Missouri Housekeepers' Conference Association. 463 



recipes for cream sauce, cream soups, and from a study of the com- 

 position of cereals determine the amount of water to be added and 

 length of time for cooking 1 . Being thoroughly grounded in the 

 same way in the study of all the elemental principles, the rest be- 

 comes easy, and they finally have a grasp of the subject which often 

 experienced housewives never get. Many women cook well under 

 certain conditions, but let these conditions change, and they ar« 

 lost. They can not vary their rules to suit conditions; but even 

 admitting they can, is not our way a short cut to what they have 

 taken years to learn? 



Summing up, the advantages of the method from the stand- 

 point of the educative value of the subject seem to be: 



(1) The advantage of the subject-matter proceeding from 

 the simple to the complex, though this is sometimes used by the 

 recipe teachers also. 



(2) General principles to keep in mind, rather than an in- 

 definite number of small rules. 



(3) The cultivation of habits of thinking which is sadly 

 needed to correct the memory habit of so many girls. 



(4) Not only are they taught to think, but their thinking 

 seems to be of peculiar value in that it functions in action. 



Let us now look, for a moment, at the arguments against the 

 method. They are: (1) cooking is not a science, but an applied 

 science; (2) the method takes too long; the students can not get 

 practice in cooking so many dishes as by other methods; (3) we 

 should have exact recipes, and keep close to them. 



We are perfectly willing to acknowledge that cooking may be 

 and usually is taught as an applied science, but when we take the 

 point of view of nutritive value and preparation of foods as the 

 basis for the organization of our principles, we have, according to 

 the very meaning of the word science, a science of cooking. 



Does it take too long? Any one who is acquainted with the 

 advantages of the inductive method in teaching the various sub- 

 jects can not doubt its efficiency in this case. Is not spelling hard 

 for us, simply because we can not use this method, but must use 

 the recipe method? How much easier it would be if in that case, 

 too, we could organize the whole subject under a relatively few 

 guiding principles? Who would then care to go back to the older 

 method, and how much faster we would learn to spell. The same 

 is true in case of cooking. In a given*time as many individual re- 

 cipes may not be cooked, but a much better and more flexible grasp 

 of the whole field is obtained. Instead of being able to prepare 



