nd the ladies of the
family with sticky fingers, scissors, and gum pot, busily porcelainizing
clay jars, and not find one where they are as zealously trying to work
out the problems of the "Official Handbook of Cookery."

I have nothing to say against the artistic distractions of the day.
Anything that will induce love of the beautiful, and remove from us the
possibility of a return to the horrors of hair-cloth and brocatel and
crochet tidies, will be a stride in the right direction. But what I do
protest against, is the fact, that the same refined girls and matrons,
who so love to adorn their houses that they will spend hours improving a
pickle jar, mediaevalizing their furniture, or decorating the dinner
service, will shirk everything that pertains to the preparation of food
as dirty, disagreeable drudgery, and sit down to a commonplace,
ill-prepared meal, served on those artistic plates, as complacently as
if dainty food were not a refinement; as if heavy rolls and poor bread,
burnt or greasy steak, and wilted potatoes did not smack of the shanty,
just as loudly as coarse crockery or rag carpet--indeed far more so; the
carpet and crockery may be due to poverty, but a dainty meal or its
reverse will speak volumes for innate refinement or its lack in the
woman who serves it. You see by my speaking of rag carpets and dainty
meals in one breath, that I do not consider good things to be the
privilege of the rich alone.

There are a great many dainty things the household of small or moderate
means can have just as easily as the most wealthy. Beautiful
bread--light, white, crisp--costs no more than the tough, thick-crusted
boulder, with cavities like eye-sockets, that one so frequently meets
with as _home-made bread_. As Hood says:

"Who has not met with home-made bread,
A heavy compound of putty and lead?"

Delicious coffee is only a matter of care, not expense--and indeed in
America the cause of poor food, even in a boarding-house, is seldom in
the quality of the articles so much as in the preparation and selection
of them--yet an epicure can breakfast well with fine bread and butter
and good coffee. And this leads me to another thing: many people think
that to give too much attention to food shows gluttony. I have heard a
lady say with a tone of virtuous rebuke, when the conversation turned
from fashions to cooking, "I give very little time to cooking, we eat to
live only"--which is exactly what an animal does.