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

speak civilly _to_ companions and competitors in the race, correspond to “make ready.” Clean, supple, and in good heart, come to the table as to preliminary refreshment you have time and appetite to enjoy. At least seven-tenths of the twaddle over the horrors of the family breakfast are affectation and indolence. Breakfasting in bed is an imported fashion, and to my notion, is not a clean practice. The tray brought to an unaired room, a tumbled bed and an unwashed body, looks well in French engravings, but is a solecism in an age of hygienic principles, much ventilation and matutinal baths. The inability to be in charity with one’s fellow mortals, to smile genially and to speak gently before the world is well started upon its diurnal swing, and the complainant’s physical system is toned and tuned and oiled by eating, is degrading in itself. The confession of it is puerile. [Illustration: BREAKFAST EQUIPAGE] Force yourself to speak pleasantly if you can not at once bring your spirits up to the right level. Study to be a man, or a woman, although breakfastless. To be thrown in the first round of the day by the sluggish flesh and the devil of ill-humor, before the world has a chance to grapple with you, is cowardly and sinful. One word of friendly counsel to my fellow brain-workers, who are also sister-women, may not be amiss in this connection: Never write or study in the morning until you have broken your fast. A physiologist of note estimates that the draft on the nervous forces and the eyesight of working on an empty stomach is equivalent to the labor of lifting thirty pounds dead weight. However this may be, stay that long-suffering organ with a few morsels—a slice of bread and butter, moistened by a cup of tea, if your rising is in advance of that of the rest of the household and you meditate an hour’s work before the family breakfast. BREAKFAST FRUITS [Illustration] The imported fashion of beginning breakfast with fresh fruit has become an American custom. The assuasive effect of the