cents), and good cooked vegetables are furnished for a price less than they could be cooked for at home, if one took any account of time and fire.

But such helps are not yet to any great extent available to the American woman; she must wrestle with her own problem at home and solve it as best she can.

THE KITCHEN.

The kitchen of a woman of average means is not the ideal kitchen. It is perhaps too small or not light enough, or it may have still more serious defects, as a bad drain. We must take it as it is, however, requiring only that it contain what is necessary to the end we have in view,—plain cooking for a family of six.

Size of kitchen.

In the cheaper city dwellings the kitchen is small, too small for good ventilation, and for the heavier kinds of work as washing; but for cooking, a very small kitchen can be so arranged as to answer every purpose.

Any one who has seen a ship's kitchen can understand this. The cook as he stands before his range is within reach of all his stores, for rows of drawers and shelves literally line the walls from floor to ceiling, little tables for pastry or cake making are drawn out of the wall and pushed in again when not wanted, and every inch of floor and wall space is used to the best advantage. This cook would tell you that he did not want a larger kitchen; he would only lose time running about in it.

Begin to utilize the wall space. If you have not yet Arrangement. aş many shelves as the walls will accommodate, put up more, and especially about and above the stove, so that as you stand at your cooking you can reach salt, pepper and every other flavor that can be used in a soup or stew; cooking spoons and forks and knives, potlids and holders-all these should be at your hand. Let

a carpenter fasten into the mortared wall strips of wood that will hold nails and a few shelves, and if the stove is in a niche with wall on two or even three sides of it, all the better. On these nails should hang nearly every implement used in cooking, and on the

shelves should be found all spices and flavors; farther back can be placed what is more seldom used. If there are no drawers, never mind, use close tin boxes for as many things as you can; if no closed cupboard for your dishes, hang a curtain before the open shelves. The nearer your sink is to the stove the better, that is the path your feet must oftenest travel. There must be a table of some sort very near the stove; if it is a movable one, all the better, or it may be a broad shelf with a very strong and safe hinged support under it, letting down when not in use.

I take for granted that the main part of your work is to be done on this stove and table, and that a well stocked pantry, fitted out for the making of pastry and cake and elaborate dishes, is not within your reach any more than the time for making such.

Utensils.

The utensils you need are few, but these few you must have. Consider the value of the food materials that you use; a few burns on an old sauce pan will quite buy a new one. We will speak only of the most important and absolutely necessary utensils.

First, do not use tin; it is cheap, but coal is not, and you will waste a great deal of coal in trying to cook in tin. Brass and copper cooking vessels are to be avoided by one who must economize, as they are expensive and require too much care to keep them free from the poisonous verdigris.

Of chief importance among your utensils is a flat bottomed iron pot with close fitting iron lid. Get the smoothest and best, even if it cost double. In this you will roast meat with little fire, cook vegetables, all but peas and beans, cook anything indeed that is not acid. Have two of these, if you can, of different sizes. Next, an iron frying pan, also of the smoothest wrought iron and light; this too should have a close fitting cover. Some people consider iron utensils heavy and old fashioned, but where economy is an object, no other ware is so good and satisfactory. The blue or grey enamelled ware is very nice but will not stand great heat and easily chips and cracks, but you should have one kettle of this ware as it is valuable for cooking fruit and anything acid. You must have a wire gridiron for toasting bread and broiling meat; this you should use for many things which you now cook in the frying pan. The tea-kettle is a matter of course, and a griddle. There is one other utensil not as common, but which deserves to be, viz., a steamer; a simple pot with perforated bottom which will fit tightly into the top

of the iron pot, and have a very tightly fitting cover. Its use will be discussed later.

You can hardly do without a number of earthen jugs, glazed with lead-free enamel, especially for cooking and holding milk. Get also a number of wooden spoons; they are cheap and clean, and of convenient shape for stirring. The old fashioned pudding stick of the Yankee kitchen is the earliest form among us, and many people know no other.

Stoves.

A good stove is of first importance in a kitchen, but fortunately good stoves have become common. A graver question, however, is the cost of fuel to be burned in them. Of course coal must be the stand-by, and when the stove is heated up as on ironing and baking days, care can be taken to use the fire to its fullest capacity; in winter, dishes can be cooked ahead for several days.

