Paper bags are cheap. The young couple setting up modestly in life are spared the outlay of an expensive range of cooking utensils; the occupant of cramped apartments has not to endure the obtrusive little kitchen in bed-or sitting-room, and the thrifty housewife has not the continual necessity of replacing a worn-out saucepan or burnt-out frying-pan. And these things run into money. All that is necessary for the equipment of the up-to-date paper-bag cook is, of course, a kettle for boiling water, a conservative boilerette (Welbank) for the cooking of these few dishes not amenable to paper-bag treatment, and an egg saucepan. For though eggs are delicious cooked in a paper bag, it would be an extravagance to light the oven up for that purpose alone. Perhaps a frying-pan might also be included, but the rest of the kitchen outfit may consist entirely of “Papakuk” bags.
DOING WITHOUT A KITCHEN.
With the aid of paper-bag cookery, the up-to-date householder may eliminate the kitchen altogether, thus gaining another room. The small flat at a moderate rent usually consists of one sitting-room, two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom. It is equally unpleasant to sit in the room in which one has just dined, or to take meals in the room where they have just been cooked. With a little contrivance and ingenuity, the kitchen may be transformed into a neat little dining-room, a gas stove erected in any convenient recess or in the bathroom, and with paper-bag cookery, nothing more elaborate will be needed.
BEDROOM COOKERY.
For the business woman, living in one room, ordinary cooking is out of the question, yet most landladies refuse to cook for their lodgers, except at a high charge, and restaurant living is expensive. Ordinary cooking, too, means more or less heat and odours, incompatible with keeping the one room fresh and neat. In this case, too, paper-bag cookery solves the difficulty.
“WILD WEST” COOKERY.
Paper-bag cookery has been seized upon with thankfulness by a girl who went out to keep house for a brother in the “Wild West,” and found the toil of cooking with rough and old-fashioned utensils beyond her capacity. So incessant were her labours, so unsatisfactory the results, that she hailed with joy and gratitude a newspaper article and some bags sent her by a compassionate relative, and now writes triumphantly that all her cookery troubles are over.
INVALID DIET.
How weary invalids get of the eternal boiled whiting and boiled chicken is well known. The poor invalid who besought his doctor's permission to have his whiting fried, and who, receiving it with the proviso it should be fried in water, burst into tears when the dish was set before him, would have been charmed with the fish cooked in a paper bag. A whiting, a chop, a fillet of chicken thus cooked are all as savoury as if fried, yet as light and digestible as when boiled.
INVALID'S CHOPS.