THE DUDLEY BOOK OF COOKERY AND HOUSEHOLD RECIPES.
The Dudley Book of Cookery and Household Recipes. Collected and Arranged by Georgians, Countess of Dudley. (Edward Arnold. 7s. 6d. not.)—This might well be called a cookery-book in the "grand style," so rich, expensive, and delicious are most of the recipes. The quantities, too, when we are told them, are very ample, and suggest housekeeping in a large country house, where fowls, eggs, cream, and butter abound, and whore the excellence of a dish is more important than its cost. The cook who intends to materialise these "creations" must know her business, and be able to translate properly such expressions as "a little," " plenty ," and a few other rather vague terms. This vagueness is, however, rare, and we are generally told the exact amount of each ingredient, and sometimes the time the dish will take to cook. But we miss the useful note at the end of a recipe, which is to bo found in some cookery-books, "sufficient for six people," or some other number, as the case may be. Though it would not be appropriate to put this elegant volume into the hands of a "plain cook," wo would recommend her mistress to study it diligently, and take quotations from it to the kitchen, thereby adding some excellent dishes to her menus. In the recipe for "Oysters Gratin" we are told that any germs will be killed if the oysters are allowed. "just to come to the boil," but we fear this is too sanguine a view to take of the great resisting powers of a germ. The various divisions into which a recipe-book naturally falls are hero intro- duced by a page or two of short and apt quotations in prose and verse, such as La Rochefoucauld's " Preserving the health by too strict a regimen is a wearisome malady." Dryden's lines
"While you hi this isle are biding, You shall feast without providing,"
put a sadly unattainable ideal before the mistress of a house, who is arduously and incessantly "providing" many things.
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