Among the middle and lower classes, where the mistress is herself the cook, the results are no better. Being without proper early training, or growing up with the idea that it is not genteel to work, she comes to her task wholly unprepared, and an ill-fed, sickly family is the result. In many cities and towns, cooking schools are found, but the graduates do not compare with those who graduated from their mothers’ kitchens, in the days when domestic labor was respected. The mind of the ambitious cooking-school graduate is too often concerned with the pretty pastries and dainty desserts that please the eye and pamper the appetite, instead of mastering the art of properly preparing the bread, meat, and vegetables, and the other substantial things.
=Bread.=--So important a part does bread play in the physical economy that it is often called the staff of life. In cities and towns and in many country villages the baker supplies the general need. Yielding to the popular demand for white bread, he uses flour that has been robbed of its most nutritious properties, and introduces unwholesome substances to make it light and white. The best bread is that in which the starch cells are most completely burst. The making of wholesome, palatable, home-made bread is becoming a “lost art” even among farmers’ wives and daughters. The corner grocery and the baker’s wagon furnish the freshly-baked loaf, the housewife is spared some trouble, and the household loses what should be one of the most healthful, nutritious, and appetizing elements of the daily supply of food. In parts of the South and West, the large use of hot bread is the cause of much indigestion and ill health.
=Meats.=--Broadly speaking, there are two methods of treating meats. By the first, it is the aim to keep the juices within the meat, as in baking, broiling, and frying. By the second, the object is to extract the juices and dissolve the fiber, as in the making of soups and stews. In order to imprison the juices and thus develop the flavor, the meat must be subjected to intense heat for a short time, so as to coagulate the outer layers of albumen, and afterward a more moderate heat should be employed to complete the cooking. To extract the juices, meat should be cut into small pieces, put into cold water, and slowly raised to the boiling point.