The word home-made is still the synonym of gastronomic excellence. When a dealer wants to specially commend his offerings, he labels or advertises them as "home-made."
Owing partly to the present difficulty of getting good cooks, and partly to the selfish disinclination of too many American women to do as much at home for their husband or father as the husband or father does for them in the office, thousands of homes have been abandoned in favor of apartment hotels. How these families can endure the insipid, monotonous, unappetizing meals served in these (for the most part expensive) places, is to me incomprehensible.
A reaction will come in favor of private kitchens, and it will be greatly accelerated by the latest improvements, now to be considered.
In the average household the use of a cooking box does not do away entirely with the smoke, soot, heat, ashes, and kitchen odors, because of the need of heating the food on a stove for five minutes to half an hour before it is put into the air-tight box. The use of gas-stoves does away with most of these nuisances, while electricity abolishes them altogether, besides removing the danger of fire, keeping the air clean and cool, and enabling one to cook in any part of the house at any desired minute.
Electric cooking is still in its infancy, but the child is growing rapidly. At the Chicago Exposition of 1893 utensils were shown in considerable variety--chafing-dishes, stew-pans, coffee-pots, teapots, broilers, griddles, etc. Since that time hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent in devising improvements, and at the electric exhibition in New York in 1911 the cooking-utensils were so prominent and boasted so many improvements that it seemed as though the time had come for their general introduction into homes and hotels.
The United States Government has taken the lead by recommending electric ranges for future use on battleships, after experiments had been made showing that the change would result in greater economy of time, space, and money, not to speak of cleanliness, or of the better quality of the cooked food, because of the uniform distribution of the heat.
For home use, electricity is still in most localities comparatively expensive, but it will be less so when it comes into more general use. If the electric companies would more frequently follow the example of the gas companies in renting cooking-ranges, it would be a great stride forward. In England some of the companies charge a special low rate for electric cooking, because it is done mostly in the day time, when there is little demand for the current for lighting purposes.
