Living on a Little

by Caroline French Benton

"Do you buy extra cream for these cereals?"

"No, unfortunately we can't do that, though I wish we could. Here again is where I long to keep a cow. But as it is, I take off just a little of the very top of the milk for coffee and the next best I put on for the cereal."

"And do you have muffins and cakes and those hot breads?"

"I think I had better tell you in order just what we have, because you will understand it all better. I arrange breakfast this way:

"First, if it is a day when we are to have fruit, a course of that; afterward a hot dish, a little bacon, an egg apiece, milk toast, or creamed codfish, or some simple thing warmed over that I have in the house; often in summer fried tomatoes on toast. And I have coffee and hot rolls or biscuits or muffins or toast, too.

"That is one sort of breakfast. When we do not have fruit I have cereal, let us say; after that we do not care for anything hot and substantial, as when the first course was an orange, perhaps, so we have the coffee and muffins alone. Or, for a third breakfast, one for cold weather, we begin with a hot dish and coffee and have cakes afterward."

"I am astonished to hear you speak of having eggs as though they were to be bought for nothing. I thought in town they cost too much to eat them up recklessly."

"So they do, in winter; they are often four cents apiece. But you see then I do not use them in cooking, or only occasionally, so even at that price I can afford to have them for breakfast twice a week, and that is the extent of my recklessness."

"But one apiece! My dear Mary, I am positively certain Fred will demand two eggs for his breakfast, if that is all he is to have."

"Then you must scramble the one-apiece with milk and serve them on toast, and he will think he is having any number of them. Or, make a parsley omelette of two with a little milk; or have them hard-boiled, chopped, and creamed, on toast or in individual dishes, with crumbs on top; that is an easy way out of the difficulty. He can't count how many eggs there are on the table when they are served mixed up."