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.