Our Daily Bill Of Fare

And What It Cost.

The Second Part Of

Originally Published in the "San Francisco Daily Hotel Gazette "

BY

Jessup Whitehead

Chicago.

1893.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the office of the Librarian, at Washington, by JEssup Whitehead, 1884. All rights reserved.

Eight Weeks at a Summer Resort.

This is my diary of a time when I went out to gain experience at a small place, as compared with our hotel magnitudes, but a first-class summer boarding house, nevertheless, situated on the shore of that beautiful sheet of water called Uintah Lake in the State of Cornucopia. A great number of interesting questions concerning the business of boarding people for profit are to be answered in this way as will be seen as we go along, but more especially the object I have in view is to stop once for all the ceaseless inquiries of a lady friend who keeps a boarding house and is very economically disposed. This lady knows that I have been cooking for profit all my life and is aware that I have become quite indifferent in regard to the state of the market, the state of the larder, or the state of the storeroom, having learned that a good meal can be made out of very slim materials if one knows how to manage, and therefore seems to expect that I can answer the hardest kind of questions off-hand on all sorts of unexpected contingencies.

"Oh," she said one day when I was going out just after breakfast, "before you go do tell me what I can have for dinner?" and she put her hand to her head in the same old state of perplexity she was so well used to.

"Well, Mrs. Tingee, a suitable soup would be-"

"The weather is too warm for soup," she broke in with, "and besides, I have nothing to make it of, and Anne would not have time."

In this respect I think she was wrong. In warm weather people take liquid food all the more readily and the soup is seldom too hot. I find that the only two dishes that are invariably eaten out clean with no remainders are the soup and ice cream. However, I went on:

"If it is to warm for soup, yon might get a fine bluefish and stuff and bake it with about a pound or less of slices of pickled pork laid under and over it, or a pompano or two of them, broiled, with softened butter and lemon-juice, and roast some young chickens, and get some of that early summer squash and corn that has come from the South, and a half gallon of thick, sweet cream and a dozen boxes of strawberries and then if you have some sponge cake and delicate cake ready made and frosted and make your coffee strong and clear, you may get through this dinner time very well and you have all the afternoon and night in which to plan for to-morrow."

"I don't want to know that," the lady snapped out, half cross. "Do you know that I have had to drop the price of day board from four dollars a week to three dollars and a half, because the boarders teased me so to do so; they said they could not stand it to pay more and I had to do it, and I should like to see myself buying strawberries for them at thirty cents a quart and cream at twenty-five. Anybody can go to market and buy the best of everything and make a good dinner; what I want to know is what you do when you have no pompano, no chickens, no fresh vegetables, no fruit, no cream, no cake, no nothing - now tell me that"

"Can't tell you, Mrs. Tingee, but I will write out what it costs to give first-class board, plentiful, reasonably rich, but not extraordinary nor extravagant and perhaps you will pick out some items that will be useful to you."

So the knotty question of "What do you do for a good meal when you have nothing that you want to make it with?" recurs continually. How, for instance, can we serve mint sauce with roast lamb in Senator Sawmill's town, where not only no mint is to be bought, but none of the inhabitants apparently have ever heard of any other mint, but Uncle Sam's, where. money is made? And here is another instance: