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

tea and toast which are supposed to meet the temporal needs of the feminine system—the apparition of an impromptu guest, and that guest a man, is like a boulder rolled upon the track before the domestic engine. The train is derailed, conductor and engineer “rattled,” and badly shaken up. Our housewife has reason on her side, and a good deal of it. It is all very fine to say, she urges, that her table should always be neat and orderly; that what is nice enough for her husband in the way of food and appointments should content the president, should he chance to drop in. Everybody sings that song in the same key, and it is stale _bosh_! For everybody knows that in the best regulated families we do make special provision for company. John comprehends that the best china can not be used every day, if we would have it remain even “good.” The second-best is excellent in quality, and pretty. Yet what housekeeper is superior to the wish to show outsiders that she has a Minton fish set; Coalport meat dishes and plates; silver vegetable dishes; Sèvres after-dinner coffee-cups? To set out her table as tastefully as she can afford to do is an offering due to the stranger within her gates—a visible token of hospitable intent. She is, in a measure, defrauded in all this when a surprise-visit is sprung upon her. John is sensible, and does not object to left-overs now and then, when flavorously put together. Today’s salmi, or salad, or croquette is, to him, a reminiscence of yesterday’s roast. The oyster-stew made by his wife to spare servants wearied by laundry work, is as satisfactory to him, once in several whiles, as a six-course dinner would be. He sees in an Irish stew, supported by browned potatoes, hot biscuits, home-made cake and a capital cup of coffee, a feast fit for the gods as represented by his hungry self and any fellow he may have corralled and brought in to “take pot-luck.” “I ask yer honors if that is anny sort of a shkull