aspinwall, in the "National Food Magazine" (May, 1910) gives details regarding the culinary doings of other society women—Mrs. Philip Lydig, Mrs. Joseph Widener, Mrs. Norman de R. Whitehouse, Mrs. Oliver Harriman and Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt, Jr.

Mrs. Woodrow Wilson is also fond of cooking, and after her husband was elected President of the United States the newspapers printed pictures of her at work in the kitchen.

DOES COOKING PAY?

The profitableness of the art also is a point not to be overlooked at a time when all professions, except cooking, are so overcrowded.

Had Rossini become a chef, he would not have earned nearly as much money as he did with his operas. But he was exceptionally successful. The vast majority of musicians, and other artists of all kinds and grades, have not only much more drudgery to undergo than cooks, but they also have much less chance to boast of a fat bank account. The best chefs command $5,000 to $10,000 a year with free board and lodging. Not to speak of other advantages, what a splendid chance this gives them to "look down on" people who earn less!

The average income of physicians, clergymen, and teachers in the United States is about $600 a year, and it is not rising steadily like that of cooks. The better class of "plain cooks" now get, in New York, $25 to $30 a month with room and board. Such a cook can easily put into the savings bank $200 to $300 a year, or half as much as is earned by the physicians, clergymen, and teachers, who have to pay for their board and lodging. Does cooking pay?

[VI]
THE FUTURE OF COOKING

SCHOOL GIRLS LIKE IT.

RESPECT for the noble art of cooking is being greatly enhanced by its introduction into our public and private schools as an important branch of education.

When this innovation was first suggested, the funny men of the newspapers seized on it as a welcome new subject for their jokes and cartoons, and even now not a few persons who have given the question insufficient thought speak of cookery as one of the fads and frills of our schools. But at a budget hearing in October, 1910, Dr. W. H. Maxwell, Superintendent of the New York City Public Schools, made the memorable statement that he considered the retention of cooking-lessons more important than the study of languages.

He might have gone further; he might have said that because health is more important than learning, therefore cookery is more important than anything else now taught in our schools.

It is useless to say that cooking should be taught at home. Most mothers, especially among the working classes, have neither the time nor the knowledge to teach their daughters how to prepare food rationally.

Recognizing this fact, the Young Women's Christian Association also began some years ago to provide culinary lessons.

One of the reasons for this action may be found in a statement made in the Twenty-seventh Report of the New York Cooking School, that "good coffee and a palatable meal often remove the need of strong drink, and many a working-woman has had her cares lightened by the child who has learned to cook."

An English girl, who had thus been taught, said: "Mother tells me she'd make a drop of nice broth for the children out of an old bone as she'd have thrown away."

A glimpse of future possibilities is given by an experiment made in six Chicago schools, with 1,200 pupils. The boys in the manual-training classes made fireless cookers, and the girls did the rest. One result was a rich, palatable soup costing one cent a bowl.

The most encouraging aspect of the situation is that both in England and in America the experience has been that the children like the cooking best of all their lessons and are glad to practise them at home. As one principal wrote, "The cooking has been enthusiastically received by the pupils, and the parents are heartily in favor of it."

COOKING CLASS AT THE WADLEIGH HIGH SCHOOL

BOYS AND SOLDIERS AS COOKS.

Schoolboys also should, and will, be taught. They can help their mothers at home—why not?—especially in daughterless families; and there are many occasions in life—when the wife is ill, or when men are serving in the army or camping—when such knowledge will prove useful.

Apart from practical considerations, it has an educational value, too, training, as it does, the memory, the power of observation, the senses of taste and smell, and the inventive faculty, besides inculcating neatness and cleanliness.

There are times when men who can cook receive better pay than most others, though their work be both easier and pleasanter. For instance, in an article entitled "In Canada's Wilderness," which appeared in the New York "Evening Post" of September 1, 1910, the writer described the trip of a prospecting party through a section of the Northwest which was tapped by the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad. Speaking of the cooks, he said that they were "good cooks, and a good cook in that country is almost worth his weight in fine rubies. They are paid from $75 to $80 a month, and receive housing and bedding. This is more money than any of the other men about an engineering camp receive, except the engineer himself."

One of these cooks had been manager and part owner of a great tea plantation in Ceylon; another had been an officer in a British regiment and had served in the South African War. He had just sold $12,000 worth of property in Edmonton.

The London "Daily Mail" of June 20, 1912, gives an account of an Oxford cooking school which has a special class for men who wish to learn to cook. It is well attended and the men, so the teacher says, "are very keen about the work, and much keener than the women would be as to details. Nothing escapes their attention."

The men work in pairs with the simplest of utensils, and each lesson extends over an hour. Special stress is laid upon frying and stewing, and upon the different meals that can be prepared in a pot or pan over a camp fire. They are taught the various ways of cooking vegetables, of making meat pies, and how to produce such delicacies as pancakes and scrambled or poached eggs. Each lesson affords time for cooking three dishes, and at the conclusion a number of recipes are given, and these are duly recorded for future reference.

The London County Council began to encourage boys in the autumn of 1910 when a school for teaching them how to cook was started. There were fifteen pupils. Two years later there were forty. It is only a small beginning, but from such an avalanche may grow. The aim of the school was stated to be to equip boys between fourteen and sixteen with a knowledge of practical cookery to enable them to fill positions as cooks in first-class hotels, clubs, and restaurants. The course lasts three years and positions are guaranteed at the end.

According to official statistics, 106 boys in England attended cookery classes during 1910-11.

Soldiers in all countries have to do a good deal of camp cooking, and they seem to enjoy it. Circular 11 of the United States Bureau of Animal Industry is concerned with army cooking. The 1912 report of Brig.-Gen. Henry G. Shaw, Commissary General, shows that great advantage has resulted from the schools for bakers and cooks that have been established at Fort Riley, Kansas City, as well as at the Barracks in Washington and at the Presidio in San Francisco. During the year 253 cooks, 131 bakers and 52 mess sergeants have been turned out by the schools as experts.

An English translation has been published (London: Forster Ground Co.) of the French Manual of Field Cookery entitled Livre de Cuisine Militaire aux Manœuvres et en Campagne. It is a pamphlet of 35 pages, including specifications and pictures of necessary utensils, with simple recipes, and a preface by the French War Minister, who remarks, among other things, that it is no longer enough to appoint certain men to the duties of cooks, but it is "necessary that every man ... should be able to prepare his own food and that of any of his comrades, who may not be in a position to do so, by means of the simple apparatus available."

In continental countries there are many cooking schools for men. In Copenhagen, for instance, as we read in the "Lancet," "there is an old frigate moored in a canal close to the most fashionable center of the town. Here there is a school for ship's cooks. On board a ship with the limited space such as prevails at sea young cooks try their 'prentice hands at making dishes such as are served to passengers on sea voyages. There is an awning on the deck, tables are laid out, and numerous inhabitants of Copenhagen take their meals there, for they are both varied and inexpensive. Thus fully qualified cooks are being prepared for the sea, and it is not necessary to point out that, whether at sea or on shore, efficient cooking not only adds to the joys of life but is a very necessary aid to digestion."

TRAVELING COOKING SCHOOLS.

In some parts of Germany traveling cooking schools have been organized by the Government. In Prussia it is intended to provide one of them for every county. These schools move from place to place, remaining long enough in each to give instruction in housekeeping to the daughters of laborers, craftsmen, and farmers. In the case of the farm girls the instruction includes the caretaking of animals, poultry culture, and the raising of fruits and vegetables. All the girls are taught to cook, to sew, to repair and clean clothing, and to keep the house clean, with other things relating to health and nutrition.

One of the principal objects of these itinerant schools is to encourage the cultivation of a greater variety of vegetables in the home gardens. In most of the Thuringian villages, for instance, it is said that the only kind of vegetable known is cabbage. The teachers have had considerable difficulty in introducing variety, for the German peasant, like the lower classes everywhere, wants to eat only what he has had since his childhood. But once tasted the new vegetables are usually welcomed and acclimated in the villages visited by the itinerant culinary missionaries.

ENGLISH SCHOOL DINNERS.

While the English are not gastronomically eminent among the nations of Europe, they are attaching more and more importance to kitchen work, especially in schools, in which lies the chief hope for the cooking of the future.

