u. The joint has
been baked in an oven, of which it smells, and is surrounded by a
sickly gravy, produced by pouring hot water over it! In conversation
with your hostess, you find that she knows nothing whatever about the
simplest elements of the preparation of food. She tells you she avoids
roasting because it necessitates a large fire and an extra expenditure
of L5 a year on coal, and she also purchases those mouldy,
frost-bitten potatoes instead of the best, because they cost half as
much as sound ones--and she herself does not care for potatoes. They
are fattening!

Sometimes at a restaurant or club, served by a foreign "chef," a
Yorkshire pudding, as hard as a stale loaf of bread, is handed round
in slabs with the so-called "roast" beef. It is not roasted: it is
baked beef, and the pudding is an ill-tasting baked mess, also.
Nowhere in London in public or private house do I ever see the
properly cooked article. True Yorkshire pudding can only be made by
placing it under the roasting joint, which drips digestion-promoting
essences into the pudding whilst itself rotating, hissing and
spluttering--as did the joints roasted in the caves long ago by the
prehistoric Reindeer-men. The scientific importance of good roasting
and grilling is that a savour is thereby produced which sets the whole
gastric and digestive economy of the man who sniffs it and tastes it,
at work. Possibly our successors, a generation or two hence, will have
learnt to do without this, and will have acquired as intimate and
happy a gastronomic relation to what now are for us the nauseous
flavours of superheated fat (rarely renewed), and of the all-pervading
gravy fabricated by chemical treatment of yeast, as that which we
ourselves have acquired in regard to the old-established and
painstaking cookery of the early Victorian and many preceding ages.

Medical men who are occupied as specialists with the study of very
young children have clearly demonstrated that the implanting of
tastes, tendencies and habits in infants of from two to eight years of
age has an immense importance in their subsequent development.
Character and capacity are really formed in those early years. Food
preferences, no less than mental and moral qualities, are then
created. Yet the children of both rich and poor are in these early
stages either left to haphazard or entrusted to ignorant nursemaids.
For those of us who were not born to the present system the transition
to the