Coal Oil.

To cook a single dish or for boiling a teakettle a coal oil stove is a saving; it is also invaluable for keeping a pot at a simmering heat-a thing very difficult to accomplish on a

stove.

Charcoal.

For the same purpose, and for any steady cooking, and above all for broiling meat, every housekeeper ought to have appliances for burning charcoal; it only needs a grating with a rim two or three inches high, to let down into the stove hole (a sort of deep spider with a grated bottom). For such purposes, a bushel of hard wood charcoal costing fifteen or twenty cents would last a long time. Charcoal is almost the only fuel used in Paris for cooking; indeed, throughout France and in Western Germany it is in very common use.

"Cooking Safe."

For "Cooking Safe" as a saver of fuel, see page 194.

PROTEID-CONTAINING FOODS AND THEIR

PREPARATION.

We have already in the introduction called attention to the importance of this food principle. It is well for us to bear in mind that there are three great classes of proteids, Albumens proper, Caseins, and Fibrins, and that in both plants and animals are found representatives of these three classes. Thus, in plant juices and in eggs we have things belonging to the Albumen class; in the curd of sour milk and in the legumine of the pod-covered plants we have examples of caseins; and in the gluten of grains and in the clot whipped out of blood we have examples of fibrins.

ANIMAL FOODS.

Our animal foods contain some other things that the housewife ranks with proteids and we have a few words to say about one of them, viz., gelatine, that nitrogenous substance boiled out of bones and cartilage.

Gelatine, Hist. of.

In the history of foods this gelatine, like meat extract, has played a great part. Before the real functions of the food principles were understood it was thought that what could be extracted by water from a piece of meat comprised all in it that was of value to the body; and so it happened that for more than a hundred years after Papin had discovered the method of extracting all the gelatine out of bones (which he did by the aid of that contrivance still known in kitchens as the "Papin Soup Digester") gelatine was considered to be one of the most, if not the most nourishing constituent of meats. In the last decade of the eighteenth centuary, and in the early part of this the French made great use of gelatine under the impression that it was a proteid because it yielded nitrogen to the chemist. Improved methods of extracting it were invented, and so general did its use become, especially in the public institutions of Paris, that from 1829-38, two and three quarters million portions of bone-gelatine soup were dealt out to the inmates of a single hospital. But in spite of the opinions of

eminent scientists that gelatine soups and gelatine tablets were a perfect substitute for proteids, their consumption decreased; physicians again took hold of the subject, and by the middle of the century opinion had so changed that nearly all, if not all, food value was denied to them. Modern experimentation based on more rational methods has put gelatine in its right place. It is a food, just as much so as is fat, but like fat it cannot play the rôle of proteid although a certain amount taken with fats and carbohydrates will enable the body to get along with a little less proteid. It is even said by Prof. Voit to excel fat in its ability to do half duty for proteid material.

We have thought it well to speak of this because of a sort of superstitious regard in the kitchen for "stock," a survival, one would think, of Papin's time. A good German housewife was wont to discourse to the writer on the economical virtues of a certain "Frau Doctor" who "always boiled her bones three times" and dwellers in many a household have had their nostrils assailed by the smell of glue, during the sixth hour of bone boiling.

But if the importance of gelatine was and is still exaggerated, this is still more true of the other parts of meat that can be extracted by water.

Sol. Albumen

and Extractives.

We have seen that hot water coagulates proteid, and once coagulated, it will not dissolve in water, and for this reason the soup generally contains of this valuable principle only the soluble albumen which rose as scum. If the cook has skimmed this off, the soup which she calls strong is strong with flavors rather than with nutritive principles.

To show how very little real food a good tasting meat soup may contain, we will give an analysis made by Professor König.

Analysis of soup.

He took 1 pound of beef and about 6 ounces of veal bones, and treated them, he says, as is usually done in the kitchen to get a pint of good strong soup or boullion.

1.83 per ct. .32 per ct.

But where are the albumens that were in the meat to begin with? Many of them are still there in that stringy, sodden mass, the "soup meat," which the cook tells us contains no further value. It consists of cooked connective tissue and albumen; now these are foods and they must be rescued from the garbage barrel, for