Remarks

The very first principle of cooking is cleanliness. No skill or flavouring can make up for the lack of it, and if it be present, there is good hope of every other culinary virtue. But cleanliness is an elastic term, and I wish it to be clearly understood that I would fain stretch its interpretation to the utmost limit. Even the sacred frying-pan would I ruthlessly scour, all unheeding the old-fashioned, and, let us add, dirty axiom, that it should be left with the fat in it. It is quite true that the fat which has been used to fry potatoes, or fritters, or anything except fish, may be poured out of the saucepan into a daintily clean basin or empty jam-pot and used again and again, but I would have every cook taught to clean her frying-pan thoroughly every time she uses it. The fat in which fish has been fried should never be used for frying anything else, and an economical housewife will take care that the fish is fried last. I have sometimes been met with the assertion that it is too much trouble and takes too much time to keep everything in a kitchen as clean as it ought to be kept. To that I reply, that if a girl be brought up by a tidy mother or mistress to understand and appreciate the value and beauty of cleanliness, she will never be able to endure any other state of things. I declare that I have observed greater dirt among the saucepans and a deeper shade of black over everything in kitchens where neither poverty nor want of time could be pleaded in excuse, than in a place where one pair of willing hands has had to keep the living-room of half a dozen people tidy.

I am not sure that I do not detest surface-cleanliness, with its deceptive whiteness, more than genuine honest dirt about which there is no concealment, for the sham snowiness is apt to throw youthful housekeepers off their guard. For their encouragement I can assure them that it is not such a superhuman task as it appears to see that everything under their sceptre is kept scrupulously clean, for the advantages of cleanliness over dirt are as patent as light over darkness, and ninety-nine servants out of a hundred will soon come to acknowledge this themselves. People of all ranks and classes differ in this respect according to their instincts and training, and in many a fine house a dirty cook would find things more after her own heart than in a two-roomed cottage.

Let us, for a moment, take the case of a girl who has been a housemaid or nursemaid in a small family, and who marries a decent young artisan earning from 15s. to 25s. a week. Here is enough money for comfort if the wife knows how to manage and is clean and tidy in herself. How far will that, or twice that sum, go if she be an ignorant slattern ? The chances are that such a girl knows absolutely nothing of cooking, and that she will have to arrive at even the smallest amount of such knowledge through a long series of unpalatable meals and wasted food. Perhaps it may be years before she attains to the production of any dish which can fairly be called wholesome or nourishing ; but surely she is not to be blamed for her ignorance. She has gone straight from her school to a situation whose duties have never taken her into the kitchen, and she finds herself at twenty-five years of age at the head of a working man's home, with no more notion of how to manage their income comfortably than if she were an infant. She has hitherto had no opportunity of learning how to cook; but if she has been taught to be thoroughly clean and tidy in her habits and ways, she may rest assured that half the battle is won. The other half, the National School of Cookery at South Kensington steps in to help her to win, and it is to be hoped that in due time, by the establishment of branch institutions all over the kingdom, by means of lectures and demonstrations (for cooking cannot be taught by theory), any young woman in such a position will know where to go if she wants to learn how to cook the food her husband's wages enable her to provide. But cleanliness she must teach herself, and practise it diligently in her little kitchen, for without it she can never be a good cook, no matter how successful she be in the matter of bread, or how deftly she may handle her frying or sauce pan.