ly to be hoped for. If such things are to be done,
it must be primarily through the educated brain of cultivated women
who do not scorn to turn their culture and refinement upon domestic
problems.

When meats have been properly divided--so that each portion can
receive its own appropriate style of treatment--next comes the
consideration of the modes of cooking. These may be divided into two
great general classes: those where it is desired to keep the juices
within the meat, as in baking, broiling, and frying; and those whose
object is to extract the juice and dissolve the fibre, as in the
making of soups and stews. In the first class of operations, the
process must be as rapid as may consist with the thorough cooking
of all the particles. In this branch of cookery, doing quickly is
doing well. The fire must be brisk, the attention alert. The
introduction of cooking-stoves offers to careless domestics
facilities for gradually drying up meats, and despoiling them of
all flavor and nutriment,--facilities which appear to be very
generally laid hold of. They have almost banished the genuine,
old-fashioned roast meat from our tables, and left in its stead dried
meats with their most precious and nutritive juices evaporated. How
few cooks, unassisted, are competent to the simple process of broiling
a beefsteak or mutton-chop! how very generally one has to choose
between these meats gradually dried away, or burned on the outside
and raw within! Yet in England these articles _never_ come on
table done amiss; their perfect cooking is as absolute a certainty
as the rising of the sun.

No one of these rapid processes of cooking, however, is so generally
abused as frying. The frying-pan has awful sins to answer for. What
untold horrors of dyspepsia have arisen from its smoky depths, like
the ghosts from witches' caldrons! The fizzle of frying meat is as a
warning knell on many an ear, saying, "Touch not, taste not, if you
would not burn and writhe!"

Yet those who have traveled abroad remember that some of the lightest,
most palatable, and most digestible preparations of meat have come
from this dangerous source. But we fancy quite other rites and
ceremonies inaugurated the process, and quite other hands performed
its offices, than those known to our kitchens. Probably the delicate
_cote-lettes_ of France are not flopped down into half-melted grease,
there gradually to warm and soak and fizzle, while Biddy goes in and
out on he