Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/527



is all very fine, M'sieu' Blot—the nebulous person is speaking now not for himself, but for a lady who has read the great Pierre's articles in the, and his book, and who has attended his lectures—it is all very fine, what you say about cookery; and your dishes are palatable, and wholesome, and pretty to look at; and your dinners are very well contrived; but it is much to be feared that all that you say will be of very little service to the mistresses of American households. For the murder is out; you have confessed it; all your nice dishes, even the simple ones, take time, and all your pretty dinners, even the most moderate ones, require forethought. And these are just the two most difficult ingredients for us to put into a dish or a dinner. If we are going to have dinner company, with invitations sent out some days in advance, we know well enough what to do: we buy our dinner, or part of it, cooked, and in the latter case the pastry-cook and the confectioner help us out, and we do very well; at least we and our guests are satisfied. Our great need is help toward having nice, appetizing, well-cooked breakfasts and dinners every day. We want to have our dinner-tables attractive, our dishes palatable and digestible, and to do this in an unpretending way. If there be the virtue in you that you seem confident of—and this we are inclined to believe—you will teach us how to do this, and at no greater expense than we are now at for our tasteless, greasy, indigestible dinners; for you accomplished French cooks are never weary of exclaiming at our wastefulness, and saying that we do not get half the worth of our money. But we cannot be planning our every-day dinners beforehand, nor can we call upon our cooks to make dishes which take so much time and require so much care as all yours seem to demand, and as, indeed, you yourself say that they must have. We—that is the most of us who read your articles—living on incomes of from $3,000 to $8,000 a year, cannot keep a cook who has nothing to do but to cook, and who has a scullion to help her. And, moreover, we are obliged to take Irish or German peasant women for cooks; women who, before they reach our shores, have rarely eaten meat, and who are not even acquainted by sight with the utensils of a well-appointed kitchen. These women generally wash and iron as well as cook, and they take care of the lower floor of the house. Now, M'sieu' Blot, do you not see that, with this personnel, all your lectures and your books are of little help to us, although they are in themselves instructive and quite charming? Our need is simply this—some means of enabling us to have, with the women we must needs accept as cooks, a simple dinner of three courses (one of them soup), and a dessert, well prepared, and sent up in appetizing shape, and to have this every day at no greater cost of time or money than we are now put to.

fact is, Mr. Blot—the nebulous person now speaks again, not for himself, but for the husband of the lady who has just had the floor—the fact is that our dinners are not generally so well cooked and so well served at home as, in the wicked recesses of our hearts, we think they might be, and that, being compelled sometimes to dine down town, we are obliged to