In the culinary art, likewise, the reader will find that far better results are reached by praising the cook for her successes than by never speaking to her except to find fault. It makes her try to earn more praise, not only in the making of that particular dish but in the making of others.
Above all things, a mistress who expects artistic dishes from a superior cook should never appear to be looking down on her.
This looking down business, perhaps more than anything else, stands in the way of our getting good cooks.
At the same time, perhaps more than anything else, it shows what fools these mortals be.
All over the country, but particularly in the West, I have found that most families look down on other families. It is chiefly a question of money. Those who have an income of $3,000 look down on those who have only $1,000 or $1,500, while those who have $10,000 do all they can to show their superiority to three-thousanders, only to be, in turn, snubbed by those whose income is $20,000; and so on.
One day in a California village where I was spending the winter, I was surprised at the rudeness of a storekeeper with whom I had had some pleasant chats. He hardly answered my questions; in fact, he snubbed me. I found out next day that he had just inherited a large fortune, a piece of luck which he celebrated by promptly looking down on everybody he knew.
As a rule, however, I regret to say, the women are more addicted than the men to this preposterously silly habit of looking down on others. Not to speak of its being extremely ill-mannered it is the most deadly obstacle to the solution of the problem of domestic help.
We shall never have a sufficient supply of good helpers until mistresses recognize the fact that cooking is a fine art, and that those who practise it should be treated, not as servants, but as practitioners of the most important profession in the world—a profession which stands to the medical in the relation of prevention to cure; and that prevention is better than cure we all know. It's cheaper, too.
An old English writer has justly remarked that "the kitchen is the best pharmacopœia."
F. W. Hackwood calls attention to the suggestive fact that all the best old cookery books in the English language were written by medical men. Sir Kenelm Digby and Dr. Mayerne in the seventeenth century, Dr. Mill and Dr. Hunter in the eighteenth, and Dr. Kitchiner in the nineteenth gave to the world "the best English cookery books of their respective eras."