The Mission of Cookery
By Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
The true purpose of cooking should be such a preparation of food materials as will so change their constituent elements as to make them more digestible than they would be in a raw state. Indeed, good cookery is a partial preliminary digestion of the food elements; at the same time it breaks up the food by dissolving the soluble portions so that it is the more readily acted upon by the digestive fluids. Cookery is one of the oldest of household arts. In primitive days it is probable that the processes by which food was prepared were very simple, but with the later ages of luxurious tendencies and voluptuous living, such a multitude of the cook’s devices was called into requisition to provide new and pleasing dishes,12that the primal purpose of the art was largely overlooked, and the whole aim centered upon producing something to cater to the sense of taste. There was much rivalry among cooks, and even those of different nations vied with one another in efforts to concoct marvelous and unheard-of dainties. With such a gastronomic heredity, it is not difficult to understand why so many of the recipes in common use at the present day are simply a mixture of ingredients to please the palate without regard to dietetic value. When taste alone is made the criterion, it is so easy to disguise the results of careless and improper preparation of food by the use of flavors and condiments, that poor cookery has come to be quite as frequently the rule as the exception. The resulting evils are almost innumerable. No one thing over which we have control exerts so marked an influence upon physical prosperity as the food we eat. Improperly prepared food makes poor blood, poor brains, poor muscles, and vitiates the integrity of the entire system. Much of the disease, many of the sins and misdeeds, and much of the unhappiness of the world may be rightfully attributed to poor food and bad cookery. Phillips Brooks used to say that “health is salvation,” and Bishop Foster declares that “to care for men’s souls most effectively, we must care for their bodies also.” To care for their bodies necessitates a first care for the building material from which these bodies are made, in the provision of proper food and its healthful preparation. The proper preparation of food for digestion is not merely a matter of having at “one’s fingers’ ends” the composition of numberless dishes. The following of recipes and the mechanical mixture of ingredients have largely constituted the cook’s art in times past, but in these days of progress it is becoming evident that success in cookery, as in other arts, depends upon attention to the scientific principles involved, and that a knowledge of the composition of foods, their digestibility, their nutritive values, their adaptation to individual use under varying conditions, the results of certain combinations, the action of heat upon different materials, the why and the wherefore of each operation employed in cooking, is indispensable for the successful production of wholesome articles of food.