Excerpt from Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping To My Fellow Housekeepers. North, East, South and West: Thirty-one years ago I wrote, dedicated to you, and sent to press, Common Sense in the Household. The daring step was taken in direct opposition to the advice of all who knew my purpose. I was assured that I should lose the I modest measure of literary reputation I had won by novels, short I stories and essays if I persisted in the ignoble enterprise. One critic forewarned me that "whatever I might write after this preposterous new departure would be tainted, for the imaginative reader and reviewer, with the odor of the kitchen." He may have been right. I do not know nor do I care whether his judgment or mine was the better. I gave my first cook-book to you because I knew from my own experience, as a young, raw and untaught housekeeper, that you needed just what I had to say. The hundreds of thousands of copies which have been sold, the thousands of grateful letters received from my toiling sisters, i testify to that need and that to me was appointed the gracious I task of supplying it. Under the impulse of a conviction as solemn and as strong I offer you now a work embodying the best results of mature, Housewifery. Or, as I would rather name it, Housemotherhood. Before I put pen to paper I stipulated that the contract with the publishers of The Complete Cook Book should contain a clause forbidding me to prepare and issue any book of a similar character during the next ten years. Whatever I have to say to you through the medium of a printed and bound volume in all these years must be said here. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.