aking the most of all these remains, is a treasure scarcely to be hoped
for. If such things are to be done, it must be primarily through the
educated brain of cultivated women who do not scorn to turn their
culture and refinement upon domestic problems.

When meats have been properly divided, so that each portion can receive
its own appropriate style of treatment, next comes the consideration of
the modes of cooking. These may be divided into two great general
classes: those where it is desired to keep the juices within the meat,
as in baking, broiling, and frying,--and those whose object is to
extract the juice and dissolve the fibre, as in the making of soups and
stews. In the first class of operations, the process must be as rapid as
may consist with the thorough cooking of all the particles. In this
branch of cookery, doing quickly is doing well. The fire must be brisk,
the attention, alert. The introduction of cooking-stoves offers to
careless domestics facilities for gradually drying-up meats, and
despoiling them of all flavor and nutriment,--facilities which appear to
be very generally laid hold of. They have almost banished the genuine,
old-fashioned roast-meat from our tables, and left in its stead dried
meats with their most precious and nutritive juices evaporated. How few
cooks, unassisted, are competent to the simple process of broiling a
beefsteak or mutton-chop! how very generally one has to choose between
these meats gradually dried away, or burned on the outside and raw
within! Yet in England these articles _never_ come on table done amiss;
their perfect cooking is as absolute a certainty as the rising of the
sun.

No one of these rapid processes of cooking, however, is so generally
abused as frying. The frying-pan has awful sins to answer for. What
untold horrors of dyspepsia have arisen from its smoky depths, like the
ghosts from witches' caldrons! The fizzle of frying meat is as a warning
knell on many an ear, saying, "Touch not, taste not, if you would not
burn and writhe!"

Yet those who have travelled abroad remember that some of the lightest,
most palatable, and most digestible preparations of meat have come from
this dangerous source. But we fancy quite other rites and ceremonies
inaugurated the process, and quite other hands performed its offices,
than those known to our kitchens. Probably the delicate _cotelletes_ of
France are not flopped down into half-melted grease, there gradually to
wa