One Hundred Different Bills of Fare, of Actual Meals, all with New Dishes; the Amount and the Cost per Head.
Eleven Hundred Recipes. All live matter that every Cook needs—both by Weight and by Cup and Spoon Measure.
A Dictionary of Cookery, Comprised in the Explanations of Terms and General Information contained in the Directions.
Artistic Cookery. Instructions in Ornamentation, with Illustrations, and Notes on the London Cookery Exhibition of 1885.
It is thoroughly analytical, practical, readable, and the first book of the principles of the systematic hotel keeping.
PRICE $3.00. Address the Publisher, or any Hotel Paper.
Preface to Whitehead’s No. 4 Cooking for Profit.
This book is in many respects a continuation of the preceding volumes in the series, it fulfills the designs that were intended but not finished before, more particularly in the second part which deals with the cost of keeping up a table. It is not an argument either for or against high prices, but it embodies in print for the first time the methods of close-cutting management which a million of successful boarding house and hotel-keepers are already practising, in order that another million who are not successful may learn, if they will, wherein their competitors have the advantage. At the time when the following introduction was written, which was about four years before the finish, I was just setting out, while indulging a rambling propensity, to find out why it was that my hotel books which were proving admirably adapted to the use of the ten hotels of a resort town were voted “too rich for the blood” of the four hundred boarding-houses; also, it was a question how so many of these houses running at low prices are enabled to make money as easily as the hotels which have a much larger income. At the same time some statistician published a statement that attracted attention showing that the vast majority of the people of this land have to live on an income of less than fifty cents a day. At the same time also an English author published a little book, which, however, I have not seen and did not need, with the title of “How to live on sixpence a day,” (twelve cents) which was presumptive evidence that it could be done. In quest of information on these points I went around considerably and found a good many “Mrs. Tingees” who were not keeping boarding-houses, and I honor them for the surpassing skill that makes the fifty cents a day do such wonders; but the right vein was not struck until the opportunity occurred to do both the buying and using of provisions from the very first meal in a Summer Boarding House.
In reference to unfinished work I take the liberty here of saying that the bills of fare in this book with the quantities and proportions and relative cost from the continuation and complete illustration of an article entitled “The Art of Catering” in Hotel Meat Cooking. Knowing how much to cook, how much to charge, how to prevent waste and all such questions raised there are carried out to an answer in these pages. In regard to the use of French names for dishes it is necessary that a statement should be made. A great reform has taken place in the last ten years in the composition of hotel bills of fare, and the subject matter of these books having been widely diffused by publication in the hotel newspapers, has undoubtedly had much to do with the improvement that is now observable. My own design was, however, to explain French terms, give their origin and proper spelling, and to that end I had a mass of anecdotes, historical mention and other such material collected to make the explanations interesting. As a preliminary, I began exposing the absurdities committed by ignorant cooks and others trying to write French, and before this had proceeded far the newspapers took up and advocated the idea that French terms should be abolished altogether. If that was to be the way the knot of misspelling and misnaming dishes was to be cut, there was no use for my dictionary work and the material was thrown away; I followed the new path and it proves a plain and sensible one. At the same time there is an aspect of the subject which cooks seeking situations perceive and editors of newspapers may never think of, and that is that there are many employers whom the reform has not reached who will pay a hundred dollars for a cook who can give his dishes imposing foreign names more willingly than fifty dollars to a better cook who can only write United States. First class hotels which have all the good things that come to market avoid French terms. They that have turkey and lamb, chicken, peas and asparagus, oysters and turtle and cream want them shown up in the plainest reading; to cover them up with French names would be injudicious; but if we have but the same beef and mutton every day, the aid that a few ornamental terms can give is not to be despised. First of all it is requisite that those who use such terms should know what they are intended to indicate and how they should be spelled and then they can be taken or left according to the intelligent judgment of those concerned.
J. W.