Our native housewife does not make the effort to crowd this cavity with the product of her poultry yard.  Eggs of all ages are marketable and her pride in the limited number she uses in filling up her household is comic, yet pathetic.  Cream is the chrysalis of butter at thirty cents a pound; to work so much as a tablespoonful into dishes for daily consumption would be akin to the sinful enormity of lighting a fire with dollar bills.  She sends her freshly-churned, golden rolls to “the store” in exchange for groceries, including cooking butter to be used in the manufacture of cake and pastry.

These she must have.  Appetites depraved by fats—­liquid, solid and fried—­crave the assuasives of sweets and acids.  “Hunky” bread-puddings and eggless, faintly-sweetened rice puddings, and pies of various kinds, represent dessert.  Huge pickles, still smacking of the brine that “firmed” them, are offered in lieu of fresher acids.  Yet she sneers at salads, and would not touch sorrel soup to save a Frenchman’s soul.  For beverages she stews into rank herbiness cheap tea by the quart, and Rio coffee, weak and turbid, with plenty of sugar in both.  Occasionally the coffee is cleared (!) with a bit of salt fish skin.  I was told by one who always saved the outside skin of codfish, after soaking it for fish balls, for clearing her coffee, that, “it gives a kind of bright taste to it; takes off the flatness-like, don’t you know?” We raise more vegetables and in greater variety than any other people; have better and cheaper fruits than can be procured in any other market upon the globe; our waters teem with fish (unsalted) that may be had for the catching.  Yet our national cuisine—­take it from East to West and from North to South—­is the narrowest as to range, the worst as to preparation, and the least wholesome of any country that claims an enlightened civilization.

Properly fried food once in a while is not to be condemned, as the grease does not have a chance to “soak in.”  But when crullers or potatoes or fritters are dropped into warm (not hot) lard, and allowed to remain there until they are oily and soggy to the core, we may with accuracy count on at least fifteen minutes of heartburn to each half-inch of the fried abominations.

Perhaps there is nothing in which we slight the demands of Nature more than in what and how we eat.  Chewing stimulates the salivary glands to give out secretions to aid in disposing of what we eat.  We swallow half-chewed food, thus throwing undue labor on the stomach.  It is impossible for the work of disgestion to be carried on in the stomach at a temperature of less than one hundred degrees.  Yet, just as that unfortunate organ begins its work we pour into it half-pints of iced water.  We add acid to acid by inordinate quantities of sugar, and court dyspepsia by masses of grease.  If we thus openly defy all her laws, can we wonder if the kind but just mother calls us to account for it?