"Oh, no, of course I do not write every meal down, but I keep a lot of possible menus on hand and turn to them for inspiration when I feel stupid. Or if I have a maid, I hand her over a few and have her follow them, and so be sure—that is, tolerably sure—that the meal will come out as I planned it. Besides these good reasons, there are more which apply especially to you. One is that when you have once learned to make up menus rapidly, you will save yourself a lot of mental storm and stress. Often young housekeepers groan over thinking out meals, especially dinners, of course, since they are the most difficult, and declare that they have had every known meat and vegetable again and again. Instead of that sort of thing, if they had at hand a number of dinners written down, they could select one and save bothering.
"And one thing more. You might often go on having the same thing over and over without realizing it. Now, in writing down the dinners for a week at a time you soon see if you are repeating yourself. If the words 'beef stew,' for instance, appear frequently you presently grasp the idea that you are having too much of that festal dish, whereas if you did not see the words in black and white, you might not guess it."
"I still do not see how you can plan a second day's meals at the same time you plan the first day's, unless you can gauge with accuracy the size of the family's appetites. Suppose some night, instead of each one's taking one helping of meat all around, we should all take two helpings; that would smash your written menu to bits."
"Yes, of course it would, and such things have happened. But written menus are not binding contracts, but only suggestions, and when you and Dick recklessly eat up all the meat between you some night,—personally I should know better than to join you in your extravagance,—then you will have to modify your next day's menu and either plan a new meal or substitute something else for the meat you had arranged for. But still you will find written menus a great help if you use them sensibly and do not feel bound to follow them literally. Now let us begin to play the game. You write down a dinner for to-night, and then I will undertake the thankless task of criticizing it."
Dolly gazed thoughtfully at the chandelier a few moments and then wrote rapidly. Presently she read glibly:
| "Potato soup. |
| Lamb pot pie with dumplings; boiled rice; macaroni and cheese. |
| Tapioca pudding. |
| Coffee." |
Mrs. Thorne smiled. "Poor Fred! If that is the sort of meal you are arranging to give him, I think he had better stay where he is. Now think a minute. Potato soup first, and potatoes are starchy; next, boiled rice, dumplings and macaroni,—more starch; and last, tapioca pudding! Starchier and starchier, to parody Alice in Wonderland."
Dolly pouted. "Well, I am perfectly sure he would eat that dinner thankfully and say it was a good one. He would never know he was eating starch if you did not put it into his head. I think it is all nonsense to point such things out to a man, anyway; it makes him notional about his food."
"Later on he would wonder why on earth he had dyspepsia, my child. You would not like to have a dyspeptic husband, would you? People who have poor digestions are proverbially cross, you know, and too much starch is certain to ruin even the very best of stomachs in time.
"Now let me explain what I took it for granted you knew already. You must not have too much of any one ingredient in your food; not too much fat, or starch, or sugar or anything else, because it is not wholesome. The perfect dinner is like this: First a good soup; then meat with one green and one starchy vegetable; then a fresh vegetable salad dressed lightly with oil; then a very simple sweet; coffee last; or, omitting the sweet, coffee alone. Of course you and I cannot afford to have dinners like that all the year around, because green vegetables cost too much, but that is the ideal toward which we must strive. In place of the things we cannot have, we must have substitutes as nearly resembling them as may be. In summer, of course, it is the easiest thing in the world to have salads and green vegetables, and in winter we must do the best we can without them. Now try another menu, and do not mind my criticisms. And put a date on this one, so we can tell the time of year and see whether or not you are having the proper things; suppose you say this is a March dinner."