Read Ebook: The Writer Volume VI April 1892. A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers by Various Hills William H William Henry Editor Luce Robert Editor

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In these days of specialties, when one man devotes himself to politics, another to finance, or music, or art, it would not seem that a woman, because she is a woman, is therefore fitted to care for the household department of a paper; yet this is usually the first work given into her hands. Probably there are many teachers of cookery who could not write a catchy newspaper article, but it may be questioned whether such writing is desirable upon this subject.

The time is coming when the cooking-school graduate will be called for to teach this art and science through the columns of the newspaper, as well as in the schoolroom.

The religious papers choose graduates of the theological seminaries for their editors, and medical journalism is conducted by physicians. If a sporting editor is essential, why should not special training be required for the cooking department?

Under present conditions, the best teachers can afford to do little newspaper work; a demonstration requires little more time and effort than the preparation of a newspaper column, and the compensation is double or quadruple, and is promptly paid.

Furnished by untrained hands, the newspaper recipe has become a synonym for something utterly unreliable, and, therefore, a byword among those so old-fashioned as to believe that a woman who holds a pen is, of course, a poor housekeeper.

True, much of the blame for the uncertainty of the newspaper recipe must be laid at the door of the typesetter and proof-reader--who else would make a demonstrator whose programme included a "Frozen Rice Pudding" responsible for a "Dozen Nice Puddings" in a single lecture.

Often the column headed "Dainty Dishes," "Hints for the Cuisine," etc., appears to be made up from recipes taken at random from the clippings of the year before--so we have strawberry shortcake and asparagus omelet in October, cauliflower in August, and blueberries in December. Without a hint concerning the proper method of combining the ingredients, a string of recipes are worthless, and mean as little as a column from the dictionary.

So accustomed has the public vision become to this artificial, improbable, housekeeping that it fails to recognize veritable facts and pronounces them impossible.

Food is a subject which demands the careful consideration of every human being daily, and therefore claims ample space in the newspapers. The wise man of the Old Testament has said: "All the labor of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled."

We are not all interested in the success of either political party, nor are we all thirsty for items of society gossip, nor are the details of every murder or railroad accident more important than our daily bread.

Our physical natures and our food are not so ignoble as some would have us think. We need only look at the thousand allusions to food in classic writings to realize that it is our attitude toward an object, not the thing itself, which makes it common and unclean.

Does it not seem strange that the art of cookery, which first distinguished man from beasts, has been so underrated and neglected?

"The art of cookery drew us gently forth From the ferocious light, when, void of faith, The Anthropophaginian ate his brother; To cookery we owe well-ordered states, Assembling men in dear society."

Surely no one better than a newspaper reporter, who must snatch a bite here and there of whatever is at hand, can appreciate the force of the words of an old physician: "The faculty the stomach has of communicating the impressions made by the various substances that are put into it is such that it seems more like a nervous expansion of the brain, than a mere receptacle for food."

Many a newspaper woman has found a safety-valve in doing her housekeeping with her own hands, the needed reaction after prolonged mental effort, and by the divine law of compensation has thus worked out with her hands something of which the brain alone was not capable. Michelet says that "A man always clears his head by doing something with his hands." Can we not all bear testimony that some of our brightest ideas have come when our hands were busy with rolling-pin or dish-pan?

The newspaper woman is expected to act as leader in many directions. Though not always competent to do special newspaper cookery in the best way, she may help mould public opinion in the right way on the great questions of temperance, domestic economy, co?perative housekeeping, and, above all, help to change the prevailing belief that work with the hands is degrading.

The great social questions of the day are largely dependent upon the food supply. Show the working men and women how to obtain attractive, palatable, and nourishing food at less cost than that which is unsatisfying, and their wages will really be doubled.

The temperance question is so closely connected with the food supply that it is astonishing that more attention has not been given to this side of it. We often ascribe the intemperance of the poor man to poor food; but are not the excesses of the rich also due to food, poor because it is too highly seasoned and improperly cooked?

Rev. T. De Witt Talmage has said: "The kitchen is the most important end of the household. If that goes wrong, the whole establishment is wrong. It decides the health of the household, and health settles almost everything."

May we all live to see the day when every town shall have a food experiment station, which shall do for the cook and the kitchen what the agricultural stations do for the farmer and farm. The cooking schools are a step in the right direction, but their work should be broadened and put upon a more scientific basis.

Such an experimental kitchen should analyze and test food products as to best methods of preparation; it should try new utensils; it should fit young women for their own home life. Perhaps something in this line will grow out of the New England Kitchen, so successfully started in Boston.

To bring about such a state of things, public opinion must be educated in every direction, through the home, school, and newspapers, as well as by individual effort.

The newspaper's cooking, like its editorials, must not be so narrow and partisan but that it may command the respect of those who do not wholly agree with it.

We must strive to separate the essentials from the non-essentials in our housekeeping; to recognize the various conditions of life among those to whom we are writing.

We do not want to copy the food fashions of any other land in a servile manner; no French, Italian, or English teacher can best instruct us in methods of cooking.

But, following our national motto, let us select the best from all, and unite these principles to develop an American system of cooking that shall produce a race so well proportioned physically that their mental and moral natures cannot fail to be well balanced.