This growing interest was illustrated by the Conference on Diet in Public, Secondary, and Private Schools held in London in the last week of May, 1912. Prominent experts made addresses, discussing the question of school diet from various points of view. The "Daily Telegraph" of May 30, in concluding its account of the Conference, made some remarks which are quoted herewith, as they give a vivid glimpse of the admirable culinary work that is evidently being now done in English schools:

"Of recent years more and more attention has been paid to the dietary in schools, and the general teaching of cookery will help on an improvement in a department of social life in which we are behind our Continental neighbors. Happily, there are a considerable number of schools in which the menus are drawn up on well-ascertained principles, including the element of variety. Here is an example of dinners served at a large school at 8d. each to over 100 children. It is chosen from those used from May 13 to May 17:

Monday.

Boiled Beef and Carrots. Roast Mutton.

Greens and Potatoes.

Cake Pudding. Milk Pudding.

Tuesday.

Veal and Ham. Beefsteak Pie.

Greens and Potatoes.

Jam Roly-Poly. Milk Pudding.

Wednesday.

Roast Beef. Haricot Mutton. Rissoles.

Greens and Potatoes.

Fruit Salad and Sponge Cake. Milk Pudding.

Thursday.

Roast Mutton. Stewed Steak. Potato Pie.

Greens and Potatoes.

Ginger Pudding. Milk Pudding.

Friday.

Fish. Roast Beef. Liver and Bacon.

Greens and Potatoes.

Rhubarb Tart. Cabinet Pudding.

"If these menus reappear in the same order or connection it will be at a very distant date. The aim is to supply all the kinds of food necessary, and in a form the girls like. Pies, stews, and rissoles are great favorites, stews being the chief. This is fortunate, because a dish of stew of any kind is rich in fat and protein, and if vegetables are added it becomes rich in salts too. The girls state each day at dinner which meat they wish for, and they help themselves to greens and potatoes. If they want a second helping of meat they can have it, but it is an unwritten law that they must finish all they take. It is also understood that if a girl does not eat her dinner she is not fit for afternoon school. This rule prevents elder girls getting the foolish notion that it is not 'nice' to have a good appetite.

"Cookery is part of the curriculum, so that sooner or later every girl learns the importance of food, and that it is useless to try to 'make bricks without straw'—in fact, the dinners are a practical illustration of the teaching in the cookery room."

The notion that it is not "nice" for a girl to have a good appetite is not so common as it used to be. Now that we know the importance of appetite to proper digestion this notion seems criminal as well as silly, and should be denounced as such in all schools where it may seem necessary.

Like some of the Continental countries, England now also has traveling cooking schools. According to educational Blue Books issued in August, 1912, the record for the teaching of domestic science in 1910-11 included under the head of cookery 327,526 scholars. Concerning the traveling schools we read with reference to the North:

"The county authority have provided a traveling van as a center for cookery teaching throughout the country districts. The van is practically a movable room, carefully planned, with satisfactory arrangements, and has so far answered admirably.

"The van remains for four weeks at each school visited, and where two classes of girls can be provided, lessons are given both morning and afternoon on each day. It is used as a center for classes formed from other schools (if any) within walking distance. When the van was at Sutton some girls walked two to three miles, but made no difficulty about the distance. The teacher is usually besieged by applications to admit older girls—and even women—to the classes. Housewifery is now taught as well as cookery. The van makes a pleasant little room, and the girls enjoy their work and do it very well. The North Riding authority have now built a second van, which is already in use."

Norfolk has a teacher who remains in a village for a fortnight, the children attending classes in a convenient kitchen of a farmhouse, adapted club-room, barn, &c., all day and every day during the fortnight.

The inspectors show that already the influence of these classes has had a reflex in the homes.

PROGRESS IN AMERICA.

As far back as 1835 household economics was taught in young women's seminaries of the United States, as we are informed by Benjamin R. Andrews of the School of Industrial and Household Arts at Columbia University. In 1912 there were over 130 schools which gave collegiate degrees for proficiency in the courses in home-making, and it was clear from the way things were going that ere long every woman's college and high school in the country would have a domestic science department, if only to meet the competition of the Domestic Science schools which are springing up everywhere.

These special schools for home-making turn out the really up-to-date girls—the girls whom young men want to marry.

In recognition of the growing importance of this branch of education Representative Wilson of Illinois introduced, in 1911, a bill providing that a Bureau of Domestic Science be established in the Department of Agriculture, with the object of investigating methods and appliances for the preparation of food and of gathering information to be used in training the boys as well as the girls of the schools and colleges in household and institutional management.

In 1910 there were in the elementary schools of Chicago only 75 kitchens available for use in giving the girls practical instruction in the art of cooking. In view of the fact that at least eight out of every ten girls in these schools are fated to spend a part of their lives in the kitchen, the superintendent of schools, Mrs. Ella Flagg Young started an agitation to have this number increased to 250.

In commenting on this subject the Chicago "Tribune" remarked: "A girl who has to hold in after life solemn communion with stewpans and gridirons had better learn in advance how to use them. It will save her mortification, bitter tears, and scoldings."

Not every husband takes the matter as calmly as the brute who, when his young wife met him with tears in her eyes and the information that the cat had eaten the first pie she had made for him, replied: "Don't cry, dear; we can easily get another cat!"

Bad cooking drives a man to drink sooner than anything else. Many honeymoons are shortened by home-made dyspeptic pangs. "Poor food ruins dispositions as well as digestions."

"Fashionable private schools are adding cookery to their subjects," I am informed; and the girls "have lots of fun with it." A wise thing; for even if these girls marry men who are wealthy enough to hire a cook they ought to know something about culinary art—the more the better—so they can tell the cook how they want things. Cooks in general are not so bad as they are painted. Many of them are simply inexperienced and glad to learn the better way. I know this from abundant experience in my own household, and I bless the stars that I have a wife who can tell what's wrong and how to mend it.

Most of the public schools in New York and many other cities now have courses in household science, including cooking. In the high schools attention is given, among other things, to the adulteration of foods and its detection; to the effects of certain bacteria, useful or harmful, on foods; to nutritive values; to the physiology of digestion; to money and labor-saving appliances; nursing and diet for the sick; cost of living; home sanitation; home-made fireless cookers; food adulteration; cooking as a moral agent; etc. The courses vary somewhat in different schools, but that all of them tend to domestic happiness and lowering of the death rate is certain.

There are indications that working girls are beginning to realize the gross injustice of marrying without having learned how to cook a palatable and digestible meal. The New York "Sun" of January 15, 1911, had an interesting article telling how Miss Mary E. Brockman started evening classes in cooking, largely for girls about to be married. Some of them have worked in factories and shops for years, yet "hardly know an eggbeater from a potato-ricer." "They are eager to learn and make good pupils." "It might seem hard to work all day in a factory and spend two or three hours in the evening mixing flour or braising meat, but evidently several hundred young women find it almost a relaxation. Once started, the subject becomes increasingly fascinating."

"Increasingly fascinating." Bear that in mind. In cooking, as in piano-playing, and everything else, the drudgery comes first, but increasing skill brings satisfaction and joy to the artist cook—not to speak of the husband, the children, and the guests. And this joy lasts as long as life itself.

There is in New York an Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor which, in 1911, was teaching 50,000 "little mothers" how to cook while their parents are away working. One of its main objects is to show the families how to economize intelligently. The fact that so many children as well as adults in our cities are so undernourished and so liable to disease is largely due to the spending of money on foolish, unnutritious, or harmful things. By simply substituting cereals and soups for their poisonous tea and soggy cake, thousands of suffering families can be rescued. The Little Mothers even get some simple notions as to the chemistry of food and the advisability of not having too much of one kind, as the following, from the New York "Evening Post," shows:

"Girls," said Mrs. Burns to a group of small cooks one day, "I am going to give a luncheon, and this is what I am going to have: bean soup, pot roast, canned corn, white potatoes, and rice pudding. Do you think that will make a nice luncheon?" Up came a small hand. "Well, what is it?" asked Mrs. Burns. "Too much starch," said the solemn cook.

A book will doubtless be written some day showing by vivid illustrations how many of the problems of charity,—crime, poverty, and the prevention of disease and intemperance—can be solved by attention to rational cooking.

Ignorant feeding kills thousands of infants every month the country over. It is therefore a crime not to include food and feeding in the subjects of study in schools—all the more as most girls get no instruction whatever after they leave school at fourteen.

