The Plain Sailing Cook Book/Preface
PREFACE
One should be prepared with an uncommonly good excuse for adding still another cook book to the legion already in existence. My own excuse will, I hope, be considered sufficient. So far as I am aware, no cook book of all the multitude now in use is successfully adapted to the needs of the person who has never before attempted to cook. It is not merely that most of the standard cook books take for granted more or less actual experience over the kitchen table and range; even those whose special appeal is to the novice and beginner usually fail in their purpose because the persons who write them, however versed in the lore of cookery, have little or insufficient skill in simple, concise, unequivocal expression. Knowing how and telling how are two very different things; and the common notion that any one who knows how is therefore and thereby fully qualified to tell how has led to endless confusion in cookery as in many other subjects.
What I have tried to do in this book is to tell how in such a way as to leave no possible room for doubt or misunderstanding on any point. In preparing and arranging each recipe, I have tried to keep continually in mind the person who has never before cooked anything, and who is as entirely dependent upon not only what I tell, but how I tell it, as one would be in attempting to concoct a chemical formula upon one's first visit to a laboratory.
At the beginning of each recipe there is a list of the kinds and amounts of the various materials required for that recipe, and a list of the utensils that will be needed for the preparation, mixing, and cooking of those materials. Each stage of the ensuing process is then separately described as simply and plainly and fully as my use of words will permit. I have tried to leave nothing to the imagination, nothing to be guessed at, nothing to be decided from previous experience. In a word, I have tried to do as I would be done by, if I were the user of the book instead of the author.
A glance through these pages will show that they are confined to the simpler every-day dishes that make up the staple menu of the average American family. In cookery, as in other things, one should begin at the beginning and serve one's apprenticeship before passing on to the more complex mysteries of the craft. Any one who has mastered the recipes here given will then, and not until then, be competent to attempt the numberless more elaborate dishes described in the almost numberless more elaborate cook books. My little volume is for the tyro, the beginner, and for no other. Its aim is to provide "plain sailing" for the wholly inexperienced mariner in culinary waters.
It only remains to add in this place that, as the beginner in cookery is usually the feminine half of a recently arranged matrimonial partnership, the recipes in this book are in nearly all cases designed to serve two persons only. If a larger family must be provided for, the amount of materials called for in any recipe should, of course, be increased in direct proportion to the additional number of persons in the family.
S. S. B.