Cooking in this country varies in difficulty in the different national
groups. In the case of the Lithuanians and Poles, for example, the
old-country cooking is simple and easily done. Among others it is a
fine art, requiring much time and skill. The Italian cooking, of
course, is well known, as is also the Hungarian. Among the Bohemians
and Croatians, too, the housewives are proverbially good cooks and
spend long hours over the preparation of food. Croatian women in this
country are said to regard American cookery with scorn. They say that
Croatian women do not expect to get a meal in less than two or three
hours, while here all the emphasis is on foods that can be prepared in
twenty or thirty minutes.
It is not always easy to transplant this art of cookery, even if the
women had time to practice it here as they did at home. The materials
can usually be obtained, although often at a considerable expense, but
the equipment with which they cook and the stoves on which they cook
are entirely different. The Italian women, for example, cannot bake
their bread in the ovens of the stoves that they use here. Tomato
paste, for example, is used in great quantities by Italian families,
and is made at home by drying the tomatoes in the open air. When an
attempt is made to do this in almost any large city the tomatoes get
not only the sunshine, but the soot and dirt of the city. The more
particular Italians here will not make tomato paste outdoors, but
large numbers of Italian families continue to make it, as can be seen
by a walk through any Italian district in late August or early
September.
In general, in the groups in which cooking was highly developed, a
great deal of time was devoted to the preparation of food. If the
housewife wishes to reduce her work in this country, she finds that
some of the ingredients which make our cooking simpler are unknown to
her. The Bohemians, for example, do not know how to use baking powder,
and the same is true of the women in Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian
groups, where the art of cooking is less developed.
With this lack of experience in housekeeping under comparable
conditions, the foreign-born housewife finds the transition to
housekeeping in this country difficult at best. As a matter of fact,
however, the circumstances under which she must make the change are
often of the worst. She is expected to maintain standards of
cleanliness and sanitary housekeeping that have developed with modern
systems of plumbing and facilities for the disposal of waste that are
not always to be found in the districts in which she lives. Even a
skillful housewife finds housekeeping difficult in such houses as are
usually occupied by recently arrived immigrants.