PREPARATION OF UNCOOKED FOODS.

The idea of preparing foods is so firmly fixed in the minds of women that the very suggestion of lessening their labors in this direction suggests the idea of limiting the family rations,—depriving the table of its pleasure and luxury; therefore, it sometimes meets with more or less opposition. Experience has shown that men are more willing to accept the elementary food idea than women, particularly when it promises to lighten the labors of their wives, mothers and daughters.

There has been for many thousand years a sort of competition between housewives, hotels, and all public and private eating-places, as to which could prepare the greatest variety of foods, the result of which is that the table is held responsible for over ninety per cent. of all human ills.

This result is not sufficiently creditable to cause thinking people to clamor for its continuation. It reminds me of the consolation that I received once from a gentleman with whom I was playing a game of billiards. It was my off-day. The balls would neither “hit” nor “hurdle,” while his plays were all graceful and effective; and I was enjoying the supreme pleasure of seeing him make all the points beside paying for the games. In answer to my complaint upon missing a simple shot, he said, “Oh, this is nothing. I have seen luck run this way for three or four hours, and all of a sudden get worse.”

The best foods need the least preparation. Geographic and climatic conditions, under which most of us live, of course, make harvesting and garnering necessary; and in order to store certain foods for winter use, certain preparations become necessary; but when we come to prepare them for the table, the effort should be to bring them back as nearly as possible to their original condition.

All fruits from which the moisture has been evaporated, so that they will keep from season to season, only need to have the moisture again restored to them by being soaked in pure water at about the temperature of the blood. This is the most healthful and delicious way evaporated or dried fruits can be prepared.

That food is most healthful and will give to animal life its highest form that can be taken most nearly in its natural condition. There is nothing more obvious and certain than this. This course of reasoning leads us to the inevitable conclusion that fruits, nuts, green plants,—that is, plants containing much chlorophyll, comprise an absolutely perfect diet.

Nearly every step in civilization has been taken in the direction of lightening human labor, except in the art of preparing foods. This has been doubled and trebled a thousand times, and laid upon the delicate shoulders of woman. The rail-road train would never have been invented had it not been that man objected to toting burdens on his back. The telephone and telegraph were the outgrowth of man’s protest against the courier system. The inventions of all the marvelous machines to which we point as evidences and marks of our great civilization, originated in the one thought, the saving of human labor. But the stomach is a veritable gehenna, and the appetite its grizzly gorgon that holds millions of women in a worse bondage than the negro suffered in the South before the war.