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

desire of the eye, often bringing a good thing into disrepute. Because his garnishes and fanciful devices conceal cheap materials and indifferent manufactures is no reason why the housekeeper should not make the substantial “home fare” provided by her honest hands goodly to sight, as well as to taste. Cooking schools and classes, chafing-dish lectures and the cuisine corner of the woman’s page have been active for more than a third of a century to bring our average American housewife to what old-time revivalists called “a realizing sense” of the deficiencies of the national kitchen, and by the rugged road of conviction to conversion from the old way to the new, which is the better. There is no dearth of missionaries, no lack of machinery. Much of the work done by these is surface culture—scratching and smoothing over the soil, cleansing, to a polish, cup and platter. Curled parsley, beets, carrots and turnips, carved into leaves, stars and flowers, and fantastic confections of tissue paper and meringue—do not cheat veterans in gastronomics into relish of the ill-prepared dishes they adorn. Experiences of this sort have something to do with the contempt felt by many competent cooks for culinary esthetics. They class everything that looks in this direction under the head of “French cookery,” a synonym with them for flash and frippery. I grant that to the hale appetite of the lover of “plain roast and boiled” of joints, haunches and rounds—the man who can digest mountains of fried “griddles,” and, in the bottom of his stomachic conscience, prefers corned beef and cabbage to broiled sweetbreads and mushrooms—his steak, or rare roast, or sugar-cured ham, or choice cut of cod, tastes no better for the garnish of cress, nasturtium or lemon. I once saw a millionaire “high-liver” toss aside the green sprays with the declaration that he “liked to have victuals and weeds sent in upon separate dishes.” After clearing the trou—trencher!—he proceeded to feed. In the feeder’s very teeth I maintain that food daintily served tastes better than the same when set before us with no regard to seemliness. If