A FEW INTRODUCTORY WORDS
Cooking ought not to take too much of one’s time. One hour and a half to two hours for lunch, and two and a half for dinner is sufficient, providing that the servant knows how to make up the fire in order to get the stove ready for use. Most girls will quickly learn to do that and how to put a joint properly in the oven. For my part I never went into the kitchen before half-past eleven for a half-past one lunch of three dishes. But once the cooking is begun one must give all one’s attention and care to it. No dish, however simple, will cook itself. You must not leave the kitchen while the cooking is going on—unless of necessity and only for a very few minutes at a time.
The bane of life in a small house is the smell of cooking. Very few are free from it. And yet it need not be endured at all. This evil yields to nothing more heroic than a simple but scrupulous care in all the processes in making food ready for consumption. That is why your constant presence in the kitchen is recommended. Unremitting care should be directed to the following points:
No saucepan should be allowed of course to boil over.
No frying pan should ever be put on the fire without the butter or lard being first placed in it, and that not before the pan is required for use.
No joint should be placed in the oven so high as to allow the fat to splutter against the roof of the oven.
No joint should be baked in a tin which is too small for it.
No vegetables should be cooked without a sufficient amount of water in the saucepan and no green vegetables should be cooked with the lid on.
No frying pan while in use should be allowed to remain on the fire with only the fat in it. A piece of whatever you are frying, bacon, fish, fritters should be left in till another piece is placed in the fat.
The pan must be removed directly finished with.
No fat once used for frying should be kept for future use. The economy is not worth making. The fat, for instance, in which potatoes have been fried will always contain a certain amount of moisture and the next lot of potatoes fried in it will turn out greasy and flabby. Fried potatoes should be crisp and melting in the mouth and if properly prepared make a delicate dish for a discriminating palate.
In the same way the fat used for fish however finely strained will contain particles of fish or breadcrumbs which will be certain to catch and cause an offensive smell. And the fish fried in such second-hand fat may perhaps be eatable but will certainly not be worth eating.
The above recommendations are founded on personal experience. The author advances them with the greater confidence because she had to find them out for herself. They present no difficulties in practice. If they are exactly followed, and due regard is paid also to incidental remarks of the same nature contained in the body of the book, your little house need never be invaded by the smell of cooking, generally so offensive and always unnecessary, which too often meets one in the hall and in nine cases out of ten—if not in every case—means simply that good food is being spoiled in the kitchen.
The recipes in this book are calculated for a household of four persons.