I have put fried bread under a separate heading on purpose to call attention to the economy of using up stale pieces of bread, by frying them for soups, hashes, etc. I daresay you know that generally hashed mutton is surrounded by sippets made of toasted bread. How much nicer is it to have nice little pieces of fried bread, brown, like a rusk.

French cooking, as I have said before, is the cheapest and most economical in the world. A French workman will live twice as well as an English workman on half the money.

In Paris men go about collecting- all the stale pieces of bread that have been dropped on the ground in the better restaurants, and these are fried and put in the soup made for the poor. Why not take a little trouble, and have the stale pieces of bread cut up and fried for your pea-soup or hash, instead of cutting a slice out of a fresh loaf and toasting it? And yet, if I call these pieces of dry bread "croutons," you have a vague, uneasy fear that it must be extravagant.

In frying bread, the bread is best stale. The fat must be deep, and the fat can be made hot in a little stewpan or saucepan if the fire is pretty fierce. It will take some time for the fat to get sufficiently hot. Test it with a small piece of bread, which should turn a light brown in a few seconds. Recollect, in frying bread that the bread will get a darker colour after it has been taken out of the fat.

In frying bread for soup, cut the bread into small dice. In frying bread-crumbs for game, try and get the crumbs the same size. (See No. 20.) In frying larger pieces of stale bread for hash, or for making first-rate sandwiches, avoid having holes near the surface. In cutting bread for frying for sandwiches (a great delicacy, but not necessarily expensive), cut the bread a quarter of an inch thick. In cutting stale pieces for hash, you can amuse yourself by making fancy shapes, such as hearts, rings, stars, etc., and use up the crumbs for something else. Bread-crumbs are always best stale. In fact, if you wish to combine strict economy with good cooking - and they always go together - stale pieces of bread are really valuable. In frying bread, be very careful to let them drain directly you take them out of the fat. As I have said before, blotting-paper is the best thing to use. If they get cold with the fat inside, they get greasy. Fried bread can be always allowed to get cold, and then made hot in the oven on a piece of blotting-paper.