There will be fewer complaints about high prices when all girls are taught not only how to prepare a meal but how to buy food knowingly. As the New York "World" has forcibly remarked: "If women would pay half as much attention to the fluctuating prices of food as they pay to the prices of dress goods,—or as the men pay to the stock-ticker—and shop half as assiduously for the one as they do for the other, one of the worst phases of the high-cost-of-living problem would be met at the start."

It is almost startling to find that the schooling of boys and girls in domestic science works the miracle of solving the important problem of how to keep boys and girls on the farm.

Professor Benson of the Department of Agriculture relates how, in 1907, he asked the teachers of thirty-four schools in Iowa how many of the boys and girls expected to remain on the farm when grown up. The answers were most discouraging. Provision was then made for giving up-to-date instruction in scientific farming to the boys and in rational household management to the girls. Three years later account was again taken, and it was found that whereas in 1907 all but 11 out of 174 girls wanted to leave the farm, in 1910, after being educated, only 17 out of 178 girls persisted in going to the city.

Progress in America is being greatly accelerated by the various women's clubs which are working in the interest of the food question. Also, by "Good Housekeeping," "The Ladies' Home Journal," "The Woman's Home Companion," "The Housekeeper," and a host of other magazines, which monthly publish not only columns of recipes but helpful articles of all sorts bearing on household science and management.

All things considered the outlook seems bright.

Characteristically American are the free lectures on cooking, with demonstrations, given in some of our large department stores. Good is also done by the booklets enclosed in many packages of food telling the purchaser of various ways of cooking it, alone or in diverse combinations. Surely, we are on the way to becoming a gastronomic nation!

TEACHING THE ART OF EATING.

It is not enough that girls and boys at school should be taught to cook; they should also learn how to eat.

Few learn this at home. They are usually taught table etiquette: that they must eat silently, and not take soup off the end of a spoon (though that is the only rational way of doing it) or put the knife into the mouth; but the infinitely more important art of mastication is entirely ignored.

The art of eating is a branch of physiology and should be taught in all schools by experts, the earlier the better. If it were thus taught the next generation of mothers and fathers would know that it is a crime to let their children swallow food, particularly milk and cereals and vegetables, before it has been kept for a while in the mouth to be mixed with saliva and thus made digestible.

Children (and most adults, too,) are like animals: give them something good to eat and they gulp it down eagerly and then look around for more to stuff into their unfortunate stomachs.

When I was a boy, a story in one of the readers, entitled "The Stomach's Complaint," made an indelible impression on my mind, and saved me many hours of the distress caused by overeating, eating too fast, or eating or drinking things too hot or too cold.

It should be indelibly impressed on all school children that gluttony is a vice which defeats its own end, and that by eating very slowly much more pleasure can be got from one mouthful than by bolting a whole plateful.

One stick of candy can be made to yield more "linked sweetness long-drawn-out" than a dozen sticks as usually devoured. Moreover, one stick will not cause hours of discomfort as the dozen sticks surely will; and, in addition, it will cost much less, thus leaving plenty of money to spend on other things. Surely this argument must appeal to all children who have brains enough to be worth schooling.

Every child should also be told over and over again, till the habit is formed, that the pleasure derived from candy and cake and all food can be vastly increased and intensified by consciously breathing out through the nose while eating (as explained on pages 62-3) and that this will be a further protection from indigestion.

If these truths were firmly impressed on all child minds, two-thirds of the minor ills of mankind would disappear in two generations, and most of the major maladies also; for let me say it once more, the stomach is the source of most preventable diseases.

REAL EPICURISM IS ECONOMICAL.

The future of cooking and eating lies in the hands of millions of boys and girls now in our schools.

It should be made clear to them how important it is to their welfare to be real epicures,—that is, persons who never eat too much, who select their food with a fastidious taste, and refuse to eat any that has no Flavor, or a wrong Flavor.

Were all of us, or most of us, epicures, what a change our markets would undergo! How the chemically denatured foods, the tainted cold-storage fowls, the drugged, soggy bread, the tasteless, frozen butchers' meats, would be swept away, together with frozen, unpalatable fish, wilted vegetables, unclean milk, unripe and decayed fruits, all of them the daily source of discomforts and disease (often including ptomaine poisoning) to thousands.

We must become a nation of epicures. To be sure, were we all as fastidious as gourmets are, only the best foods would be tolerated in the markets, and these cost more than the inferior grades. But that will not worry any one who bears in mind the three cardinal principles of gastronomy which I am trying to emphasize in this book:

I. The food from which we chiefly derive our nourishment is for the most part cheap.

II. We need more or less expensive flavor in food to make it appetizing and digestible; but, fortunately,

III. We need very little of the savory material to flavor a bountiful meal.

Were we a nation of epicures, making daily practical application of these three cardinal principles of culinary knowledge, we could easily, though getting always the best material, live much more cheaply than we do now.

Count Rumford, in a report on dietary experiments made by him in behalf of the Bavarian Government with its army, dwelt particularly on the fact, demonstrated by these trials, that much more depends on the art and skill of the cook than on the sums laid out in the market.

The brain is mightier than the purse. With brains in the kitchen you can live better on two or three thousand a year than on ten times that sum without brains.

To solve the high-cost-of-food problem we should therefore above all things labor to get educated cooks into our kitchens.

Educated cooks can save us money. The more they save us, the more we can afford to pay them; and the more we pay, the easier will it become to persuade young women and men to become trained cooks.

Let us, therefore, with all our might and main endeavor to make the culinary art and science an honored profession, to which any one may feel proud to belong.

Fortunately, apart from all the things just considered which make for the popularity of cooking as a profession, there are others of the utmost importance which must now be dwelt on.

In most hesitating minds one of the chief objections to cooking as at present practised is the drudgery it involves. This drudgery is now being eliminated and will in a decade or two be reduced to a minimum.

FIRELESS COOKERS.

While President Tylor of the British Anthropological Institute was doubtless right in holding the opinion (already referred to) that cookery has done more than any other art to help mankind in its progress from savagery to civilization, it is odd that the latest and socially, as well as gastronomically, most important phase of this art takes us back to practices similar to those of primitive man. When Darwin, in his voyage round the world, tarried in Tahiti, his native guides on a trip to the interior prepared for him a meal which he greatly enjoyed. It consisted of pieces of beef, fish, and bananas, wrapped in large leaves and placed between hot stones, which were then covered with earth to keep in the heat. In about a quarter of an hour the viands were "most deliciously cooked."

One who has never had the good luck to taste, at a New England picnic, beans baked in the ground really does not know beans, though his home be in Boston. Nor does any one know the epicurean possibilities inherent in seafood unless he has attended a shore clam-bake, at which lobsters, clams, and fish, just out of the water and wrapped in layers of seaweed, were cooked over heated stones, the whole being covered with more seaweed to prevent the escape of the heat and the flavors.

In these customs we have a survival of the primitive method of cooking praised by Darwin and numerous explorers and missionaries. Many of the benighted dwellers in our cities have never even heard of them; but within the last few years thousands of our kitchens have been provided with an apparatus which combines the advantages of Tahitian cooking and Rhode Island clam-bakes with modern conveniences—the cooking-boxes, or fireless cookers, which many rival manufacturers are now turning out by wholesale, and which are destined, in combination with gas and electricity, to bring about within the next ten years a domestic revolution so complete and far-reaching that future historians, in summing up the great achievements of the first quarter of the twentieth century, will probably name as the three most important ones wireless telegraphy, aviation, and fireless cookery.

Fireless cookery in Hawaii

Even in this rich country, only one family in ten can afford to hire a cook, and in the far West such a person is seldom obtainable at any price. Now, by the fireless cooker all women who have to prepare their own meals are fast being emancipated from the hot-stove slavery, which is particularly cruel in our sultry summers. It makes it possible for them to cook breakfast, luncheon, and dinner at the same time, in perhaps an hour, leaving the rest of the day free for other work. All they have to do is to heat the meat, vegetables, cereals, or other viands on the stove for some minutes (varying with different foods), and then put them into the air-tight box, which, being lined with non-conducting substances, cooks them thoroughly, retaining all their flavors, keeping them hot for six hours, and warm for five or six longer.

There is a tradition among mistresses that cooks resent innovations in the kitchen; but no domestic helper will ever balk at a box which eliminates so much of the kitchen drudgery.

The fireless cooker will therefore go far toward solving the most difficult of all domestic problems—that of getting some one to help us in our kitchens.

