Cooking As Art

Therefore cooking as an art - 'Hidden Art', if you want to call it so - should be recognized and then developed in everyone who has to cook, wants to cook, or could cook! Cooking should not be thought of as a drudgery but as an art. Talent in this art form differs, of course, and would not be identical in each individual even if developed, but that is not the same thing as not recognizing it as an art form and not attempting to develop it.

The danger today, for both men and women cooks, is to take the short cut of using prepared and frozen foods all the time, using things from packages, bottles, tins and cans, rather than starting with fresh food, or food from one's own garden. I am not advocating that we never use anything pre-prepared, to save time for other things, and I realize that many - perhaps most - people do not have a garden; but one can at least try to get away from the 'plastic trend' in the area of cooking and it is healthy, in several meanings of that word, to try to do so.

~Edith Schaffer, from The Hidden Art of Homemaking