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God gave food, but man made cooks; and cooked food, the result, is like all attempts at blending the perfect with the imperfect, in the main, a failure. Now and then some inspired being arises capable of demonstrating the wonderful pitch of excellence to which cookery may be carried; but when these creatures instinct with culinary inspiration die, their mantle rarely falls upon worthy shoulders, and darkness settles down down again for a season upon the world of pots and pans. Absolute genius in cookery is rare, for genius is a birth-right, and cannot be attained by study, however laborious and preserving; but culinary talent is latent in almost every human being, and needs only proper stimulation to arrive at any reasonable development. Yet it is safe to say, that from Greeland's icy pemmican to the under done missionary of the torrid zone, the major portion of the food consumed by mankind is unpalatably and unwholesomely prepared; not intentionally, but simply because people do not know any better. As civilization advances, the need for practical reform in this matter constantly becomes more manifest, and spasmodic sporadic attempts are being made throughout Christendom to achieve a better order of things in the department of the kitchen. The primal source of bad cookery lies in failure to recognize the fact that knowledge of cooking, like all the other arts, must be acquired by study - is not, in other words, a natural attribute. For some reason which has yet to be explained, there is a popular belief in the absolute potentiality of all women, with or without instruction, to cook food in such manner as will render it acceptable to the taste, and meet for the wholesome subsistence of man. This belief is wholly unfounded. It is true that the average woman does possess the elements essential to culinary excellence - patience, nice sense of taste and smell, and that superior, intuitive judgment which enables her to unravel such mysteries as "seasoning of taste," and "adding enough flour to make a good dough" - but unless these elements are brought into homogenous accord by actual experimentation, they are neither more nor less that theoretical nonentities. With earnestness of purpose, and absolute concentration of mind upon her task, the woman who would cook must give herself up to serious study under competent instructors, and it is safe to say, that while, by the means, only the exceptional woman will rise to greatness, the average woman will achieve a measure of success which will fit her to shine as the care-taker of a household, But here another difficulty is encountered, for the secondary source of bad cooking lies in the difficulty of procuring that competent instruction which is necessary to quicken the embryonic culinary idea. In comparatively few households, we regret to say, is exemplary cooking to be found, for the kitchens of America are cursed by the pie dish and the frying pan, and their out-put, to an extent which, in the aggregate, is horrifying, in one or another sort of mucilaginous or oleaginous compound provocative of dyspepsia. So our girls grow up with their latent talent undeveloped; grow up, themselves dyspeptic, to marry dyspeptic husbands, and raise a generation of unfortunate beings with utterly disordered insides.

(Take directly from The American Housewife circa 1878)

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