Such an experimental kitchen should analyze and test food products as to best methods of preparation; it should try new utensils; it should fit young women for their own home life. Perhaps something in this line will grow out of the New England Kitchen, so successfully started in Boston.
To bring about such a state of things, public opinion must be educated in every direction, through the home, school, and newspapers, as well as by individual effort.
The newspaper's cooking, like its editorials, must not be so narrow and partisan but that it may command the respect of those who do not wholly agree with it.
We must strive to separate the essentials from the non-essentials in our housekeeping; to recognize the various conditions of life among those to whom we are writing.
We do not want to copy the food fashions of any other land in a servile manner; no French, Italian, or English teacher can best instruct us in methods of cooking.
But, following our national motto, let us select the best from all, and unite these principles to develop an American system of cooking that shall produce a race so well proportioned physically that their mental and moral natures cannot fail to be well balanced.
Anna Barrows.
Boston, Mass.
DO THE BEST WRITERS WRITE?
A few years ago my attention was attracted by an article in one of the leading magazines. It was an article of more than ordinary merit, possessing that rarity, even then, a plot dramatically conceived and executed. The scene was laid in a part of the world the truthful picturing of which showed the writer to be a person who had travelled much and observed keenly; the diction was "English pure and undefiled." There was but one drawback, that the author's name was withheld, and I was obliged to lay my offering of approval and admiration at an unknown shrine.