Good cookery means the knowledge of all fruits, herbs, balms, and spices, and of all that is healing and sweet in fields and groves, and savory in meats. It means carefulness, inventiveness, watchfulness, willingness, and readiness of appliance. It means the economy of your great-grandmothers and the science of modern chemists. It means much tasting and no wasting. It means English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality. It means, in fine, that you are to be perfectly and always ladies (loafgivers).- Ruskin.

Food is prepared and cooked for many reasons:

1. To render mastication easy.

2. To convert certain hurtful substances into nutritive foods.

3. To combine the right foods in proper proportions.

4. To make it more agreeable to the palate and pleasing to the eye.

Apart from the purely aesthetic value of an agreeable meal, and a well spread table, there remain many solid arguments for the last two reasons.

Pleasant flavors are a necessity of diet.

No person could be nourished on tasteless foods.

No one could live content on a monotonous diet, though there may be nothing wanting from the point of view of chemical analysis.

Mastication acts mechanically in subdividing foods.

It acts chemically by reason of the digestive power of saliva on starch.

We may perceive how impossible it would be to masticate a mouthful of flour or of raw meat.

We cannot expect the human teeth to do all of the subdividing of the food we eat; the action of heat in the preparation of foods will accomplish much of the subdividing.

In all latitudes cookery has to accommodate itself in an infinite variety of ways to the ages, conditions and fortunes of men.

Food must be prepared in such a manner that the greatest nutrititive and aesthetic value may be derived from its consumption.