To the Woman in the Home
Some years ago a witty and well-known writer deplored the fact that, in every block of twenty houses, twenty dinners were being cooked by twenty women, involving waste of coal and waste of energy, instead of having the twenty families go to a public dining-hall. But where is the dining-hall, hotel, or restaurant, whose meals, when partaken of three times a day for week after week, month after month, year after year, do not produce the sense of intolerable monotony and of everything tasting alike? Where are the hotel and restaurant habitués whose hearts do not hanker and whose mouths do not water for “home food and home cooking?”
Then a newer school of economists arises, to tell us that the “cost of coal” standard— the money standard in anything has to give place to the psychic standard, the wholesome pleasure that transcends its money cost. The home table, the family meals, are a source of this pleasure. The woman in the home, who thinks of everybody’s tastes, who provides for everybody’s needs and idiosyncrasies, has in her hands the bestowal of much solid comfort and happiness in the family life. We might almost go so far as to say that when the home and family meals go, the family will go too, the bond will be weakened which so curiously depends on the breaking of bread together.
To the Woman in the Home then, this book is especially offered for the help it is hoped it will bring her. The thanks of the writer are due to the publishers of American Cookery for permission to include many menus and recipes which appeared in that magazine. Also she desires to acknowledge her indebtedness to the publishers of The Queen’s Work, St. Louis, Missouri, in which first appeared a briefer and less detailed list of the foods included in the tables of the last section of this book.— From “The Boston Cooking-School Magazine Company,” 1920
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