Good cooking is a moral agent. By good cooking I mean the conscientious preparation of the simple food of every-day life, not the more or less skillful concoction of idle feasts and rare dishes. Conscientious cooking is an enemy to gluttony. The trained delicacy of the palate like a cultivated delicacy of sentiment stands in the way of unseemly excesses. The decency of our life is for a great part a matter of good taste, of the correct appreciation of what is fine in simplicity. The intimate influence of conscientious cooking by rendering easy the processes of digestion promotes the serenity of mind, the graciousness of thought, and that indulgent view of our neighbours’ failings which is the only genuine form of optimism. Those are its titles to our reverence.

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