Meals for the Million. By Crefydd. (Simpkin, Marshall, and Co.)—
This little book contains 125 dishes suited to incomes varying from 1001. to 250/. a year. There is no lack of variety, or of that wealth of resource which is so much needed in all households, and which seems to have taken up its abode on the Continent. We cannot profess to have eaten any of Crefydd's dishes, or to have learnt the receipts for them by heart, but we shall try and persuade Mrs. Current Literature to make use of some of them, and if our income goes further than it did before we shall show our gratitude by a second notice. The particular merit of the book is that the price of every material, and of every dish that is composed of various materials, is appended. Thus, we are to have soup enough for four persons, at sixpence or eightpence. A dish of fish for three persons—we hope nothing untoward has happened to the fourth in the short interval between the courses—is not to cost more than from eightpence to a shilling, and the dish is to be composed of almost every fish except salmon. The name of one of the soups is rather too significant ; "mock mock-turtle" seems like bad heraldry, or a patch on a patch, which we know is beggary. Then we have a calculation of -a week's expenses for a family of three, the whole amounting to II 4e. for all the food that is necessary. Of course the allowance is scanty in the extreme, but the marvel is how it is possible. Has Crefydd ever made one of the three whose appetites are typical, and who, while buying from "good tradesmen in rather an expensive locality," are able to indulge themselves at so moderate a cost? If those appetites only exist in theory, we fear practice would tell a very different tale. But there are small eaters in the world, and there are good managers. The difficulty is to combine the two, or perhaps to reduce the former by an excess of the latter.
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