which require premeditation and deft manipulation are unpopular.  The scorn with which our middle class woman regards soups, jellies, salads and entrees is based upon prejudice that has become national.  Recipes marked—­“Time from three to four hours,” are a feature of English cook-books.  We American writers of household manuals are too conversant with Jane’s and Eliza’s principles to imperil their sale by what will be considered danger-signals.  This same desire to dispatch a disagreeable task increases in said manuals the number of “Quick Biscuit,” “Minute Muffins” and “Hasty Pudding” recipes.

Represent to the notable housewife who is scrupulous in saving minutes, candle-ends and soap grease, that a few pounds of cracked bones, a carrot, a turnip, an onion and a bunch of sweet herbs, covered deep with cold water, and set at one side of the range on washing-day, to simmer into soup stock, wastes neither time nor fuel and will be the base of more than one or two nourishing dinners; prove, by mathematical demonstration, that a mold of delicious blanc-mange or Spanish cream or simpler junket costs less and can be made in one-tenth of the time required for the leathery-skinned, sour or faint-hearted pie, without which “father’n the boys wouldn’t relish their dinner;” that an egg and lettuce salad, with mayonnaise dressing, is so much more toothsome and digestible than chipped beef as a “tea relish,” as to repay her for the few additional minutes spent in preparing it—­and her skeptical stare means disdain of your interference, and complacent determination to follow her own way.

She has heard that “country people in furren parts a’most live upon slops and grass and eggs and frogs, and supposes that’s the reason Frenchmen are so small and dark-complected.”  She thanks goodness she was born in America, “where there’s plenty to eat and to spare,” she adds, piously, as she puts the chunk of salt pork on to boil with the white beans, or the brisket of salt beef over the fire with the cabbage, before mixing a batch of molasses-cake with buttermilk and plenty of soda.

The corner-stone of her culinary operations might have been cut from the pillar into which another conservative woman with a will of her own, was changed.  It is solid salt.  Salt pork, salt beef, salt fish, relieve one another in an endless chain upon her board.  She averts scurvy by means of cabbage and potatoes.  I know well-to-do farmers’ wives who do not cook what they call “butcher’s meat,” three times a month, or poultry above twice a year.  Dried and salt meat and fish replenish what an Irish cook once described to me as “the meat corner of the stomach.”

“Half-a-dozen eggs wouldn’t half fill it, mem;” she protested, in defence of the quantity of steak and roast devoured daily below-stairs.