Much might be said in favour of household management, and especially in favour of improved cookery.  Ill-cooked meals is a source of discomfort in many families.  Bad cooking is waste,—­waste of money and loss of comfort.  Whom God has joined in matrimony, ill-cooked joints and ill-boiled potatoes have very often put asunder.  Among the “common things” which educators should teach the rising generation, this ought certainly not to be overlooked.  It is the commonest and yet most neglected of the branches of female education.

The greater part of human labour is occupied in the direct production of the materials for human food.  The farming classes and their labourers devote themselves to the planting, rearing, and reaping of oats and other cereals; and the grazing farmer to the production of cattle and sheep, for the maintenance of the population at large.  All these articles—­corn, beef, mutton, and such-like—­are handed over to the female half of the human species to be converted into food, for the sustenance of themselves, their husbands, and their families.  How do they use their power?  Can they cook?  Have they been taught to cook?  Is it not a fact that, in this country, cooking is one of the lost or undiscovered arts?

Thousands of artizans and labourers are deprived of half the actual nutriment of their food, and continue half-starved, because their wives are utterly ignorant of the art of cooking.  They are yet in entire darkness as to the economizing of food, and the means of rendering it palatable and digestible.

Even the middle classes are badly served in this respect.  “If we could see,” says a public writer, “by the help of an Asmodeus, what is going on at the dinner hour of the humbler of the middle class,—­what a spectacle of discomfort, waste, ill-temper, and consequent ill-conduct it would be!  The man quarrels with his wife because there is nothing he can eat, and he generally makes up in drink for the deficiencies in the article of food.  There is thus not only the direct waste of food and detriment to health, but the further consequent waste of the use of spirits, with its injury to the habits and the health.”

On the other hand, people who eat well, drink moderately; the satisfaction of the appetite dispensing with the necessity for resorting to stimulants.  Good humour too, and good health, follow a good meal; and by a good meal we mean anything, however simple, well dressed in its way.  A rich man may live very expensively and very ill; and a poor man may live frugally and very well, if it be his good fortune to have a good cook in his wife or in his servant.