Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/696

676 good do you expect all this will do you in the kitchen?" "As if," as she says, "I was necessarily to spend my life in the kitchen, or as if there was no chemistry to be used in the kitchen!"

Even sneers have their value, since, as we shall see in this case, they are often the spurs to great achievements.

Shortly after the culmination of the work of the Sanitary Science Club in Home Sanitation, in the fall of 1889, Mrs. Mary Hinman Abel, a graduate of Elmira College, returned from a six-years' residence in different European cities with the idea that something might be done toward the better nourishment of the working people, such as she had seen in Germany and Austria in the Volksküche, and in the Fourneau Économique in France.

During her husband's prolonged absence in Europe, she went for six months to stay with Mrs. Ellen H. Richards, now professor of sanitary chemistry in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who had become especially interested in her through being one of the judges in the matter of the prize of five hundred dollars offered by Mr. Lomb, of Rochester, N. Y., for the best essay on practical sanitary and economic cooking. Mrs. Abel won this prize, and her little volume bearing this title is considered the simplest and still the most scientific presentation of the subject yet made.

The fruit of this six-months' companionship was the now famous New England Kitchen, started under Mrs. Abel's direct charge. Even the first meeting of these two women foreshadowed the future developments along this line, for then, in mentioning the needs of the working people in this country, Mrs. Richards remarked that Mrs. Quincy A. Shaw, of Boston, and a daughter of the scientist Louis Agassiz, had been ready for some time with the money which might be necessary for such an experiment, she having especially in mind the establishment of a place which, by furnishing cheap and good food, should help to keep laboring men from the saloons.

Mrs. Shaw, having only the benevolent idea in mind, relied entirely upon her friend Mrs. Richards as to ways and means, but agreed with both her and Mrs. Abel that much experiment and the gathering of information must underlie true philanthropy in this direction.

The principles upon which this experiment rested were, then, as they said, the necessity of finding out "how people live, how they cook, and what they buy ready cooked, in order to lay out any satisfactory plan of reform," and the value of bringing absolute accuracy into certain departments of food preparation, so that a physician in ordering an article of diet—beef broth, for instance—might know just what unvarying nutrients it would contain.

In accordance with these ideas and plans, a first-floor room and