KITCHEN ALCHEMY.
It is to France chiefly that the world owes this invaluable lesson, which gives to those of moderate means many of the advantages of the well-to-do. In that country the humblest peasant family enjoys palatable meals because the cook is an alchemist who knows how to transmute the baser metals into silver and gold.
The secret of this alchemy lies in the use of the stock-pot, which saves for the table a vast amount of animal and vegetable nutriment and flavor such as in American cities and on American farms are wickedly wasted.
It is no consolation to know that the British are almost if not quite as foolishly wasteful as we are. But they are beginning to learn of the French. Sir Henry Thompson's "Food and Feeding" sounded a note which is being listened to more and more attentively. A more recent writer comments instructively on "French Thrift and British Waste":
"In a French household such a thing as waste is almost unknown. The positive waste of odds and ends in this country is simply appalling. Look not only under the vegetable stalls in our streets, but also in almost all dustbins, and you will see as much as, if it had been kept clean, might have given health literally to thousands of people.
"Besides the outside leaves of cabbages and cauliflowers, and the outside layers of onion skin, there are the peelings of potatoes, turnips, carrots, and apples, and the tops of beet-roots and turnips, and the large outside sticks of celery. In France and other countries these go, as a matter of course, into the stock-pot. In England the stock-pot is scarcely used at all among the poorer people. It is not too much to affirm that half a dozen changes in the ways of English poor people, including first and foremost the use of the stock-pot, would increase our national prosperity more than our social reformers dream of."