will never be what it can, and ought to become, until women of social and intellectual culture make it the business of their lives, and, with thoughts unfettered by other household cares, devote themselves, like lesser providences, to its benign necromancy. Being one of the great original functions of woman, like clothes-making and infant-rearing, there is no doubt that she has a special gift or instinct for it; while the superior keenness of her senses and fastidiousness of her taste must fit her peculiarly for all its finer and more complicated triumphs. All the Paris letters make mention of Sophie, cook to the late Dr. Véron,—only a woman, and probably uneducated. She is said to be "the most consummate culinary artist of the day; looking down with unspeakable contempt on Baron Brisse, and even on Rossini and Alexander Dumas. Ministers, bankers, artists, men of letters, paid obsequious court to this divinity of the kitchen, who ruled despotically over her master's household and dining-room, and who had made it a law that no more than fourteen guests should ever sit together at the doctor's table." If such is her success, what an artist was lost to the world in the New England housekeeper I attempted to describe. Delicate to etherealness, accurate to mathematical severity, she might have wrought marvels indeed, had she been initiated into the mysteries of the modern cuisine. Therefore, above all things, let the co-operative housekeepers appoint one of their number, at a liberal salary, to the office of cook-in-chief. If possible, let them afford her every advantage of gastronomical education, such as go through the great French chefs, who learn sauces from one master, entrées from another, confection from a third, and so on. If the co-operative kitchen should ever become universal, we shall probably see American ladies by dozens going to Paris to study under just such artists as the great Sophie above mentioned, and then returning home to benefit the whole country with their accomplishments. It is a well-known fact that no nation in the world has such a variety and abundance of the best food that Nature gives, as we ourselves. She teems with such bounty to her adopted
