een of New Orleans cooks, temporarily transplanted. Also sundry
and several delectable dishes of alien origins--some as made in France
or Germany, some from the far Philippines, but all proved before record.
In each case the source is indicated in the title. Things my very own,
evolved from my inner consciousness, my outer opportunity and
environment, I shall likewise mark personal.

Lastly, but far from leastly, let me make protest against
over-elaboration, alike in food and the serving thereof. The very best
decoration for a table is something good in the plates. This is not
saying one should not plan to please the eye no less than the palate.
But ribbon on sandwiches is an anachronism--so is all the flummery of
silk and laces, doilies and doo-dads that so often bewilder us. They are
unfair to the food--as hard to live up to as anybody's blue china. I
smile even yet, remembering my husband's chuckles, after we had come
home from eating delicatessen chicken off ten-dollar plates, by help of
antique silver. Somehow the viands and the service seemed "out of
drawing."

Quoth Heine the cynic: "Woman, woman! Much must be forgiven thee! Thou
hast loved much--and many." Edibly I love much rather than many. Enough
of one thoroughly good thing, with proper accessories, is more
satisfying than seven courses--each worse than the last. Also cheaper,
also much less trouble. If time has any value, the economy of it in
dishwashing alone is worth considering. In these piping days of rising
prices, economy sounds good, even in the abstract. Add the concrete fact
that you save money as well as trouble, and the world of cooks may well
sit up and take notice.

The one-piece dinner is as convenient and comfortable as the one-piece
frock. There are, of course, occasions to which it is unsuited.
One-piece must be understood to mean the _piece de resistance_--the
backbone of subsistence as it were. A bowl of rich soup or chowder, with
crackers on the side, a generous helping of well-cooked meat, with bread
or potatoes, and the simplest relishes, or a royally fat pudding overrun
with brandy sauce; each or either can put it all over a splash of this,
a dab of that, a slab of something else, set lonesomely on a separate
plate and reckoned a meal--in courses. Courses are all well enough--they
have my warm heart when they come "in the picture." But when they are
mostly "The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
seen," then I