Choice Cookery

small matters, and the directions faithfully carried out, there will be no difficulty in a lady becoming her own _chef_. I propose to begin with sauces. This is reversing the usual mode, and yet I think the reader will not regret the innovation. The cooking to be taught in these pages, being emphatically what is popularly known as "Delmonico cooking," very much depends on the excellence of the sauces served with each dish; and as it is no time to learn to make a fine sauce when the dish it is served with is being cooked, I think the better plan is to give the sauces first. They will be frequently referred to, but no repetition of the recipes will be given. Before proceeding further I will say a few words that may save time and patience hereafter. Of course it is not expected that any one will hope to succeed with elaborate dishes without understanding the principles of simple cooking, but many do this without perceiving that in that knowledge they hold the key to very much more, and I would ask readers who are in earnest about the matter to acquire the habit of putting two and two together in cooking as they would in fancy-work. If you know half a dozen embroidery or lace stitches, you see at once that you can produce the elaborate combinations in which those stitches are used. So it is with cooking. The most elaborate dish will only be a combination of two or three simpler processes of cooking, _perfectly_ done--that is a _sine qua non_--something fried, roasted, boiled, or braised to perfection, and a sauce that no _chef_ could improve upon; but to recognize that this is so--that when you can make a Chateaubriand sauce or a Bearnaise perfectly, and can _saute_ a steak, the famed filets a la Chateaubriand or a la Bearnaise are no longer a mystery, or that one who can make clear meat jelly and roast a chicken has learned all but the arrangement of a _chaudfroid_ in aspic--will make apparently complicated dishes simple. I go into