The Ghosts, and Other LecturesIngersoll, Robert Green
Religion
The Ghosts, and Other Lectures
Ingersoll, Robert Green
Free thought
Farmers should live like princes. Eat the best things you raise and sell
the rest. Have good things to cook and good things to cook with. Of all
people in our country, you should live the best. Throw your miserable
little stoves out of the window. Get ranges, and have them so built that
your wife need not burn her face off to get you a breakfast. Do not make
her cook in a kitchen hot as the orthodox perdition. The beef, not the
cook, should be roasted. It is just as easy to have things convenient
and right as to have them any other way.
Cooking is one of the fine arts. Give your wives and daughters things to
cook, and things to cook with, and they will soon become most excellent
cooks. Good cooking is the basis of civilization. The man whose arteries
and veins are filled with rich blood made of good and well cooked food,
has pluck, courage, endurance and and noble impulses. The inventor of
a good soup did more for his race than the maker of any creed. The
doctrines of total depravity and endless punishment were born of bad
cooking and dyspepsia. Remember that your wife should have the things to
cook with.
In the good old days there would be eleven children in the family and
only one skillet. Everything was broken or cracked or loaned or lost.
There ought to be a law making it a crime, punishable by imprisonment,
to fry beefsteak. Broil it; it is just as easy, and when broiled it is
delicious. Fried beefsteak is not fit for a wild beast. You can broil
even on a stove. Shut the front damper--open the back one--then takeoff
a griddle. There will then be a draft downwards through this opening.
Put on your steak, using a wire broiler, and not a particle of smoke
will touch it, for the reason that the smoke goes down. If you try to
broil it with the front damper open, the smoke will rise. For broiling,
coal, even soft coal, makes a better fire than wood.
There is no reason why farmers should not have fresh meat all the year
round. There is certainly no sense in stuffing yourself full of salt
meat every morning, and making a well or a cistern of your stomach for
the rest of the day. Every farmer should have an ice house. Upon or near
every farm is some stream from which plenty of ice can be obtained, and
the long summer days made delightful. Dr. Draper, one of the world's
greatest scientists, says that ice water is healthy, and that it has
done away with many of the low forms of fever in the great cities. Ice
has become one of the necessaries of civilized life, and without it
there is very little comfort.
Make your homes pleasant. Have your houses warm and comfortable for the
winter. Do not build a story-and-a-half house. The half story is simply
an oven in which, during the summer, you will bake every night, and feel
in the morning as though only the rind of yourself was left.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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