It is strange that this important service for simplifying cooking should have had to wait till the twentieth century for its general adoption. Its principle was known to the ancient Hebrews. Charles XII got on the trail when he cooked a fat hen while on the march by inserting within it a piece of hot steel, the whole being placed in a tin box which was wrapped in a woolen cloth and strapped on a soldier's back.

It was in the far North that the possibilities of this procedure were first appreciated in modern times. The general attention of Europe was directed at the Paris Exposition of 1867 to what was called the "Norwegian automatic kitchen"—a box in which food that had been heated to boiling point for a few minutes continued to cook slowly till done.

One would have supposed that such a wonderful saver of fuel, time, and trouble must have been adopted universally within a few years, all the more as any one could construct his own cooker out of an ordinary box lined with felt, hay, paper, sawdust, or some other poor conductor of heat. But years passed and little was done until some enthusiasts, prominent among whom was the Grand Duchess of Baden, took up the propaganda.

Then came the era of auto pianos and automobiles and auto everything. The automatic cooker was no longer a solitary voice crying in the wilderness. The manufacturers took it up, and now, especially in the United States, thousands are sold every day.

Already there are nearly as many "makes" of them as there are of pianos or automobiles, each claiming special advantages over all others. With the best of them, boiling, steaming, broiling, baking, frying, roasting—everything, except crisping and toasting—can be done with satisfactory results. Soups and stews, in particular, which require hours of slow cooking at moderate heat, come out of these cookers with a delicious flavor.

From the gastronomic and dietetic points of view the most important of all the claims made for the fireless cooker is that the food flavors previously dissipated through the whole house as "kitchen odors" are retained in the meats and vegetables, making them exceptionally savory and appetizing.

It is needless to say that these cookers are of no use for broiling or frying steaks, chops, bacon, ham, sausages, or griddle cakes, which require only a few minutes to cook and must be crisp to be enjoyable.

Nor will the presence of a cooker make it any the less necessary for the mistress or the professional cook to thoroughly understand the culinary art. They must know about meats, and cereals, and vegetables, and flavors, and their combinations and extension, to which attention has been called. It is simply, in all households, valuable because it preserves flavors, eliminates the danger of burning or overcooking, reduces the cost of fuel by three-fourths or more, makes it easier to wash the pots and in other ways saves no end of drudgery; while for those who have to do their own cooking its advantages in giving leisure for other work, or diversions while the cooking goes on, are incalculable. The best of all wedding presents is a fireless cooker.

Automobilists and excursionists in general are finding these boxes a great convenience. They have also been used in the army.

Many women whose work is away from home hardly have even as much time to spare as is needed for starting a meal in the cooker. It is likely that restaurant-keepers and other caterers will be more and more called upon to prepare specially ordered meals for such cases and send them in the heat-retaining boxes in which they were made. Expert cooks, in all probability, will go from house to house to start the cookers.

PRIVATE VERSUS COMMUNITY KITCHENS.

There is a future here for various new kinds of culinary work. But for one kind, it is to be hoped, there is no future, and that is the community kitchen—a single kitchen for a number of families. This plan has been tried in various countries, always without success. Berlin had its "Einküchenhaus"—for a time. The New York "Independent" of March 6, 1912, contains an account of a similar experiment in America. A dozen women presided in succession with invariably disastrous results.

It is impossible in such a case to suit the taste and purse of every family. In a large restaurant it is possible to cater to every patron's wishes, but where there are half-a-dozen or a dozen families clubbed together, some are willing to pay for fresh eggs and poultry and unsalted butter, for example, while others would prefer to save the money and live on storage eggs and poultry, salted butter, wilted or canned vegetables, and so on. There is sure to be constant squabbling; troubles arise from feeing, bribing, and a hundred other sources. No; most of us want to be able to order our own meats, vegetables and fruits, and have them cooked and served as we like them.

"It was the fashion of forty years ago," wrote E. P. Powell in 1904, "for progressive economists to discuss a reform village, built in squares, one house on each corner, and a community boarding-hall and kitchen in the center of each square. Some experiments were made along such lines, but they fell to pieces over the table question. It is not easy for four families to agree on a menu three times a day, and on the qualities of the cooking. As a rule every woman must be mistress of her own kitchen."

The German delicatessen store (now acclimated in all our cities) with its cooked cold meats, pickles, cheeses, and diverse fancy groceries, is likely to be the nearest approach to a community kitchen (nearly every block has one) that the future will know; and the delicatessen store is only an appendix to the private kitchen.

Nothing could be more ridiculous than the wails of certain writers over the "waste of time" in having the cooking done separately for each family. There are plenty of persons in search of profitable employment to supply the demand; and surely, it is infinitely more human, more intellectual, more enjoyable to practise the noble and useful art of cooking than to be merely one cog in a huge machine for making shoes or garments, or cigarettes, as are hundreds of thousands of factory workers, most of whom could lead much happier and more elevated lives if they were cooks.

"The gourmet distrusts dishes provided by pastry cooks and caterers," wrote the late Theodore Child; and this is another of the many reasons why every family that can afford it should have its own cook. I have never yet eaten ice cream, even in the most expensive places, as rich and luscious as the cream we make at home. Excellent jams and jellies are now for sale in the markets; but in your own kitchen you and your helpers can make jams and jellies, and preserves that are better still—made of material you have seen, and sweetened, or otherwise seasoned, to your individual taste.

The word home-made is still the synonym of gastronomic excellence. When a dealer wants to specially commend his offerings, he labels or advertises them as "home-made."

Owing partly to the present difficulty of getting good cooks, and partly to the selfish disinclination of too many American women to do as much at home for their husband or father as the husband or father does for them in the office, thousands of homes have been abandoned in favor of apartment hotels. How these families can endure the insipid, monotonous, unappetizing meals served in these (for the most part expensive) places, is to me incomprehensible.

A reaction will come in favor of private kitchens, and it will be greatly accelerated by the latest improvements, now to be considered.

SCIENTIFIC ELECTRIC COOKING.

In the average household the use of a cooking box does not do away entirely with the smoke, soot, heat, ashes, and kitchen odors, because of the need of heating the food on a stove for five minutes to half an hour before it is put into the air-tight box. The use of gas-stoves does away with most of these nuisances, while electricity abolishes them altogether, besides removing the danger of fire, keeping the air clean and cool, and enabling one to cook in any part of the house at any desired minute.

Electric cooking is still in its infancy, but the child is growing rapidly. At the Chicago Exposition of 1893 utensils were shown in considerable variety—chafing-dishes, stew-pans, coffee-pots, teapots, broilers, griddles, etc. Since that time hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent in devising improvements, and at the electric exhibition in New York in 1911 the cooking-utensils were so prominent and boasted so many improvements that it seemed as though the time had come for their general introduction into homes and hotels.

The United States Government has taken the lead by recommending electric ranges for future use on battleships, after experiments had been made showing that the change would result in greater economy of time, space, and money, not to speak of cleanliness, or of the better quality of the cooked food, because of the uniform distribution of the heat.

For home use, electricity is still in most localities comparatively expensive, but it will be less so when it comes into more general use. If the electric companies would more frequently follow the example of the gas companies in renting cooking-ranges, it would be a great stride forward. In England some of the companies charge a special low rate for electric cooking, because it is done mostly in the day time, when there is little demand for the current for lighting purposes.

But the most radical way to reduce the cost is to combine the electric range with the fireless cooker. Thousands of families that can not pay for an electric current five or six hours a day could easily afford one for the fifteen minutes necessary for heating the food before it is put into the box, besides the few minutes needed for crisping roasts, brewing coffee, or toasting bread.

In 1911, fancying myself a prophet of great things to happen, I wrote: "It is quite likely that the electric range can be so constructed in part that no separate cooking-box will be needed; and then the culinary millennium."

The "Edison Monthly" reprinted my remarks and in an editorial promptly informed me that what I had voiced as a mere possibility for the future was already a fact: that electric fireless cookers had been put out by several manufacturers more than a year before my article appeared. It was a pleasant surprise to find that this was literally true; that my imagined "millennium cookers" were actually in the market.

In Chicago, on September 15, 1910, the following menu was served to nineteen persons in an electric shop:

Consomme Julienne

Radishes Olives Celery

Prime Roast Beef

Mashed Potatoes Lima Beans

Combination Salad

Fresh Peach Short Cake

Coffee

This meal was cooked in two hours; and by using high heat only so long as necessary (on the "cooker" principle) and then turning down the electric current the cost was made as low as only a trifle over a cent and a quarter per person.

