The Bottineau Courant

INTELLIGENT COOKING.
All Housekeepers Should Understand the High Art of Simple Cookery—Some Useful Knowledge.

Ordinary sense, the very acme of good living, is the best presentation of good material in simple form, and in that sense it is the best and highest of living. The introduction of cookery as a branch of our public-school training will start the coming generations of housekeepers in the right direction; but the crying need of the present, next to a knowledge of materials, is for housekeepers to better understand the importance of the high art of simple cookery.

Many a woman will take infinite pains in making a cake who probably could not tell of the vegetables in common use which should be put on to cook in hot water and which in cold, which should be salted at first and which later, and why; how each should be dressed for serving, and the difference in dressing them when young and old. Among housekeepers there are more good pie-makers than bread-makers; twenty who make pretty desserts to one who is expert in cooking meats, and fifty who make fine cake to one who understands good soup-making. Do not, because you have kept house ten, twenty or thirty years, feel your housewifely dignity would be compromised by beginning all over again in certain things, for that is being progressive. A narrow-minded woman would not do it, be sure of that. The really useful knowledge you already possess will count for its full value; your expertness in the non-essentials is very desirable—as a supplement to more important knowledge.

Of course you can cook a potato. But how? When you have really exhausted 'the fine art' of cooking potatoes you have finished one fundamental branch of a splendid education. There are others of equal importance, and each alike necessary, if one would be an intelligent housekeeper. Ella Morris Kretschmar, in Woman's Home Companion.