It takes but little to make a home. It requires little to beautify it, but that little lacking, home can exist only in aspiration and in imagination.

That food is to the body the kitchen should be to the home. Indeed, as Brillat-Savarin has said, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are;” so one may say, Show me the kitchen, and I can form a good idea of the home. As the comfort and happiness of home do not depend upon vast room and costly furniture, and there is often far more peace and pleasure in a cottage than a palace, so the kitchen need not be a vast apartment in which many cooks are preparing many dishes, such as the wealthy Roman houses of two thousand years ago were famous for. But as every human life depends for its support upon food, so every human home must have a kitchen in which that food is prepared. The person who neglects food soon gets sick, and the home in which the kitchen is neglected is not a healthy or a happy home.

Let the kitchen be a central attraction of your home by its cleanliness and the excellence of your cooking. Nature intended man to enjoy his food as well as to keep himself alive by it. The simplest fare daintily spread before one is far more appetizing than a feast of all sorts of mixtures just as a plain suit of clothes, perfectly neat and tidy looks better than costly raiment bespattered with dirt.