Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping

a certain degree of ceremony in the most modest household. Breakfast may be hurried over in haste that is not unseemly when one considers that the day’s work is all ahead of the family, and luncheon may dwindle down to a “cold bite” eaten standing. Everybody must dine, and dining is always “business.” A dinner party is the most serious of social functions, and even a family dinner follows a prescribed order. There must be a beginning, a middle and an end. Plates must be changed, for even in the backwoods, meat and pudding are not set on the table at the same time. This is as it should be. If we would have “_Good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both_,” we must bring to the discussion of the heavier nourishment set before us orderliness, leisure and tempers free from annoying discomforts. Magnificence is within the reach of a few; modest elegance is attainable by many; cleanliness and good manners are free to the humblest housemother and her brood. So much for a general view of the wide field indicated by the word set at the head of this chapter. Before entering upon a discussion of the dishes which belong to this section of our book, I would lay stress upon a cardinal duty connected with dinner—eating—a duty the neglect of which is a proverbial national disgrace. It is a physical impossibility to eat properly—and to digest with any prospect of healthful assimilation—a breakfast of coffee, steak, hot rolls and fried potatoes, in five minutes, or in fifteen. Yet this is what the commuter, the clerk, the collegian—and a host of other men (including an occasional capitalist) try to do six days in the week. They eat, as they live, on the jump. When an especially audacious jump lands them in the grave, intelligent scientists affect to wonder with the rest of mankind at the untimely taking-off. [Illustration: A CHRISTMAS TABLE DECORATED WITH HOLLY AN AUTUMN DINNER TABLE DECORATED WITH VINES A TABLE DECORATED WITH CHRYSANTHEMUMS AND PALMS] Big mouthfuls and bolting are alike part of the national