Cargoes for Crusoes

by Grant M. Overton

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In addressing this chapter to you, I do what I can to notify other men that they may find it uninteresting. Indeed, as you and I know, if all the truth were told they would find it, many of them, most unpalatable reading. There are things we need not go into, such as the indubitable fact that the success of the home depends solely upon the woman. A man may contribute to it, but he cannot make it; and whatever his behavior, if the woman is steadfast, he cannot absolutely wreck it. The home is a form of government and a form of human society. We are familiar with the larger forms of government men have tried, the best of them only partly successful. But the home has been a complete success, times innumerable. Men may call it a benevolent despotism, but the fact remains. It is perhaps significant that the government of the home is not conducted by the use of the Australian or the Massachusetts ballot. Women have accepted the vote and will use it; but their grasp of certain essentials of society is more clear than men’s, and if the ballot cannot safeguard the home, and the health and welfare and opportunity of children, then government will have to be transformed into something that will.

But this is understood; my purpose is simply to tell of a few books which are, in type, indispensable to the homemaker. The types are really only two: the cook book and the handbook of motherhood. It so happens that there is one volume of each type so complete, so thoroughly tested, so practically perfect that it stands alone on an eminence above all others of its sort—and the best of the others make no pretensions to do more than add wings, columns, buttresses, and chapels to the main edifice. If I could talk about The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book and The Care and Feeding of Children in the same breath, I should do so. I can, anyway, talk about them in the same chapter!

The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, by Fannie Merritt Farmer, first appeared in 1896 and was most recently revised last year. It has over 800 pages and still is a volume of little more than ordinary size, no thicker than a rather long novel. The 122 illustrations are so treated as to be intelligible—and if you have ever tried photographing food, you will appreciate what this means. The pictures have been used to show what the words of the text could not make so clear; one sees at a glance the differences between kidney lamb chops, rib chops and French chops, or the precise effect of capon in aspic, rather elaborately garnished with cooked yolks and whites of eggs cut in fancy shapes, pistachio nuts, and truffles.

The book opens with a simple scientific account of the kinds of food (food being “anything which nourishes the body”) and follows with a chapter on cookery including invaluable timetables. After a chapter on beverages with its recipes there are chapters on everything from bread to ice cream, from soup to jam and jelly-making and drying fruits. Then comes a long selection of menus, a chapter on food values with the necessary tables, and a forty-eight page index which has all the utility of an absolute, all-inclusive bill-of-fare.

The chief thing, of course, is that every teaspoonful and every direction in the book is exact, and standard. Nor, without going into the more recondite French cookery, or into special Italian, Spanish, German and other foreign dishes, is it possible to think of any dish which The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book omits. The variety of each kind of dish is often extraordinary. For example, I have just counted seventy hot puddings. In every case there is first the table of ingredients, then the simple directions. If a personal word will add anything to the force of what has been said, I will say that the superb cook who honored me by becoming my wife tells me that in no case when following The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book formula has she failed to cook with success.

Specialized, or partly specialized, cook books are many, and one of the best and most recent is Fannie Fox’s Cook Book, by Fannie Ferber Fox, with the assistance of Lavinia S. Schwartz. Mrs. Fox is a sister of Edna Ferber, and the novelist has written an introduction for Fannie Fox’s Cook Book which has all the richly human interest of her own fiction. In a paragraph which need hurt no feelings, Miss Ferber points out the tendency to over-emphasis in one or another direction which characterizes the cookery of most lands; and she gives with humorous eloquence her personal tribute to the toothsome torte, that cake of rich and crumbling particles which is included in Mrs. Fox’s recipes. This is a cook book that covers all kinds of foods but is distinctive by its preservation of the finest recipes from Jewish cookery.

Another valuable addition to the kitchen bookshelf is Bertha E. L. Stockbridge’s Practical Cook Book, in which a notable feature is the great number of practical suggestions for menus.