For dishes requiring only a short time to prepare, the following details have been given:

"A toaster can be used for fifteen minutes at a cost of 1-1/4 cents; fried oysters with bacon, prepared in the blazer of an electric stove consumes 2 cents' worth of current; to prepare creamed oysters costs 1-3/4 cents; finnan haddie, 2 cents; lobster à la Newburg, 2 cents; chicken and mushrooms, 2-1/2 cents; spring chicken, 2-1/2 cents; lamb chops with vegetables, 2-1/2 cents; sweetbreads, 2-1/2 cents; plain omelet, 1-3/4 cents; cheese omelet, 2 cents; Spanish omelet, 2-1/4 cents. To boil eggs the water-cup may be used on the dining-room table and one cup of water can be boiled for 1-1/2 cents; Welsh rarebit may be made for 1-1/2 cents; griddle cakes baked on the electric stove for 2-1/2 cents for 1-1/2 hours' operation."

West London in the autumn of 1912 had two private restaurants in which all the cooking was done by electricity, 1,200 meals being provided daily for the staff of a large establishment.

In the London "Daily Mail" of November 2, 1912, the following appeared:

An interesting test made in a small middle-class home gives the entire cost of the day's cooking at 6d. Beginning first thing in the morning, the time and amount of electricity used were carefully noted. For early morning tea the boiler or kettle of the electric range boiled rather more than two pints of water in four minutes, the electricity used equaling less than one-fifth of a penny. The whole cooking of the breakfast took ten minutes, the electricity used being less than 7-10th of a unit, equaling an expenditure of just under 3/4d. The menu was five rashers of bacon and toast cooked on the grill in less than seven minutes, five eggs boiled on a ring, and coffee made from the rapid boiler.

The midday meat meal consisted of an 8 lb. joint, potatoes, and other vegetables for five people, milk pudding, and coffee. The electric oven retains the heat so well that the pudding was placed in the oven after the joint was removed and the electricity switched off, the retained heat being sufficient to cook it; 2-3/4 units, or 2-3/4d., cooked this meal.

Tea time cost 1/2d. for tea, hot grill cakes, and toast, and supper with a hot dish 1d. During the day water was boiled, cakes baked, and some soup simmered, at the cost of another unit.

The advance of the electric cooker can be gauged by the statement of the electric supply companies, who affirm that where they had but six private houses using cookers last Christmas they have 200 this year; or by the statements of the users, who say that they have no desire to return to old methods. Many big business houses have complete electric installations in their kitchens.

Electricity in the kitchen will make cooking an exact science. No longer will diners be obliged to rely on the cook's "instinct" or "knack," which too often fail. With the electric appliances the temperature can be controlled to a degree, and special switches permit fast, medium, or slow rates of cooking.

From the economic point of view the most satisfactory electric ranges are of course those in which the current shuts off automatically, while the dinner continues to cook with no further expense, the stove taking on the fireless cooker principle.

Further advantages claimed for electric cooking are that the loss of weight in meat while cooking is greatly reduced, and that the results obtained by it have the advantages of the paper-bag cooking, which has come so much into use within a few years because of its cleanliness and its value in preserving the food flavors which in ordinary cooking are so lamentably dissipated.

Electric chafing dishes, toasters of various kinds, coffee percolators and tea kettles, waffle irons, boilers, stew and frying pans, are now at the service of all who have electricity in the house. Nor is this all. There are, besides, bread and cake mixers, coffee grinders, food choppers, ice cream freezers, egg beaters, vegetable slicers, food graters, apple peelers, knife sharpeners and polishers—all of them run by the electric current.

Thus we see that the housewife and the cook of the future, instead of feeling like a drudge in a smoky, smelly, overheated kitchen, will have the dignity of workers in a cool, clean laboratory for the scientific preparation of savory food and the abolition of dyspepsia.

The editor of the electric magazine referred to indicates another important result of this agreeable transformation of the kitchen. Caste feeling is largely a matter of dress. "The poorest stenographer is a lady, because, in so far as her stipend permits, she dresses like a lady. Accordingly, she looks down upon the cook drawing the same wages and 'keep,' because the cook works with red face and streaming hair over a hot stove." But in the electric kitchen of the future the cook will be able to be as neatly dressed as if she were presiding over a glove counter; and this will act as a great social leveler.

The cook's work will also be lightened by the growing practice of preparing food and drink on the dining-room table, to have it hot, and with the flavor at its best. The choicest coffee, for instance, is usually spoiled by being prepared carelessly in the kitchen. Epicures make their own coffee and tea; they are also able now to have better toast than ever comes from the kitchen by making it on the table in an electric toaster. Eggs and bacon, taken sizzling from the electric frying stove and eaten out of the pan, have a richness of flavor that will astonish those who have never tried them this way; and the same is true of many other breakfast and lunch dishes.

IMPORTANCE OF VARIETY IN FOODS.

It is likely that in the development of electric cooking inventive America will lead Europe. But in other respects the American cooking of the future will have to borrow many useful hints from the older and more experienced nations of Europe.

We need, especially, greater variety in our dietary. The following chapters will endeavor to indicate the best ways of multiplying our pleasures of the table.

Before beginning with France, which has the largest number of lessons to teach, let us briefly consider the need of variety.

King Philip V of Spain engaged Farinelli, the most famous vocalist of his time, to sing four songs for him, without change of any kind, every evening for ten years. He was not in his right mind, "as a matter of course," one feels tempted to add, and yet are there not at this day, and in this country, many thousands of persons whose musical pabulum consists entirely of half a dozen tunes, which they sing, hum, and whistle decade after decade? For them the countless inspirations of genius given to the world in the last three centuries do not exist at all. And how much enjoyment they thus miss!

Vastly more surprising, since everybody eats, is the fact that the majority of persons are equally ignorant of the countless delicacies invented by ingenious cooks of the past and present. What Sir Henry Thompson wrote, more than a quarter of a century ago, regarding the average Englishman is quite as true to this day of the average American: "He cares more for quantity than quality, desires little variety, and regards as impertinent an innovation in the shape of a new aliment, expecting the same food at the same hour daily."

Breeders of fine animals have long since discovered that nothing is so conducive to health and other desirable qualities as variety in the food given.

A monotonous diet soon palls on the appetite, fails to stimulate the digestive organs, and the result is dyspepsia, loss of pleasure, energy, and earning power, and the shortening of life. Think of the pallid victims of the everlasting hog and hominy in the South! "Hasty pudding and milk," as Artemus Ward sagely observed, "are a harmless diet if eaten moderately, but if you eat it incessantly for six consecutive weeks, it will produce instant death."

At a conference on diet in schools held in London, all the speakers agreed that "monotony is the most fatal thing to digestion in both young and old, and that the knowledge that such and such a dish must inevitably come on Monday and such and such another on Tuesday, is destructive beforehand to appetite which is essential to good digestion and nutrition."

When the average American or Englishman travels, he is glad to see new cities, new scenery, new costumes and new faces; but he is comically indignant if he cannot get the same food he has always had at home. It would be much better for him if he could be made to understand that Cowper's maxim, "Variety's the very spice of life," applies to diet as much as to anything. Every country has something to give and teach us regarding the pleasures of the table. No other land yields such a lavish and varied supply of raw material as the United States, and all we need in order to become the leading gastronomic nation is to wake up to the importance of good and varied cooking and rational eating, and to learn all we can from nations famed for their culinary art.

The methods of obtaining the diverse national food flavors can often be studied without traveling abroad, since in our cities we have cooks and restaurants of nearly every land under the sun. In New York one can make a gastronomic trip of the world.

[VII]
FRENCH SUPREMACY

A GRUMBLER might ask "What's the use trying to learn new things from foreigners when so many of our families can hardly afford to buy the ordinary meats and vegetables for any kind of meal?"

But it is precisely because foodstuffs are becoming expensive that we ought to look to the older and less extravagant nations of Europe for guidance. Our Government has been commendably alert in this matter, doing a most useful service by issuing Farmers' Bulletin 391, which, as previously pointed out, shows how, by expert cooking, the cheaper cuts of meat may be made to yield more nutrition as well as more appetizing flavor than the choicest cuts as at present prepared in American households.

KITCHEN ALCHEMY.

