Wanted a Cook Author:Alan Dale Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III "Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner." If Byron, whose genius few will deny, can make such a remark, there is no need for me to apologize... more » for dwelling upon a topic that long-haired dreamers, with bad digestions, might call nigglcdy-piggledy. In fact, I have no intention of so doing. It has long been my idea that dinner is not so much a mere matter of material indulgence, as of artistic communion, to which food is an accompaniment. The fact that the very best music, cruelly harmonized, must distress —that Melba, Calve, and Nordica warbling to a discordant accompaniment, would produce nausea—can certainly need no discussion. It is a fact that is self- evident. It has an Euclidian Q.E.D-ness that is instantly apparent. I told Letitia that I was not going to emulate the example of so many men and treat myself each day to a choice luncheon in town. That has always seemed to me to be a greedy process. Better—far better is it—to re'curn to one's home at night, hungry as a hunter, with an appetite for healthful food, ratherthan an abnormal craving for supreme de volatile. Don't you think so? I intended to save myself up for Letitia—to accumulate hunger-pangs, and bring them to her table for artistic treatment. My wife fully agreed with me, and although I brought the due amount of hunger-pangs to our first dinner at home and discovered, perhaps, that "delicatessen" food didn't treat them quite as artistically as they deserved, I was not discouraged. My appetite next evening was really in a wonderfully unimpaired condition. I rejoiced to find that I was so healthy, and as I wended my way homewards, I looked longingly at mere apples in the street, while the peanut stands and the roast chestnut stoves almost suggested assault. On this occasion Letitia was not ...« less