When planning out the bills of fare the cook must use more brains and less gas.
For instance, let us say that she wants to serve hashed mutton (and Heaven help that it may not be that grey and slimy mass endured in too many an English home!), potatoes, Brussels-sprouts, milk pudding, and stewed fruit.
Let her heat the oven and cook the mutton in a casserole. The potatoes and sprouts can cook in the oven just as well as over a boiling tap, the milk pudding is baked, and the fruit baked in a covered casserole. Managing thus, all the dishes are cooked in the oven.
Then there will come a day when the oven need not be used at all, and the meal be cooked on the top of the stove. After all, cooking is carried out by heat, and it matters little in most cases if the heat surrounds the pan as in the oven, or is kept directly under it as by a tap.
Every oven should be supplied with a solid browning shelf, not a thing with holes in it. This can be placed where needed, and by its use the part of the oven above it can be kept 100 degrees cooler than that which is below.
PLATE XXXIX
AN ELECTRIC COOKER (OVENS, HOT-PLATE, GRILL, PLATE HEATER) FOR A LARGE HOUSEHOLD
(Messrs. Crompton & Co.)