It is to France chiefly that the world owes this invaluable lesson, which gives to those of moderate means many of the advantages of the well-to-do. In that country the humblest peasant family enjoys palatable meals because the cook is an alchemist who knows how to transmute the baser metals into silver and gold.

The secret of this alchemy lies in the use of the stock-pot, which saves for the table a vast amount of animal and vegetable nutriment and flavor such as in American cities and on American farms are wickedly wasted.

It is no consolation to know that the British are almost if not quite as foolishly wasteful as we are. But they are beginning to learn of the French. Sir Henry Thompson's "Food and Feeding" sounded a note which is being listened to more and more attentively. A more recent writer comments instructively on "French Thrift and British Waste":

"In a French household such a thing as waste is almost unknown. The positive waste of odds and ends in this country is simply appalling. Look not only under the vegetable stalls in our streets, but also in almost all dustbins, and you will see as much as, if it had been kept clean, might have given health literally to thousands of people.

"Besides the outside leaves of cabbages and cauliflowers, and the outside layers of onion skin, there are the peelings of potatoes, turnips, carrots, and apples, and the tops of beet-roots and turnips, and the large outside sticks of celery. In France and other countries these go, as a matter of course, into the stock-pot. In England the stock-pot is scarcely used at all among the poorer people. It is not too much to affirm that half a dozen changes in the ways of English poor people, including first and foremost the use of the stock-pot, would increase our national prosperity more than our social reformers dream of."

SEVEN HUNDRED SOUPS.

There are a thousand uses in an intelligently conducted kitchen for the delicious bouillon in the stockpot, redolent of the flavors of diverse vegetables and meats.

Dumas wrote that the French cuisine owes its superiority to the excellence of its bouillon—the product of seven hours of continuous simmering. He knew what he was talking about, for he was almost as far famed for his knowledge of kitchen lore as for his novels; and his "Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine" is one of the monumental contributions to the arts of cooking and eating.

Another Frenchman, Ferdinand Grandi, wrote a book in 1902 entitled "Les 700 Potages, ou l'art de Préparer les Soupes, Consommés, Bisques, Purées, Garbures, Semoules, Légumes, Farineux, Potages de toutes Sortes et de tous les Pays."

Seven hundred soups seems a large order, yet it is possible to prepare not only seven hundred but seven times seven hundred kinds by combining the juices and flavors of diverse meats with those of an endless variety of vegetables. That this is not an exaggeration any one may convince himself by turning over the pages of Baumann's "Meisterwerk der Speisen," which, in its 2016 pages, indicates the nature of about that number of soups.

It must not be inferred from the foregoing remarks about the stockpot that nothing goes into it except odds and ends—peelings and tops of vegetables, bruised bones, trimmings from joints, scraps of poultry or other meat that is left over at table. On the contrary, those who can afford it put in chunks of carefully chosen meats to enrich the bouillon.

For making the national French soup known as pot-au-feu the pieces generally selected are the top round, the shoulder, or the ends of ribs. Preparing the pot-au-feu is not so simple a matter as it may seem. In "L'Art du Bien Manger" we read that the boiling must be done slowly and methodically and that the vegetables to be used must be fresh:

"To make an excellent bouillon, cook, preferably in an earthenware casserole, or, if that is not available, an iron pot; put in the meat, the bones, cold water and salt. Put the pot on the fire, bring it to the boiling point and skim carefully, then after this first skimming add a glass of cold water. Let it boil up again and skim a second time. When the soup begins again to boil slightly slacken the fire, uncover the pot partially and let it simmer gently.

"After three hours' simmering add the vegetables and two pepper-corns. Let this go on simmering two hours more. Color the liquid with a little caramel made from burned sugar. Remove all the fat from the bouillon, put it through a fine sieve and pour it into the soup tureen in which you have placed thin slices of bread which have been browned in the oven. The beef from the stock may be served garnished with the boiled vegetables. (The use of pepper is a matter of taste.)

"The economical side of the pot-au-feu is to furnish soup for two meals. What is left over may be kept in an earthenware jar into which it should be poured through a fine sieve after it has settled somewhat in the soup kettle."

Dumas, who relied for his culinary directions on his friend Vuillemot, of the Tête Noire at St. Cloud, advises that only the freshest and juiciest meat should be used and that it should not be washed, as that would rob it of a portion of its juice. The bones that are added should be broken up well with a mallet as that will result in the gelatine being effectually extracted from them. "Then we place them in a horsehair bag with any scraps of fowl, rabbit, partridge, or roast pigeon which may be found in the larder; in fact, the remains of yesterday's dinner."

As I am not writing a cook book, my main object in presenting these excerpts is to provide an illustration of that use of brains and painstaking care in the kitchen which explains French supremacy in matters gastronomic.

SAVORY SAUCES.

The same traits are abundantly manifested in the making of sauces.

While Dumas attributed the culinary superiority of the French to their bouillon, George H. Ellwanger, who has written an entertaining book on "The Pleasures of the Table," declares that "the supreme triumph of the French cuisine consists in its sauces."

Many of the French gourmets and chefs have held the same view, and undoubtedly more inventive skill has been shown, and more reputations have been made, in the realm of sauces than in any other department of the art of cooking.

Recipes for eighty-one of the best French sauces are given in "L'Art du Bien Manger," and two hundred and forty-six sauces are described in Charles Ranhofer's "The Epicurean." Perhaps the number of possible sauces is not as large as that of the soups; yet there is ample scope still for inventive genius.

Not only men but cities have been made famous by a sauce. In the restaurants of Paris and all over Europe, in fact, Rouen duck is often on the bill of fare. But as Lieut.-Col. Newnham-Davis says in "The Gourmet's Guide to Europe," "the Rouen duck is not any particular breed of duck, though the good people of Rouen will probably stone you if you assert this. It is simply a roan duck. The rich sauce which forms part of the dish was, however, invented at Rouen."

It was with a duck sauce that one of the French restaurateurs of our time won fame and fortune. For a number of years every American and Englishman in Paris who could afford it, went to the Tour d'Argent to eat a duck as prepared by Frédéric Delair. He used two ducks for each order. One of them, well-cooked, was for the meat, while the other, quite rare (or under-done, as the English say) was put into a silver turnscrew and had all its juices—including that of the liver—squeezed out. These juices make a sauce which I have eaten with enjoyment and impunity; but I have been told by a physician at Lyons that some persons are made ill by it, owing, apparently, to some injurious quality in raw duck-livers.

The "Tour d'Argent" and Frédéric Delair

Most of the Paris restaurants, now that Frédéric is no more, have their silver turnscrew, and they do not feel guilty of plagiarism, for Frédéric did not really originate this trick but adapted it from the practice of French peasants who tried to get as much juice as possible out of their tough and skinny ducks by smashing the carcasses with stones.

Already in the middle ages the saucier, or saucemaker, was the headman in the cuisine of French aristocrats.

The age of Carême (who wrote eloquently and lovingly about sauces) was, as Ellwanger remarks, "the era of quintessences—of the cuisine classique, when chemistry contributed new resources, and fish, meats, and fowls were distilled, in order to add a heightened flavor to the sauces and viands that their etherealized essences were to accentuate. One thinks of Lucullus and Apicius, and of the 'exceeding odoriferous and aromatical vapor' of the ovens of the artist mentioned by Montaigne."

The most common ingredients used to make the savory and appetizing French sauces are the yolks of eggs (raw or cooked), salt, pepper, mustard, vinegar, lemon juice, tomatoes, bouillon, shallots, anchovies, onions, garlic, carrots, olive oil, orange rind, truffles, cream, mushrooms, pickles, wines, meat extracts, cayenne, and diverse aromatic herbs. But the most important of all French sauces is melted French butter—not "kitchen butter," but the fresh, fragrant product of the creamery. With such butter, and plenty of it, gastronomic miracles can be performed.

CARÊME

There is a great deal of local Flavor in French sauces. Blindfold a Parisian gourmet who knows his country, and place before him dishes made after the fashions of different provinces, and he will tell you at once the name of the town they smack of.

The coast towns enjoy special advantages in this respect, as they can use diverse shellfish and other marine creatures peculiar to their region to impart special overtones of flavor, so to speak, to their sauces.

French enthusiasm over sauces reached its climax in the exclamation that with sauce Robert a man might be pardoned for eating his own grandfather!

Brillat-Savarin, like many of his countrymen, went too far when he declared that "poultry is for cookery what canvas is to the painter."

