Do not expect your cook, unless more than usually intelligent, to compose the bills of fare for your daily dinner, or for a party, but do it yourself until, at least, you have properly trained your cook and until you have made her understand your ways. Of course, if the good wife should happen to have a taste for such small matters as cookery, she will do very much better than any one else.

For my own part I would not trust any cook to compose a bill of fare for me. It is an easy task to tell, when you dine out, whether the chef was the sole author, or whether the chatelaine has stamped the menu with her own seal. When six out of eight dishes are truffled, no matter whether the dinner be in January or in July, you may safely back the chefs authorship. And where there is hardly one plain dish, when lobsters, ducklings, etc, appear in the shape of mousselines or soujflees long odds may be laid on the chefs haying had no one to say him nay.