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.