We do not say that the daughters of the wealthy and well to do should be submitted to regular kitchen apprenticeships, and taught the details of cookery, any more than that they should learn to make shoes or to fit and sew dresses. But it is desirable that they should acquire _principles_—such principles as would enable them to apply prompt correction to the errors of their hired cooks. It is no very bold assertion that were such a knowing and judicious supervision generally exercised, the stomach diseases, under which half our nation is said to groan, would be materially abated. Let us take a step or two lower in the ladder of English life, where circumstances oblige the Good Plain Cook and the wife to be one and the same person. Many a respectable clerk, and many a small farmer, is doomed from one year’s end to another to a wearying disproportion of cold, dry, uncomfortable dinners, because his wife’s knowledge of cookery takes no wider range than that which pertains to the roasted, boiled, and fried. Thousands of artisans and labourers are deprived of half the actual nutriment of food, and of all the legitimate pleasures of the table, because their better halves—though good plain cooks, in the ordinary acceptation of the term—are in utter darkness as to economising, and rendering palatable the daily sustenance of their families. ‘If we could see,’ says a writer before quoted, ‘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. Gin is the consolation to the spirits and the resource to the baulked appetite. There is thus not only the direct waste of food and detriment to health, but the farther 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 appetite with relish dispensing with recourse 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 one very frugally but very well, if it be his good fortune to have a good cook in his wife or his servant; and a ministering angel a good cook is, either in the one capacity or the other, not only to those in humble circumstances, but to many above them of the class served by what are self-termed professed cooks, which is too frequently an affair of profession purely, and who are to be distinguished from plain cooks only in this, that they require larger wages for spoiling food, and spoil much more in quantity, and many other articles to boot.’