Page:Hill - Salads, Sandwiches, and Chafing-Dish Dainties.djvu/17

 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

is positive need of more widespread knowledge of the principles of cookery. Few women know how to cook an egg or boil a potato properly, and the making of the perfect loaf of bread has long been assigned a place among the "lost arts."

By many women cooking is considered, at best, a homely art,—a necessary kind of drudgery; and the composition, if not the consumption, of salads and chafing-dish productions has been restricted, hitherto, chiefly to that half of the race "who cook to please themselves." But, since women have become anxious to compete with men in any and every walk of life, they, too, are desirous of becoming adepts in tossing up an appetizing salad or in stirring a creamy rarebit. And yet neither a pleasing salad, especially if it is to be composed of cooked materials, nor a tempting rarebit can be evolved, save by happy accident, without an accurate knowledge of the fundamental principles that underlie all cookery.

In a book of this nature and scope, the philosophy of heat at different temperatures, as it is applied in cooking, and the more scientific aspects of culinary processes, could not be dwelt upon; but, while we have not overlooked the A B C of the art, our special aim has been to present our topics in such a simple and pleasing form that she who attempts the composition of the dishes ix