534 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



milling, easily cooked and easily digested, is not more largely con- 

 sumed by the poorer families in this country. 



The effect upon our food habits of the introduction of railways and 

 the supply of comparatively cheap fuel to every household is almost 

 incalculable. But for this the consumption of tea, perhaps even of 

 potatoes where there is no peat, would be very small. The preference of 

 the French for liquid, and of the English for solid, food, has been at- 

 tributed to the greater relative facilities which the French once en- 

 joyed for making a fire, though the persistence (if not the origin) of our 

 popular habits in this respect probably lies rather in the fact that a 

 Frenchwoman's cookery makes greater demands upon her time and 

 attention. One result of this preference is that the essential juices 

 of meat preserved by the French in soups and ragouts are with us to a 

 large extent absolutely wasted. Owners of small house properties com- 

 plain that, however well trapped their sinks may be, the pipes are 

 constantly choked, and that the mysterious mischief is almost invariably 

 cured by liberal doses of boiling water, which melt the solidified fats 

 cast away in a state of solution. The number of persons who died of 

 starvation in the administrative county of London in 1898, or whose 

 death was accelerated by privation, amounted to 48; and we shall be 

 pretty safe in estimating the total number in the United Kingdom 

 at something less than 500. The common and inevitable reflection is 

 that they might have been easily relieved from the superfluities of the 

 rich; but it is true also that their sufficient sustenance was destroyed 

 many times over through the ignorance of the poor. It would be dif- 

 ficult to find an English cookery book which a workman's wife would 

 not reject as too fanciful and ambitious to be practical. A little French 

 treatise, 'La parfaite Cuisiniere, ou l'Art d'utiliser les Restes/ strikes 

 in its title, at any rate, the keynote of the popular domestic economy 

 of which we stand much in need in England. Housekeeping, even 

 the humblest, is a skilled business. To know what to buy, how to use 

 it and how to utilize waste does not come by the light of nature. If 

 more knowledge and more imagination were devoted to the teaching 

 of cookery in our board schools, the family meal might be made more 

 varied, more appetizing, more attractive and more economical, leaving 

 a larger margin for the comforts, culture and recreations which help to 

 develop the best social qualities. A happy family is a family of good 

 citizens. It would be discourteous to another section of this Associa- 

 tion to quote without reserve the mot of Brillat-Savarin : "He who dis- 

 covers a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than he who 

 discovers a new planet." We must stipulate that the new dish effects 

 an improvement in the economy of the working classes. 



Take, again, the consumption of coal. Mr. Sargant says, "It is im- 

 possible to say how much of the superiority of English health and 



