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Classic
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INTRODUCTION.
MY dear readers, my intention is not to publish in the following pages an
extensive volume, full of long and complicated recipes, but to tell you how, at
a small expense, cooking may be made not only substantial and wholesome, but
also appetizing and palatable. "The Creator by obliging men to eat to sustain
life"--says Brillat Savarin--"invites him by the appetite and rewards him by the
pleasure;" but to have real pleasure while at the table, and this pleasure is of
every age, it is necessary that the meal presented to you should please at the
same time the smell, the taste and the view.
"A ce propos" I cannot protest enough against the custom so general in the
United States to give to the table only the necessary time and to eat like a
locomotive taking water, by doing which you expose yourself to the various
stomach diseases which make so rapidly the fortune of the doctors and druggists.
To this my male readers will certainly respond: "We are so busy, we haven't
time;" well, let us excuse them for taking the least time possible at lunch;
business is business and the lunch not an important meal, but in many cases the
one to blame for the hastening of dinner is the housewife who does not give to
the dinner all the care it requires.
It is certainly not through lack of good will, because the Americans love home
and do their utmost to make it comfortable and attractive, but a good cook is a
rare and expensive blessing here and sometimes the mistress of the house does
not know anything about cooking.
Why does she not consult one of the numerous books written on the matter? There
are certainly many of them; but unfortunately the great majority are
intelligible only to professional cooks, because the chief object of the authors
has been to gain reputation among their fellow cooks.
My manner of procedure will be entirely different; wishing above all to be clear
and practical, therefore I will not hesitate to simplify the recipe of a dish,
while keeping its consecrated name; it will be perhaps
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