The Elegant Art of Dining: Bohemian San Francisco, Its ... - iMedia

form of waste. Waste consequent upon lack of knowledge of food values is the
waste that is doubly expensive for it not only wastes food but it also wastes the
system whose energy is exhausted in trying to assimilate improper alimentation.
It is a well recognized medical fact that much of the illness of Americans arises
from two causes, improper food and improper eating methods. In Europe this
fact was recognized and generally known so long ago that the study of food
values and preparation for proper assimilation is one of the essential parts of
every woman’s education, and to such a degree has this become raised to a
science that schools and even colleges in cooking are to be found in many parts
of England, France and Germany. Francatelli, the great chef who was at the head
of Queen Victoria’s kitchen, boasts proudly of his diploma from the Parisian
College of Cooking.
The United States is now beginning to wake up to the fact that the preparation
of food is something more than a necessary evil, and from the old cooking
classes of our common schools has developed the classes in Domestic Science,
that which was formerly considered drudgery now being elevated to an art and
dignified as a science. In Europe this stage was reached many generations ago,
and there it is now an art which has elevated the primitive process of feeding to
the elegant art of dining. In San Francisco probably more than in any other city
in the United States, not even excepting New Orleans, this art has flourished
for many years with the result that the average San Franciscan is disappointed
at the food served in other cities of his country, and always longs for his favorite
restaurant even as the children of Israel longed for the flesh pots of Egypt.
One needs to spend a day in the Italian quarter of San Francisco to come to a
full realization of the difference between the requirements of even the poorest
Italian family and the average American family of the better class. We need but
say that we have been studying this question for nearly twenty years yet even
now we meet with surprises in the way of new delicacies and modes of using
herbs and spices in food preparation.
If we were to attempt even to enumerate the various herbs, spices, flavorings,
delicacies, and pastes to be found in a well regulated Italian shop it would take
many pages of this book, yet every one of these articles has its own individual
and peculiar use, and the knowledge of these articles and how to use them is
what makes the difference between American and Foreign cooking. Each herb
has a peculiar quality as a stomachic and it must be as delicately measured as if it
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