All the other duties of the housewife are subsidiary to the great
subject of preparing food for the household. The care of the home, the
care of health, etc., all either bear upon this work or require ability
to perform it.

With decks cleared for action, therefore, we will proceed to discuss the
fundamental principles of cookery, the application of which, in the form
of specific recipes, will follow in a separate chapter.

In the limited space which can be here devoted to the subject, it
will be assumed that the housewife is a cook, and can follow plain
directions, and that she is familiar with the methods of preparing the
ordinary meals that are universal throughout the country. It will be
also taken for granted that she has one or more general cook books
containing a wide variety of recipes for the making of bread in its
various forms, cakes, pies, omelettes, salads, desserts, etc., and the
discussion will be confined to meats, wherein, owing to advancing
prices, new economical methods of preparation are coming into practice,
based upon a scientific knowledge of food values.

Vegetarianism and fruitarianism are being adopted by many households,
less as a matter of principle than as a recourse from what are
considered the present prohibitive prices of meats. Now the proper way
to solve a problem is not to evade it, but to face it and conquer it,
and this is eminently true of the meat problem. Granted that the
proportion of family income devoted to food cannot be increased, it is
a fact that, by an intelligent study of the food value of the different
kinds of meat, and of economic ways of preparing them, the expense of