SCHOOL GIRLS LIKE IT.
RESPECT for the noble art of cooking is being greatly enhanced by its introduction into our public and private schools as an important branch of education.
When this innovation was first suggested, the funny men of the newspapers seized on it as a welcome new subject for their jokes and cartoons, and even now not a few persons who have given the question insufficient thought speak of cookery as one of the fads and frills of our schools. But at a budget hearing in October, 1910, Dr. W. H. Maxwell, Superintendent of the New York City Public Schools, made the memorable statement that he considered the retention of cooking-lessons more important than the study of languages.
He might have gone further; he might have said that because health is more important than learning, therefore cookery is more important than anything else now taught in our schools.
It is useless to say that cooking should be taught at home. Most mothers, especially among the working classes, have neither the time nor the knowledge to teach their daughters how to prepare food rationally.
Recognizing this fact, the Young Women's Christian Association also began some years ago to provide culinary lessons.
One of the reasons for this action may be found in a statement made in the Twenty-seventh Report of the New York Cooking School, that "good coffee and a palatable meal often remove the need of strong drink, and many a working-woman has had her cares lightened by the child who has learned to cook."
An English girl, who had thus been taught, said: "Mother tells me she'd make a drop of nice broth for the children out of an old bone as she'd have thrown away."
A glimpse of future possibilities is given by an experiment made in six Chicago schools, with 1,200 pupils. The boys in the manual-training classes made fireless cookers, and the girls did the rest. One result was a rich, palatable soup costing one cent a bowl.
The most encouraging aspect of the situation is that both in England and in America the experience has been that the children like the cooking best of all their lessons and are glad to practise them at home. As one principal wrote, "The cooking has been enthusiastically received by the pupils, and the parents are heartily in favor of it."
COOKING CLASS AT THE WADLEIGH HIGH SCHOOL