Home › Weights and Measures › Weights and Measures: Success

Weights and Measures: Success

MRS. CURTIS'S COOK BOOK Nete Edition Revised and Enlarged A MANUAL of INSTRUCTION IN THE ART of EVERYDAY COOKERY 2y ISABEL GORDON CURTIS Author of "Leftovers Made Palatable" "The Everyday Cook Book" "The Making of a Housewife" "The Progress of a Housekeeper" SUCCESS COMPANY'S BRANCH OFFICES PETERSBURG, N. Y.

DANVILLE, ILLS.

TOLEDO, OHIO OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLA. SAN JOSE, CAL.

F COPYRIGHT, 1909 THE SUCCESS COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1913 BY SUCCESS COMPANY'Ss BRANCH OFFICES COPYRIGHT, 1914 BY SUCCESS COMPANY'S BRANCH OFFICES PREFACE THIS book is designed for the use of the home cook, who is interested in the best way to do her work, and who strives to set an attractive table as well as to practice economy. Although this compilation contains a number of recipes for what are termed "fancy dishes," the greater part of its teaching deals with the plain food, which is served three times a day on the table of an everyday American family. It teaches every detail about how to make good bread, how to cook vegetables, fish, meat, eggs, cereals, and other wholesome foods in the most tempting way possible. It also teaches how to utilize all sorts of left-overs-daintily and economically. I believe that every woman should know how to cook, whether she is compelled to use that knowledge or not. The knowing how is not unlike being able to swim: you may spend nearly all your life upon dry land, then suddenly comes a crucial moment when swimming means life or death. In the career of nearly every housekeeper there comes at some time a crucial moment, when the knowledge of cookery means life or death, for a steady course of unwholesome, badly cooked food is certainly death. Cookery may seem to the novice at first distasteful and hard work, but when one begins to master the principles it is an art that grows in interest. To-day instead of looking upon domestic tasks as menial labor, the woman of sense and dignity sees in a thorough and scientific mastery of such labor a step toward the higher education. ISABEL GORDON CURTIS.

INTRODUCTION WHEN the query was recently put to Isabel Gordon Curtis, " Where and how did you learn to cook?" she went back to the days of her childhood, which were spent in Scotland. "If I was eager for one thing," she confesses, "it was to get into the kitchen on baking days. Baking day in a Scottish kitchen is very different from that in America. No yeast-raised bread is made, no cakes, cookies, pies, or doughnuts. Twice a week a Scotch housewife piles a tray full of crisp oatcakes. They are baked on a griddle, then dried on a little hanging shelf in front of a red peat fire. There is a batch of puffy scones, also griddle-baked, but no sweet stuff. The stoves are long ranges built into the wall; they never fire up enough to bake anything that needs more heat than a milk pudding. Then Scotch women do not know the secret of bread-making, for 'loaf-bread,' as it is called, comes from the bakeshops. For me there was no fascination of watching bread rise or the mysterious process of kneading. Only I loved to roll out my own little oatcakes and scones and bake the tiny batch on the edge of the griddle-that was if the cook was good-natured enough to let me hang around. When I read American stories, which told of baking days in a farmhouse kitchen, and luscious things coming from a brick oven, I longed to be in the thick of it, not so much to eat as to cook. "I tried to make American bread-just once. Some Canadian cousins visited us and I listened eagerly to their description of baking pie, bread, and cake. The housewife of the party was a fine cook, and while she described the processes of bread-making I took it all in. My mother left with them for a few days of sight-seeing, and in her absence I determined to make bread. I took two shillings from my bank and at the bakeshop bought ten pounds of flour and a cup of yeast, 'barm' as it is called in Scotland. I rose very early next morning, and mixed the dough, kneading it till my arms ached; then I laid it into round pans. If the rising process had been described I missed it. The pans were popped straight into an oven as hot as I INTRODUCTION could make it. The loaves baked and baked and baked, while I stood right by the stove keeping it at a roaring heat. They never rose as I supposed bread ought to do and my hopes fell. Hours later I took the loaves from the oven; they were heavy and dark, with a crust you could not have broken with an axe. They looked like curling stones more than anything I can think of. The perplexing question was where to put them, for I wanted nobody to know of my failure. If I had buried them in the garden they might be dug up. Our wash house in the yard had a queer little attic which nobody entered, because the only entrance it had was a hole opening from the wide chimney. I climbed on the rough cobble stones of the wall and rolled my loaves into the dimmest recess of the attic. Years after, when I had utterly forgotten them, the wash house was demolished by a windstorm and among the débris were found my loaves. They were a curiosity to the neighbors, for I never told my secret. One old man declared they were meteorites, and his theory was looked upon as a possibility. "In these days there were no cooking schools in Scotland, though in school we studied a text-book on domestic economy, only of what use was a text-book without practise? My mother sent me into a caterer's kitchen where many girls were taught something of cookery. There I learned how to make shortbread, the famous hot mutton pies of Scotland, gingerbread, pound cake, sponge cake, and Bath buns. We did not make bread; that was a bakery product. I had lessons, though, on how to turn out a magnificently upholstered christening or wedding cake, which shows what an impracticable course it was. "A few years later we sailed for America. From a friendship made in this new country, I look back on the beginning of an ideal and also the beginning of a definite ambition. My ideal was one of the most gracious, accomplished, and capable women I have ever known. As I came to know her well, I realized that a woman may occupy the highest social position with charming dignity and lose none of that dignity by being a thoroughly capable housewife. She could cook, sew, or even do the work in her own kitchen, when necessity demanded it, with a perfection that is seldom found in hired help. From this woman I had my first lessons in housewifery; she taught me not only how to do work of all sorts as well as it can be done, but that it was work every woman ought to know how to do and she INTRODUCTION should be proud of that knowledge. Twenty years later, when a dedication was required for the first book I wrote on housekeeping, I gave it to the woman who at just the crucial point in my life instilled a belief that there is no higher accomplishment than to know how to live well, yet economically, making a home healthful, attractive, and happy. "Years after, when I drifted into newspaper work and edited the woman's department of a farm paper as well as that of a city weekly, I found the knowledge I had gained of housewifery no small value. Later I married, and that knowledge was put to practical use. I began then to make domestic economy a regular study, for each day there came a new problem that demanded something more than the information in cook books. Experience and experiment prove valuable teachers. "Ten years ago, I was called to the editorial staff of Good Housekeeping. That required even more extended study; a course in a cooking school and constant reading. No wider experience can be gained than in answering the questions that come from housekeepers to a home magazine. In learning how to solve problems for other people, you absorb a multiplicity of knowledge that cannot be achieved in one home. The cookery of America is cosmopolitan, its housewifery is conducted after the customs of many nations, and the woman who answers questions on a magazine cannot help but learn much that is not found in books. Following Good Housekeeping came similar work on Collier's Weekly, the Delineator, then on Success Magazine. One thing I am learning from it is, that as wide as our continent is interest in the betterment of homes, in the moral influence of wholesome, well-cooked food, in simpler living, and in household economy. It means a steady development of the American woman toward the highest ideals of housewifery."

THE PUBLISHERS.