BOSTON, Mass.

DO THE BEST WRITERS WRITE?

A few years ago my attention was attracted by an article in one of the leading magazines. It was an article of more than ordinary merit, possessing that rarity, even then, a plot dramatically conceived and executed. The scene was laid in a part of the world the truthful picturing of which showed the writer to be a person who had travelled much and observed keenly; the diction was "English pure and undefiled." There was but one drawback, that the author's name was withheld, and I was obliged to lay my offering of approval and admiration at an unknown shrine.

Lately, in conversation with a man who forms one of the great majority of those who gain a moderate competence in business life, his days spent in the wearisome routine of mercantile life, his nights in painful figurings about that delusive "deal" which is to settle satisfactorily all questions of financial perplexity, our talk turned on books, literary celebrities, the chat of the profession of letters. My friend suddenly became communicative and reminiscent--rare expressions in him.

"A few years ago," he said. "I, too, had the literary craze. I wrote a little--stray articles, stories, poems, the usual repertoire."

I wondered what kind of material this suave, cynical, reserved man could have produced--in other words, what was his undercurrent. I interrogated. To my surprise and consternation I had found at last the author of my pedestal-placed masterpiece.

"But why," I said, "did you not keep on; why hide, deface, forget, a talent like yours?"

"Allowing, for the sake of argument," he answered, "that I possessed talent to the degree you imply, I should still have been forced to my present attitude. I am not alone in this. I am convinced that the best writers are the people who never write, who could bring to the field varied experience, the results of travel, thought, and cultivation, but who are driven away by the knowledge that the wolf will have them if they attempt it. Notwithstanding the fact that there has never been a time when literature has been produced so prolifically, a man can only make a moderate competence, and that after years of weary uncertainty and a constant strain on the waiting nerves, and, even at the end, he gets but a meagre reward: lots of newspaper notoriety and a scanty bank account. I am not complaining; I looked the facts squarely in the face, and chose what I regarded as the only sensible solution. I could not conscientiously use literature as a safety-valve or time-passer, giving to the world the result of tired brain and over-wrought nerves; consequently, I sacrificed inclination to necessity, and have left my muse alone. However,"--and he was once more the worldling,--"I have reserved to myself the right to criticise; and when I see a young man of talent enter the field of letters, I conclude he is like a man about to marry, either a great hero or a great fool."

NEW YORK, N. Y.

FASHIONS IN LITERATURE.

A veteran novel reader has learned to detect a plot in its early stages; to see from afar the marriage, the forgery, the hidden will; to him the true inwardness of the different characters is manifest; no disguise, no blandishments, avail to conceal from his piercing vision the true heir, the disguised villain, the timid lover.

It has been stated by careful students that the original stories in the world number but two hundred and fifty; but we have not forgotten our arithmetic, and we have learned chess, so we know something of the manifold combinations of numbers, and we take courage.

But the veteran novel reader finds little variety in incident and machinery; there are fashions in fiction as in everything else, and the prevailing "style" of the time is followed apparently without question.

The heroines of an earlier generation differed from those of the present. They were slender creatures, living on delicate fare, and fainting at every or no provocation. When these lovely beings died it was usually of a broken heart, developing into consumption. They were depicted clad in white and holding flowers, reclining at open windows, regardless of draughts, and they lectured heart-broken friends and faithless lovers with a command of language and strength of lung rare in every-day life. For bringing about some needed explanation sprained ankles have played a conspicuous part, and a strong-armed hero or stalwart rival was ready to carry the fair sufferer

"Over hill, over dale, Through bush, through briar,"

to some place of shelter, where friends and reader alike watched the progress of recovery. Runaway horses have been vastly useful in bringing matters to a crisis, and in New England stories a fierce bull is always ready to threaten the life of the heroine.

These casualties were especially the lot of the heroines, but fevers were open to all without distinction of "sex, race, or color." In the wanderings of delirium the cleverly-disguised villain betrayed his dark designs--the self-distrusting lover sighed his woes into the sympathetic ear of the damsel of whom in his "normal state" he had said--

"'Twere all as one That I should love some bright particular star And seek to wed it."

With the modern dissemination of knowledge and of sanitary science, the former ailments have become less fashionable; there has been a run of diphtheria, and heart complaints are slaying their thousands.

Athletics are restricted to no sex,--the hero is less frequently called to rescue his beloved from a watery grave. Indeed, her skill may be superior to his,--witness Armorel, one of the fairest of modern creations.

We have now the "novel of every-day life," wherein we are called to "assist" at commonplace incidents; to listen to inane talk, where adverbs, liberally bestowed, help our comprehension, as we are told that certain things were "coarsely," "suggestively," "tentatively," said. It is, indeed, "reading made easy."

Stuart Mill, lamenting the changes in the tendency of modern fiction, wrote: "For the first time perhaps in history, the youth of both sexes of the educated classes are universally growing up unromantic. What will come in mature age from such a youth the world has not yet had time to see."

These words were written half a century ago, the generation referred to has reached "mature age," and the world has read its novels.

EAST BRIDGEWATER, Mass.

SNEAK REPORTING.

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