Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping

The mistress who yields to the earliest manifestations of an inclination to draw the dead line in housewifely progress is weakly indulgent or blindly foolish. In one wealthy family, not a hundred miles from a great city, “a valued old servant” played the tyrant for over a score of years. Little by little, the employers, mindful of her long term of faithful service, admitted her pleas that this or that new-fangled way was opposed to her habits and inclination, until family bills of fare were monotonous to boredom, the style of serving that of a preceding generation. At last Elizabeth died and was buried at the master’s expense. “It’s dreadful, I suppose,” piped the youngling of the long-suffering band on the way home from the funeral. “But it ought to be some comfort that we won’t be obliged to have rice pudding three times a week any more.” Faithful Elizabeth had her epitaph. Nothing is more solemnly and sadly sure in this rushing age than that he who does not keep up with it will be thrown down and trampled out of sight. It is a trifle, apparently, when a woman tabooes oil in salad dressing because she “has never been used to putting it in,” when she thinks mint sauce a “trashy” accompaniment to roast lamb, and “won’t hear of hot sauce with cold pudding,” or whipped cream as an accompaniment to ice-cold raw tomatoes. When the vegetable dishes must all be set on the table with the meat, “as she has always had them,” and lettuce be cut up and dressed in the kitchen at the cook’s convenience, instead of being served, crisp and cool, from the deft fingers of some member of the family who is “up in salads.” Each protest is a symptom of decadence which is wilful, not inevitable. She has stopped learning because she _has_ “stopped.” In time, mental muscles become stiff, but disuse is the cause of the change. “I account that day lost in which I have learned no new thing,” said an aged sage. Our housewife may lay the saying to