No doubt, many of the sauces served with poultry in French restaurants (each of which has its specialty, as it has in the line of fish sauces) are delicious, yet good chickens, ducks, and turkeys, not to speak of game birds, have flavors of their own which it is a barbarism to disguise even with the noblest of sauces—except once in a while, for the sake of variety. The way to cook any winged creature if you want the most delicious flavor it can yield, is roasting à la broche.

PROFITABLE POULES DE BRESSE.

Of the barbarism just referred to, many Parisian restaurants, I regret to say, are habitually guilty. One evening, at one of the best of them, I was simply dumfounded when a choice poularde, which cost as much as the almost extinct canvasback duck does in New York, was served with—horribile dictu—a sauce made of American canned corn! It was not an attempt to cater to the supposed taste of a New Yorker, for it was a plat du jour, prepared before we arrived and served to others. Had I been the host of the occasion instead of merely a guest I should have taken the head-waiter into a corner and whispered some advice into his ear.

What aggravated the crime was that it was a poularde de Bresse that was thus maltreated.

Many varieties of chickens are raised in France—the poule commune, the race de Houdan, race de la Flèche, race de Crèvecœur, race de Barbezieux, race Caussade, etc., besides imported varieties; but the noblest of them all is the race de la Bresse.

The poulet de Bresse is the most highly esteemed of all domestic birds that are served not only at French dinners, but at the best restaurants and hotels all over Europe. It has a richness of flavor that puts it far above other fowls—as far as its delicious fragrance puts the Gravenstein above all other apples.

In France the poule de Bresse has long been held in highest esteem. Brillat-Savarin wrote in 1825: "as to chickens, the finest are those from Bresse, which are as round as an apple." English breeders have recently discovered its superior merits. It promises, the London "Telegraph" remarks, to "become very popular in the near future, and deservedly so, considering the breed's laying and table properties, which have been tested for fully a century across the channel. Bresse is one of the principal towns in the Aisne district, and the breed which bears its name was always cultivated for its white flesh, with delicacy of flavor. Poularde de Bresse usually fetches a higher price than any other fowl in the Paris market." "It behoves our English poultry keepers to use every effort to popularize the Bresse fowl in this country. The specialist club, started some three years since [1909] has already done much.... Mr. G. H. Caple, of Stanton Prior, near Bristol, is honorary secretary, and will give all needful information."

It is to be noted that the Bresse fowl not only "puts on flesh in a wonderful way," but has all the other qualities most desirable in a farmyard bird. Several varieties have flesh as juicy as the Bresse, and almost as delicate in flavor, but there is always some trait or other that puts them at a disadvantage. The Houdan, for instance, is a good bird for the table and a fair layer, but it requires too much attention to be generally profitable. La Flèche provides a tender morsel but flourishes only in dry regions, and the same is true of the Crèvecœur class, which is extremely sensitive to humidity. The Belgian Campine puts on good flesh but not enough of it. The American Wyandotte and the Leghorn are robust, and good layers, but the flesh is inferior in flavor. Much better in this respect are the Plymouth Rocks, but they are poor layers. The Langshans class is good to eat, but does not fatten easily, while the Cochins grow too slowly and their flesh is mediocre as to flavor.

The poule de Bresse has none of these flaws. The black variety is the hardiest of all chickens, flourishing in any climate except the extreme north, and on any soil, dry or humid. As a layer she is among the very best, often winning prizes for size and number of eggs. Though prolific she is not too eager to set, but when she does hatch, she makes a devoted mother. Best of all, the flesh is tender and juicy, there is plenty of it, and in flavor it is beyond compare.

Truly, the poule de Bresse is the chicken for the farm and the market—"c'est la véritable poule de rapport, celle qui convient à la ferme," as a French noted aviculteur remarks.[9]

To my great surprise, in looking over Farmers' Bulletin No. 51 (1907) entitled "Standard Varieties of Chickens," I found no mention of the poule de Bresse in this forty-six-page document, which begins with the statement that there are 104 standard and a large number of nonstandard varieties of chickens raised in this country. Can we afford to be so far behind the French—and the English?

Ungastronomic America confronts us in the statement, in Bulletin 51, that although as a table fowl the Leghorn is only "fairly good," it "holds the same place among poultry that the Jersey holds among cattle. The question of profit in poultry has been decided in favor of the egg-producing breeds."

In a country in which most poultry is spoiled by being put into cold storage undrawn, it is no wonder that the laying capacity of a fowl should alone be deemed worth considering; for, under these conditions, as previously pointed out, breed and feed are of no consequence so far as flavor is concerned. But the time is coming when the American consumer will imperatively demand Flavor in Food; and bountiful harvests will be reaped by farmers who look ahead now and stock their poultry yards with an eye to good and abundant flesh as well as good and abundant eggs. The Bresse race will fill the whole bill. It is best for eggs, best for the table. A Bresse hen will virtually hatch two chicks from one egg.

DIGESTIVE VALUE OF SOUR SALADS.

Salad goes with chicken as the piano goes with a song. To eat lettuce with the cheese, as many Englishmen and not a few Americans do, is preposterously absurd. As for putting sugar on lettuce I cannot write down my opinion, for it is not fit for print. Salad cries for vinegar, as a parched plant cries for rain.

Vinegar is not only agreeable to the senses of taste and smell, and most refreshing, especially in summer, but it plays a very important rôle in the digestion of food.

It has been said that God sent us our food and the devil our cooks. This is not always the case, but the devil certainly inspired the man who taught that, in mixing a salad dressing, the vinegar should be added by a miser.

This maxim, widely accepted, has done a great deal of harm, not only in spoiling many millions of dishes for the palate, but in preventing salads from heading off dyspepsia, with all its evil consequences.

Many physicians have deplored the insufficiency of fat in the average American's diet. Fat is especially important as a source of energy, and also because fat meat is more savory and appetizing than lean meat. Furthermore, physiologists have shown by laboratory experiments that the presence of fat in meat or vegetable dishes makes them yield a larger degree of nutriment (apart from what it contributes itself).

Professor John C. Olsen of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute says that "fats and oils furnish fully half the energy obtained by human beings from their food. Fats also exert a beneficial influence on the digestive process, so that a diet without fat is dry and unpalatable."

The only drawback is that fat makes the food "rich" and difficult of digestion—unless the cook is an artist.

This is why so many persons exclude it from their dietary, at the cost of energy in men and the beauty of health in women.

It is here that salad comes to the rescue. The vinegar in it, if genuine, excites by its fragrance and acidity the digestive glands not only in the mouth and the stomach, but in the pancreas, which acts on all the constituents of food, particularly the fats.

The pancreas is a gland near the stomach; it secretes the juice known as pancreatic and pours it into the duodenum, or small intestine, which—some ten or fifteen feet in length, is folded about it. To prevent intestinal indigestion there must be an abundant flow of pancreatic juice, and this flow is stimulated by the vinegar in the salad we eat and other acids in our food.

On this point the greatest living authority on the subject, Professor Pawlow, makes the following extremely important remarks:

... an acid reaction is not only necessary for an efficient action of the peptic ferment, but is at the same time the strongest excitant of the pancreatic gland. It is even conceivable that the whole digestion may depend upon the stimulating properties of acids, since the pancreatic juice exerts a ferment action upon all the constituents of the food. In this way acids may either assist digestion in the stomach where too little gastric juice is present, or bring about vicarious digestion by the pancreas where it is wholly absent. It is easy, therefore, to understand why the Russian peasant enjoys his kwas with bread. The enormous quantity of starch which he consumes, either as bread or porridge, demands a greater activity upon the part of the pancreatic gland, and this is directly brought about by the acid. Further, in certain affections of the stomach, associated with loss of appetite, we make use of acids, both from instinct as well as medical direction, the explanation being that they excite an increased activity of the pancreatic gland, and thus supplement the weak action of the stomach. It appears to me that a knowledge of the special relations of acids to the pancreas ought to be very useful in medicine, since it brings the gland—a digestive organ at once so powerful and so difficult of access—under the control of the physician.

It is obvious from these disclosures that if every American family followed the French custom of eating a sour salad at least once a day there would be very much less intestinal indigestion, which is even more distressing than indigestion in the stomach.

It is further obvious that Fletcherizing, or "mouth work," alone does not avert indigestion, for saliva has no effect on fats. The pancreas takes care of these, particularly if aided by acid ingredients in our food.

Probably no detail of the French menu is therefore so important to us as the daily sour salad.

