Healthful Cookery
209
cook with simplicity, and yet in a manner to secure the most palatable
and healthful food.
Because it is wrong to cook merely to please the taste, or to suit
the appetite, no one should entertain the idea that an impoverished
diet is right. Many are debilitated with disease, and need a nourishing,
plentiful, well-cooked diet. We frequently find graham bread heavy,
sour, and but partially baked. This is for want of interest to learn,
and care to perform the important duty of cook. Sometimes we find
gem-cakes, or soft biscuit, dried, not baked, and other things after the
same order. And then cooks will tell you they can do very well in
the old style of cooking, but to tell the truth, their family do not like
graham bread; that they would starve to live in this way.
I have said to myself, I do not wonder at it. It is your manner of
preparing food that makes it so unpalatable. To eat such food would
certainly give one the dyspepsia. These poor cooks, and those who
have to eat their food, will gravely tell you that the health reform does
not agree with them. The stomach has not power to convert poor,
heavy, sour bread into good; but this poor bread will convert a healthy
stomach into a diseased one. Those who eat such food know that they
are failing in strength. Is there not a cause? Some of these persons
call themselves health reformers, but they are not. They do not know
how to cook. They prepare cakes, potatoes, and graham bread, but
there is the same round, with scarcely a variation, and the system is
not strengthened. They seem to think the time wasted which is devoted
to obtaining a thorough experience in the preparation of healthful,
palatable food. Some act as though that which they eat were lost, and
anything they could toss into the stomach to fill it, would do as well as
food prepared with so much painstaking. It is important that we relish
the food we eat. If we can not do this, but eat mechanically, we fail to
be nourished and built up as we would be if we could enjoy the food
we take into the stomach. We are composed of what we eat. In order
to make a good quality of blood, we must have the right kind of food,
prepared in a right manner.
It is a religious duty for those who cook to learn how to prepare
healthful food in different ways, so that it may be eaten with enjoy-
ment. Mothers should teach their children how to cook. What branch
of the education of a young lady can be so important as this? The
eating has to do with the life. Scanty, impoverished, ill-cooked food