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.