Whoever serves fish or meat to a number of guests at a public house of whose tastes and preferences he can know nothing, takes unwarrantable liberties with their food if he covers it with a sauce before sending it in. The sauce should be placed under or at the side of the cut. The salmon or the trout may be fine, firm, flaky, pink-fleshed, good to look at, and appetizing, but the sauce may be a dull paste, perhaps tasting of butter of a poor quality; or, if of the very best quality when first made it may have become thick and stringy with waiting, or, it may be a caper sauce, which the person does not like, or eggs, or tomato, or anchovy which many detest - why should the fish or meat be deluged with these peculiar flavors whether the recipient wishes it or not ? There is an answer - it is because that it is the custom of French cooks and so the directions read. But it never was intended for general application. One day I happened to be at the Lookover-the-Mountain House (by-the-Sea) when a large number of prominent townspeople were taking dinner there for some complimentary purpose concerning the excellence of the table, and the cook served the fish with wine sauce. The fish was of the finest; probably it was well cooked; but whether it was the wrong wine or no wine at ail, but a substitute, the sauce was sweet; it could hardly have been sweeter if it had been molasses; it had the Parisienne potatoes in it saturated and dingy, and each portion of fish served was buried out of sight under a large spoonful of the mess. There are plenty of reasons why sauces may be bad in spite of skill and good intentions, but they are of small consequence in the houses where they are but poured at the side and not over the cut of meat or fish, because then a free choice is left to either take or leave, and the cook's sauce is placed upon its own merits.