This book is intended to be a help to the young housekeeper who is starting out in the new home without either a knowledge of science or the technical training which could help her. This is more often the case of the girl who has been to college and has devoted her time to other subjects outside the home, so that she starts in handicapped on the business of home-making, than it is the case of her sister who has stayed at home and has been trained there by her mother.

The book is also intended to help those women who have kept house for years and who are excellent cooks and careful planners. It should give a scientific foundation to their technical skill, showing them the reasons why they have been doing certain things all their lives, and perhaps showing them ways in which they may shorten processes and thus save time and energy.

In preparing this book I have used material I have been gathering for some years, but this has been modified, or at least clarified, by what I have learned in ten years' experience in my own home, where for much of the time I have done all the cooking. I have used some of this material in my lectures during the past two years and a half in my classes in Dietetics for the Red Cross, in Food Conservation at Wellesley College, and at the Brookline Food Center under the auspices of the Public Safety Committee.

Few women realize the great importance of the proper feeding of the family. Undernourishment among our children in the United States is far more prevalent than is generally supposed, and is found quite as often in the homes of the well-to-do as in those of the poor. It is the result of ignorance rather than of poverty or the high cost of food. Children need a well-chosen but simple diet.

This book is written primarily to show mothers how they can feed their children easily and economically. A little attention to the subject by the home-makers will make the greatest difference to the nation in producing strong, well-nourished men and women, capable of doing their part in carrying the great responsibilities placed upon our country at this time. I have a great hope that the mothers and home-makers of America will take the lessons of this book to heart and that it may play some real part in giving us a stronger and sterner race.

This book, while it contains some recipes, is not intended to compete with cook-books, but rather to supplement them. I have kept the order of material customarily used in cook-books, that of following the courses of a dinner. This necessitated the present order of the two chapters on fats and sugars. If I had adhered more closely to the discussion of foods according to their chemical composition, these two chapters would have appeared in reverse order.

Acknowledgment is due to the Department of University Extension of the Board of Education of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for permission to use, in chapter XIV (The Use Of Food In The Body), the material which I prepared two years ago for the Department course entitled "Foods and Nutrition." I also wish to take this opportunity to thank the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston for permitting me to reprint the plates showing the cutting of meat from the Lowney Cook-Book (The Walter M. Lowney Co., Boston, 1908). I am indebted to my sister Dorothy Stimson, Ph.D., for her assistance in revising the text.

L. S. H.

Brookline, Mass. September, 1919

Food Facts For the Home-Maker