THE SOCIAL CASTE OF COOKS.
One of the most amazing phenomena in the United States is the great number of girls of all classes who consider kitchen work beneath them and not worthy of serious attention.
Girls of the working classes are not in the least ashamed to confess their absolute ignorance of the art of cooking, though they know that after marriage they must cook for their families. Then they bewail their fate if their husbands, tormented by dyspepsia, seek relief in strong drink. France, it has often been said, is on the whole a sober nation because it is a nation of good cooks.
American girls should remember that, as a Chicago expert has testified, "few men abandon or get a divorce from a woman who is a good cook."
The most amazing of our young women are the factory workers and shop-girls who imagine they are of a higher social caste than cooks, and look down on them.
What makes this attitude the more ridiculous is that the mothers of all these girls were cooks (mostly very bad ones!) and that all of these girls themselves, when they marry, must spend much of their time in the kitchen.
To be sure, they are not paid for this work, as professional cooks are.
Some of the social "reformers" are now demanding that husbands pay their wives for domestic work. If that point should be carried, what would be the social status of the wives—nine out of every ten in the country—who cook for their families?
In future, if there is any looking down, it will be done by the cooks, whose work is infinitely more elevating, refined, scientific and artistic than that of factory and shop girls, who, instead of enjoying the cooks' splendid opportunities for exercising their brains, their taste, and their inventive powers, are reduced to the level of mere machines by the deadly monotony of having to make so and so many dozen shirt-waists or paper boxes, or ruining their health by standing behind a counter, serving the same things, day after day and year after year, to customers most of whom look down on them as being of a lower social status.
That settles the foolish notion that American girls refuse to become cooks because they do not wish to lose social caste. Society women are no more addicted to inviting the girls who wait on them in stores to their banquets or teas than they are the girls who wait on them at home or preside over their kitchens.
Moreover, no mistress would dare to treat her cook so contemptuously, so insultingly, as shop girls and factory girls are often treated, or as chorus girls are treated habitually on the stage.
French supremacy is demonstrated in many ways, not the least of which is the recognition, generations ago, of the noble status of the cook, domestic or professional.
It may not be literally true that French girls read cookery-books with the avidity with which ours read novels, but certainly they are proud of their ability to cook savory dishes.
An article in the New York "Times" (February 11, 1912) on the most exclusive clubs in Paris, where the chefs receive the salaries of ambassadors, states that members "have obtained permission for their daughters—young women, belonging to well-known French families—to be present in the kitchen while the head cook is preparing dinner every afternoon. While the chef officiates in front of the huge furnace which stands in the center of the kitchen he is surrounded by a group of fashionably dressed young women, who follow all his movements with the greatest interest and listen eagerly to his explanations as he initiates them into the mysteries of his art."
The French cuisine is preëminent to-day because a century ago the daughters of the best French houses were taught to cook. And, as Anatole France has remarked, these girls knew that "there is no humiliation in washing dishes."
To be sure, dish washing, as done at present, is monotonous and hardly entertaining. But if we tried to avoid all things in this world that are monotonous and not entertaining, what would happen?
My own work includes some hours of daily drudgery. What busy man's or woman's doesn't? Why discriminate against the kitchen? Read Marion Harland's delightful little book on Household Management (New York: Home Topics Publishing Co., 23 Duane St.); you can do it in an hour and you will benefit particularly by the chapter on "Fine Art in 'Drudgery,'" in which, writes the distinguished author, "I give a recipe for dishwashing as carefully and with as much pleasure as I would write out directions for making an especially delicious entrée or dessert."
Women and men who prepare for the stage, dramatic or musical, have to undergo an enormous amount of drudgery and keep it up all their lives. In the summer of 1912 I heard the greatest of all pianists, Paderewski, daily practising elementary "five-finger" exercises, and he admitted that it took great strength of will to keep it up; but he knows the truth of the remark once made by Hans von Bülow that if he neglected his practicing one day he knew it; if two days, his friends knew it; if three days, the public knew it.
That is a kind of drudgery compared with which dishwashing is a picnic. Most dishwashers, moreover, dawdle dreadfully. They could do their work in one half if not one quarter the time it takes them. See the remarks of the astonished Isabella Bird Bishop in her book on the Rocky Mountains on the way she saw two young bachelors disposing of their kitchen work in the twinkle of an eye.