Page:Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book.djvu/17



To My Fellow Housekeepers, North, East, South and West;

years ago I wrote, dedicated to you, and sent press,

The daring step was taken in direct opposition to the advice of all who knew my purpose. I was assured that I should lose the modest measure of literary reputation I had won by novels, short stories and essays if I persisted in the ignoble enterprise.

One critic forewarned me that "whatever I might write after this preposterous new departure would be tainted, for the imaginative reader and reviewer, with the odor of the kitchen."

He may have been right. I do not know nor do I care whether his judgment or mine was the better. I gave my first cook-book to you because I knew from my own experience, as a young, raw and untaught housekeeper, that you needed just what I had to say. The hundreds of thousands of copies which have been sold, the thousands of grateful letters received from my toiling sisters, testify to that need and that to me was appointed the gracious task of supplying it.

Under the impulse of a conviction as solemn and as strong I offer you now a work embodying the best results of mature Housewifery. Or, as I would rather name it, Housemotherhood. Before I put pen to paper I stipulated that the contract with the publishers of should contain a clause forbidding me to prepare and issue any book of a similar character during the next ten years.

Whatever I have to say to you through the medium of a printed and bound volume in all these years must be said here.

I have had this thought in my mind with the writing of every page. In every page, in every line, in every word I have done