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."