Allied Cookery: British, French, Italian, Belgian, Russian

had overpassed the line of good taste in offering my entire knowledge. I should have only offered part of it. I therefore resolved that instead of writing the whole book as I had at first intended, I would content myself with sending to the editors, a certain number of selected recipes of a kind calculated to put the book in a class all by itself. I sent, in all, fifty recipes. I regret to say that after looking over the pages of the book with the greatest care, and after looking also on the back of them, I do not find my recipes included in it. The obvious conclusion is that while this book was in the press my recipes were stolen out of it. The various dishes that I had selected were of so distinctive a character and the art involved in their preparation so entirely _recherché_ that it seems a pity that they should be altogether lost. They contained a certain _je ne sais quoi_ which would have marked them out as emphatically the perquisite of the few. To say that they were dishes for a king is to understate the fact. It is therefore merely in the public interest and from no sense of personal vanity that I reproduce the substance of one or two of them in this preface. There was a whole section, for example, on Eggs, which I am extremely loath to lose. It showed how by holding an egg down under boiling water till it is exhausted, it may be first cooked and then be passed under a flat iron until it becomes an Egg Pancake. It may be then given a thin coat of varnish and served in a railway restaurant for years and years. I had also an excellent recipe for Rum Omelette. It read: "Take a dipper full of rum and insert an omelette in it. Serve anywhere in Ontario." I am convinced that this recipe alone would have been worth its weight in rum. But it would be childish of me to lay too much stress on my own