5 NOVEMBER 1910, Page 61

THE SUCCESSFUL HOME COOK.

The Successful Home Cook. By Lucy H. Yates. (Rebman. 2s. 6d. net.)—" This book," we read in the preface, "is written specially for home cooks whose means are limited, with the hope of helping them to make the most of their limitations." Many cookery-books certainly err on the side of excess, giving recipes which involve a quite unreasonable cost. Miss Yates keeps in mind the exigencies of real life, of the small kitchen, the narrow income, and shows the housekeeper how to make the best of what she has at hand, what to provide, and how this may be best pre- pared. To say that there is a vast amount of really inexcusable ignorance on many of the simplest matters is no exaggeration. In view of this Miss Yates might have been somewhat more definite in her information about the relative cost of food. A table of various kinds of fish arranged according to ordinary prices would have been useful. How many housekeepers know that the smaller flat fish, even of the commoner sorts, would stand very high ? The cost of filleted lemon soles, for instance, works out at something like half-a-crown a pound. To take another common case,—how many people know that water is boiling when the violent bubbling ceases?