The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1889-11-09
CoOK-RooM TEMPERANCE.

the Temperance Movement OF
the Improper Treatment of Foods
No doubt among the poor, men and
women, too, resort to beer in order to
piece out an insufficient diet. Badly
cooked meat, bakers bread and mis-
cradle boiled tea made out of the
sweepings of warehouses, constitute
the chief articles of food. In cities,
if vegetables are bought they are
cheap. stale, wilted trash, half de-
cayed and utterly unwholesome.
Denizens of tenements eat nothing
which give the rich blood and abound
ing health that workers ought to
have. Growing children are starved
for the want of nutritious grains and
cooling fruits, as well as for the lack
of good air and cleanliness. Phos-
pilates, that are found in whole wheat
and oatmeal, are generally lacking
from their larders.
Under these conditions nature Graves
nutriment. There is a constant, gnaw-
ing hunger hard to bear. Wives and
mothers, ignorant of the proper mode
of preparing and cooking food, and
many of them at work earning the
means to buy their daily bread, it is
easy tor them to supply the want, or
try to supply it, by ale. beer or some
thing stronger still. They could do
nothing worse. but for the time the
trouble is tided over. Who of US,
starved day after day while at work,
or with all the inordinate appetite of
the growing child, but would long for
something to fill up the aching void,
something to make us feel better: and
who that would feel satisfied and sus-
tanned by moral precepts and temper
ance maXims?
Among such, and their number is
greater than most suppose, the need
is to be taught how to cook. Edward
Atkinson in the Forum once showed
how good, economical cook might
save five cents worth of food and
fuel every day, or $18.25 per year,
At the same time the raw nutriment
could be converted into more nutri-
tious and appetizing food, by which
means better, healthier race of peo-
pie would result. The difference in
each community of 5000 would be
500. 500 per year, or about nine per
cent. of the total product of the typ
ical community. Now, while this
would by no means destroy drunken
ness, it would remove great tempta-
ton. Every one knows the physical
satisfaction resulting from eating q
good dinner, and the opposite feeling
after part&king of a poor one. 1t is
not meant by good dinner one made
up of rich food elegantly served, but
one that is both appetizing and nour-
ishing. 1t may be plain and simple
in the extreme, it must feed the body
and the nervous system.
Now, the number of women who can
make the most of good plain food is
not beyond computation. There is
the everlasting frying-pan and the
| ubiquitous soda, each of them guilty
of constant dietetic enormities, that
are on the right hand and the left of
eight housewives out OF ten. Good
meat is fried into scraps and tough
meat reduced to India-rubber, and
white flour screened from the best
part of It's nutriment, made into sod
den mass by the use of fat and soda.
In it Turk the demons of dyspepsia,
hypochondria, restlessness, nervous
ness and incipient intemperance.
Cooking-schools, founded on the
right basis, will be faithful helpers Of
the Temperance movement They
will not teach how to make deviled
lobster, diplomatic pudding and rum
sherbet. but how to make soup out OF
bones, scraps, vegetables and rem
nants that would otherwise be thrown
away; to make light bread and
wheaton muSh and plain buildings.
dishes that taste well and supply
waste. The women who will institute
these kind of cooking-schools in viii
lagos and country hamlets, or wher-
ever enough can be gathered to make
a class, will be doing good service to
humanity. Union Signal.
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