Roadtown

by Edgar Chambless

The mechanical carrier will be on the order of that used in the Library of Congress as a “book railroad.” It is inexpensive, noiseless, and can by means of a “key” be set to switch automatically at the house for which the “car” or “carrier” is intended.

The Roadtown cooking will not be done in a single kitchen, but in a number of large establishments, such as bakeries, creameries, boiling, roasting establishments, etc. The prepared foods will then be sent in suitable quantities to serving stations located about half a mile apart, and there kept hot in the warming closets. Here the frying, broiling, and other such types of cooking will be performed to order.

The bill-of-fare will be sent out by Roadtown mail. The people will order by ’phone and the foods will be on the sideboard in the Roadtown dining-room in less time than it takes to bring it by the two-legged route from Delmonico’s kitchen to his dining-room. But in the dining-room a difference arises. The carriers must be opened and the dishes and food arranged upon the table by the women folks—a homely virtue left that the household poet may not be entirely without material.

The usual meal will require two carriers, one of which will be heated, and the other containing butter, milk, ices, etc., will be chilled. Many changes of fashion will be required in the form and material of dishes for containing and serving food—changes that will doubtless “upset” the good dames who have found virtue in soup tureens that can slop over, but it is needless to add that their Roadtown daughters will be more “upset” at the thought of a return to present customs.

At the close of the Roadtown meal, the dishes, food remnants and soiled linen, will be put into the carrier, and dropped down a little chute where they will travel merrily to the public dish-washery. Here a few men with the aid of machinery will do the work which now occupies half a hundred mothers while their families adjourn to the library, music-room or to indulge in a nap.

In the Roadtown household there will be no furnaces to tend, no ashes to haul out, and no marketing to do. The garbage waste will be only the table refuse which will be placed in a paraffined paper receptacle and sent back with the dishes. A bag for waste cloth and paper will complete the waste disposal system.

The End of Household Drudgery.

In such an environment with the baby cared for by experts in the nursery or kindergarten only a thousand feet away, the mother will have time to operate an electric sewing, knitting, or one of many other automatic and noiseless machines, work in the garden, read, visit, or attend the theater, lecture hall or church. Indeed the Roadtown woman will be free to do anything and everything she chooses except home drudgery.

The Roadtown idea will at first produce a long low wail from the thousands of men readers which will begin and end with a plea for “mother’s cooking.” The Roadtown cookshop is coöperative, but the dining-room is not. And the cookshop will be there to fill the need of the coöperators, not to make money. If there is demand it will have uncooked food to send out as well as cooked food. Nor will there be any law against the bringing into one’s home the fruits of one’s own garden, berry patch, and poultry yard. Roadtown folks that keep a cow can take their choice between setting the milk in the spring and letting the cream rise or sending the milk to the creamery where it is aërated, chilled, pasteurized, and bottled, and the fat contents standardized, and thus sent back as 4 per cent milk to drink and 20 per cent cream for the strawberries. Personally having tasted both kinds I prefer the scientific product.

Every Roadtown home will have a boiler for hot water, a chafing dish and as much more cooking apparatus as may be desired. The wealthy matron of to-day keeps alive the sentiment of mother’s cooking by making the tea, frosting the cake or making the salad dressing. The Roadtown mother can do the same, and as much more cooking as she likes, but once the opportunity is given for people to find the actual economy of coöperation and to see the folly of heating up a whole house to do one family’s cooking, the amount of cooking mothers will do will be decidedly limited.