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Co-operative housekeeping

family health and happiness, and doubtless has an incalculable influence both on physical perfection and intellectual activity. Probably the easiest way for the co-operative housekeepers to organize their kitchen would be to send for Professor Blot, and place themselves under his direction. Failing in this, the committee on the co-operative kitchen must have recourse to hotels, restaurants, bakeries, and provision stores, and from these will, no doubt, be able to judge what kind and how large a building will be needed; whether the kitchen can be combined with the laundry; and what its stoves, ranges, ovens, boilers, general arrangement, and accompanying cellars and storerooms must be. These large establishments will also enable the committee to report on the number of divisions, officers, assistants, servants, carts, and horses that would be necessary. For the method of conveying the meals hot and on time to the different families of the association they will probably have to go to France or Italy, where cook-shops have long been an institution,—though whether it would be quite fair to take from a hundred Yankee wits the delicious chance of inventing a Universal Heat-generating Air-tight Family Dinner-Box I do not know. How many of the co-operative housekeepers would choose to be connected with the kitchen of course themselves alone could decide. Obviously it must have a superintendent, a treasurer, a book-keeper; a caterer, to contract with butchers, gardeners, farmers, and wholesale dealers; a stewardess to keep the storerooms and cellars and give out the supplies; and an artist cook-in-chief with her assistants, a confectioner, a pastry-cook, and a baker, to preside over their preparation. As all of these would be positions of peculiar trust and responsibility, demanding superior judgment, ability, and information, as the salaries connected with them would be large, and the persons filling them necessarily of great weight and consideration in the community, I cannot imagine any woman, except from indolence, ill health, or a preference for some other employment, unwilling to accept of either of these offices. Regarding cookery, I believe that, like dress, it