﻿Cooks De Luxe 
 
In all ages ft has been customary to “blame the cooks” for everything that happens. If a man gets bald headed, it’s the cook’s fault. 
He says, “that woman thou gavest me really ought to know cooking at least.” He brings home a pay envelope that strikes terror to the heart of the “sweet woman,” and causes her to grab at least three breakfasts per week from the oat bin—can you blame her? There he sits, like a storm cloud on Lookout Mountain, and demands to know why she don’t feed him round steak at least once t in a while. It’s the cook’s fault! 
Even the children are quick to notice the “culinary failures” of the family foodstuff worker. 
Of course I am not trying to advance a child as a person capable of passing on the merits, or demerits, of a cook —nor do I attempt to convey the idea that a child has any exceptional ability “to come to an understanding” of the underlying causes that “offset” the cook in rather a compromising position. No, I merely desire to emphasize the old saying “Like father, like son”—childish. 
The cook at all times is doing the best she can. (If there is no good food on the table it is because she could not procure it, for some reason or other.) 
The hotel cook is generally a man. Ninety-nine in hundred, of such men, are regular “he-men,” and many are the battles they have put up, for the “eaters” against the management. Single handed, only with the support of dishwashers and porters, have they fought the encroachments of an organized system of stomach-robbery—which all goes to show how “yellow” the public is. 
Ordinarily a cook has all he can do to look after his own welfare ; his own wages; his own conditions of servitude. But it is true the cooks have repeatedly sacrificed their own interest, their jobs and their “standing in the industry” trying to better the food for a shiftless, easy-going public. Someone has said, “to hell with the public”; and I do verily believe, he guessed it. 
The public is rapidly reaching a stage of mental, moral and physical putrefaction, which might be termed a condition of hell. The cooks have been unable to save the people from the profit system, although the people were willing to let them do it. 
Not only in swell hotels, but in commissary-camps, are the inmates patiently waiting for the cooks to win “their battle” with the capitalist system. I think they’ll wait a long, long time. 

It is now up to the cooks to save themselves. This idea of fighting someone else’s battles is getting to be old style and is frowned upon in well-organized circles. Let the cooks organize in a union of their industry, and let them fight for wages, shorter days and better conditions for themselves. That’s the best thing they can do for the Public. 
T-Bone Slim.