would trade them, and gladly, for as much good bread and
butter as appetite called for.

By way of postscript: being a strict and ardent advocate of temperance,
I refused to consider writing this book unless I had full liberty to
advise the use of wine, brandy, cordials, liquors, where good cooking
demands them. Any earthly thing can be abused--to teach right use is the
best preventive of abuse. Liquors, like everything else, must be good.
"Cooking sherry" is as much an abomination as "cooking butter," or
"cooking apples." You will never get out of pot or pan anything
fundamentally better than what went into it. Cooking is not alchemy;
there is no magic in the pot. The whole art and mystery of it is to
apply heat and seasoning in such fashion as to make the best, and the
most, of such food supplies as your purse permits. Tough meat cannot be
cooked tender; tainted meat cannot be cooked sound. It is the same with
stale fish, specked or soured fruit, withered vegetables. It pays to
educate tradesfolk into understanding that you want the best and only
the best of what you buy. If the thing you want, in perfect condition,
is beyond your means, take, instead of a lower grade of it, the highest
grade of something cheaper. So shall you escape waste of time, effort
and substance. Never mind sneers at your simple fare. Remember it was
Solomon the Wise who wrote: "Better a dinner of herbs and contentment
than a stalled ox, and contention therewith." Paraphrase the last clause
into "spoiled ox and ptomaines therewith," and you may keep not only
self-respect, but that of the neighbors.

[Illustration: _The Staff of Life_]

Bread, more than almost any other foodstuff, can not be better than what
it is made of. Here as elsewhere a bungler can ruin the very best of
flour or meal. But the queen of cooks can not make good a fundamental
deficiency.

Hence in buying flour look for these things: a slightly creamy
cast--dazzling whiteness shows bleaching, as a gray-white, or black
specks mean grinding from spoiled grain. The feel should be velvety,
with no trace of roughness--roughness means, commonly, mixture with
corn. A handful tightly gripped should keep the shape of the hand, and
show to a degree the markings of the palm. A pinch wet rather stiff,
and stretched between thumb and finger, will show by the length of the
thread it spins richness or poverty in gluten--one of the most valuable
food elements.

The cornmeal of c