Hand-Book of Practical Cookery, for Ladies and Professional Cooks: Containing the Whole Science and Art of Preparing Human Food

food beautifies the physique the same as a good and well-directed education beautifies the mind. A cook-book is like a book on chemistry, it cannot be used to any advantage if theory is not blended with practice. It must also be written according to the natural products and climate of the country in which it is to be used, and with a perfect knowledge of the properties of the different articles of food and condiments. Like many other books, it is not the size that makes it practical; we could have made this one twice as large as it is, without having added a single receipt to it, by only having given separate ones for pieces of meat, birds, fishes, etc., that are of the same kind and prepared alike. All cook-books written by mere compilers, besides giving the same receipt several times, recommend the most absurd mixtures as being the best and of the "latest French style." Although cookery has made more progress within two or three years, in this country as well as in Europe, than it had since 1830, and although all our receipts are complete, practical, wholesome, and in accordance with progress, still they are simple. Our aim has been to enable every housekeeper and professional cook, no matter how inexperienced they may be, to prepare any kind of food in the best and most wholesome way, with economy, celerity, and taste; and also to serve a dinner in as orderly a manner as any steward can do. We did not intend to make a book, such as that of CARÈME, which cannot be used at all except by cooks of very wealthy families, and with which one cannot make a dinner costing less than twenty dollars a head. Such a book is to housekeepers or plain cooks what a Latin dictionary is to a person of merely elementary education. If we give so many different ways of preparing the same article of food, it is not with a view to complicate cookery, but people's taste is in food as in dress, differing not only in