An astonishingly small number of American families know what a delicious and hygienically valuable dish salad is with a French dressing of good olive oil and pure, fragrant vinegar.

There is very little nourishment in salad leaves until the oil has been added; and the oil is what we need, with the vinegar to help digest it.

The two words I have just italicized explain why so many Americans imagine they do not like salads with vinegar and oil dressing. Unless the oil is good and the vinegar pure and fragrant such a salad does no good but may do much harm; and it is seldom that one can buy good oil and vinegar in a grocery store.

Of all the food adulterators none are more rascally and abundant than the makers of artificial vinegar. Pure vinegars made of cider, wine, or malt can be sold at a very good profit to the manufacturer and dealer at from ten to twenty cents a quart; but this profit does not satisfy the swinish greed of the adulterators and unscrupulous grocers. By using acetic acid, a by-product of the distillation of deadly wool-alcohol, they can make "vinegar" at a cost of two cents a gallon, or 90 cents a barrel, which retails at over $20.

The pure food law covers this case, but the fines inflicted are so trifling compared with the gains, that the adulterators regard them in the light of a joke and continue their profitable poisoning, though many of them have been before the courts two, three, or four times. Jail is what their crime calls for. This so-called vinegar is in most cases injurious to the health of those who consume it, and by its lack of agreeable fragrance it discourages the healthful practice of eating sour salads.

It is foolish to get vinegar of the nearest corner grocer unless you know he is honest. It is best to buy it in the sealed bottles of firms which have a national or international reputation for fair dealing.

The same caution should be observed in purchasing olive oil. Do not buy it of a grocer who exposes his bottles in the show window. If he does not know that sunlight spoils the best olive oil, he is not likely to know, or care, what the best oil is.

Among the adulterants used to cheapen olive oil small quantities of castor oil, lard oil, fish oil, and even petroleum have been found. More frequent are rapeseed and poppy-seed oil. Peanut oil is much used, but the most frequent adulterant is cottonseed oil, which costs only about one-fifth the price of high-grade olive oil and therefore offers great temptation to the dealer.

Cottonseed oil is not inferior in nutritive value to olive oil, and Dr. Wiley assures us that no objection can be made to it "from any hygienic or dietetic point of view." Of the three million barrels of it produced in this country every year, not less than two-thirds are consumed as food. It is "perfectly satisfactory," the doctor adds, "to those who have not acquired a taste for olive oil."

If you like cottonseed oil there is no reason in the world why you should not pour it into your salad bowl. But if you wish to enjoy the epicurean delights of true salads you must train your sense of smell and learn to distinguish between fragrant oil and cottonseed oil, which, at its worst, has a disagreeable flavor and at its best is practically odorless and tasteless.

It is the fragrance, the Flavor, of olive oil that keeps it in the market, boldly defying its cheap rivals.

A great many Americans who think they do not like olive oil know not what real olive oil is. They have been fooled by the adulterators. They may have been careful to buy bottles labeled "Pure Virgin Olive Oil"; but, as Dr. Wiley says, "this expression upon the label has been found in many instances of olive oil highly adulterated and belonging to the cheapest grade."

There are more than a dozen grades of olive oil. It varies with the locality it is grown in, the care taken in its manufacture, the season, and so on. The first pressing (virgin oil) is the best; the virgin oil of the month of May is finer than any other, and the best oil comes from Italy.

It is worth while to cultivate a "taste" for the finer kinds, for they are the most fragrant and digestible. Such oil is not only a table delicacy second to none, it is also used more and more by doctors for diseases of the stomach and other parts of the digestive tract. For gall stone it is almost a specific.

As a cosmetic, nothing equals olive oil. The beauty of Spanish and Italian women is owing largely to their daily and liberal use of it in salads and cooked foods. It improves the complexion and rounds out the lines of the form.

Eating salad is by far the most agreeable way to take olive oil. There are persons with whom all acids disagree; these unfortunates have to do without the fragrant vinegar; but they can easily learn to like salads with oil and salt alone. The taste is decidedly worth acquiring.

In making the dressing, oil should by all means be applied "by a spendthrift." "Put on as much as you think you can afford," I feel tempted to advise; but, of course, you can get the best results more cheaply by painting each leaf with oil or by thoroughly mixing the leaves with it before putting on the vinegar. Always make sure that there is no water in the bowl and that the leaves are well dried.

In hot weather the vinegar should be put on first, to make the salad more piquant and refreshing. One spoonful of vinegar (pure and fragrant, if you please) to every two of oil is not too much. Let the stirring be done "by a maniac," according to the old maxim, for it is most important.

Salt is a necessary ingredient, and a trifle of cayenne makes the salad more digestible. Black pepper is, to some epicures, an unwelcome intruder, though it is often used even in Paris restaurants, where I now find it necessary to add sans poivre in ordering a salad. Once in a while, for variety's sake, add a little mustard, or rub the inside of the big bowl (it must be big, and Russian lacquer is the best) with garlic. A few tablespoonfuls of meat gravy—particularly chicken gravy (from roast or fricassee) give additional richness and savor to the dressing.

If you can get no pure and fragrant vinegar, by all means use lemon juice as infinitely better than "vinegar" made of acetic acid and water. But if malt, wine or cider vinegar is at hand it is preferable to the lemon, which does not harmonize so well with oil. Lemon is too loud—too self-assertive—like a trombone added to a string quartet.

It is a subtle thing, this gastronomic instrumentation, and there are differences of opinion as in matters musical. There is nothing better than a glass of lemonade—except, perhaps, a glass of limeade;—in very warm weather it is a luxury to suck a lemon like an orange. But if a slice of lemon is put in my tea I lose the delicate aroma of the leaves, which I am after; and so with salads. The fragrance of vinegar is more delicate, and does not overpower the fragrance of the oil. On the other hand, in making mayonnaise, which is also a French dressing, having been invented by the Marshal de Richelieu, and which is often used for green salads as well as for meat and fish salads, lemon is perhaps preferable to vinegar. Apparently the addition of the yolks of raw eggs to the other ingredients prevents the lemon tone from being too loud. With sardines, also, a lemon is all right, because their own flavor is not so weak as to be easily routed.

In remote regions, where pure olive oil cannot be obtained, a very fair substitute for French salad dressing may be provided by following the practice of Belgians and Germans of putting small cubes of fried bacon into the vinegar. Sometimes the vinegar, thus oiled, is heated and then poured over the leaves. That wilts them but makes a piquant dish for a change. In one way or another, have a sour salad with your dinner, especially if it includes fat food, for the reasons given.

ESCAROLE, TOMATOES, ARTICHOKES, ALLIGATOR PEARS.

In nineteen cases out of twenty the salad served in our country is lettuce, and in nine cases out of ten the diner is insulted with huge green leaves fit only for boiled greens or the stock-pot.

Green lettuce is good to eat raw only in its infancy (when two or three inches high) or when it has shot up higher in a few weeks on very rich, moist soil. Much better, however, is head lettuce, with the white inside leaves, crisp and succulent. Even those, unfortunately, are somewhat indigestible to many, unless very carefully chewed.

Those who find lettuce troublesome should by all means try the bleached white hearts of the variety of endive known as escarole (the French call it scarole).

Until a few years ago it was very difficult to find escarole in any American market, and it is not abundant now. In the catalogues of seedsmen who give several pages to the different varieties of lettuce, escarole is disposed of in four or five lines of small type. One catalogue, of the year 1912, referred to it as "unsurpassed for salads;" the others made no comment at all, or spoke of it as "good for soups or greens." As there has been practically no demand for escarole seed, it was lucky to be listed at all.

Some seedsmen, however, when they know of a good thing, try to create a demand for it. Prominent among those is W. Atlee Burpee, of Philadelphia. To him I confided my sorrows over the difficulty of getting good escarole—or often any escarole at all. I called attention to the fact that it is, to say the least, equal in flavor to the best head lettuce, and much easier to assimilate, one member of my household being able to eat it by the bowlful, whereas lettuce invariably gives her indigestion.

It is much easier to raise, also, than lettuce, which is extremely "cranky" in summer. Even in cool Maine lettuce sometimes is wilted by a single hot day, unless cared for like a tender hot-house orchid; whereas escarole has as many lives as a cat. I have often, in thinning out my plants, thrown them away by the dozen, to be roasted by the sun; but if a rain came along in a day or two, they revived, took root unaided, and grew into healthy plants!