A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House

was a direct incentive to counsels of unreasonable violence. Victims of gloomy imaginings, they lived in abject submission to the wiles of a multitude of fraudulent medicine men--quacks--who haunted their existence with vain promises and false nostrums from the cradle to the grave. It is to be remarked that the quack of modern civilisation, the vendor of patent medicine, preys mainly upon the races of Anglo-Saxon stock who are also great warriors, great orators, mighty hunters, great masters of outdoor pursuits. No virtues apparently will avail for happiness if the righteous art of cooking be neglected by the national conscience. We owe much to the fruitful meditations of our sages, but a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen--the kitchen of the small house, the abode of the preponderant majority of the people. And a sane view of life excludes the belief in patent medicine. The conscientious cook is the natural enemy of the quack without a conscience; and thus his labours make for the honesty and favour the amenity of our existence. For a sane view of life can be no other than kindly and joyous, but a believer in patent medicine is steeped in the gloom of vague fears, the sombre attendants of disordered digestion. Strong in this conviction I introduce this little book to the inhabitants of the little houses who are the arbiters of the nation’s destiny. Ignorant of the value of its methods I have no doubt whatever as to its intention. It is highly moral. There cannot be the slightest question as to that; for is it not a cookery book?--the only product of the human mind altogether above suspicion. In that respect no more need, or indeed can, be said. As regards the practical intention I gather that no more than the clear and concise exposition of elementary principles has been the author’s aim. And this too is laudable, because modesty is a becoming virtue in an artist. It remains for me only to express the hope that by correctness of practice and soundness of precept this little