Good pastry is expensive. Indifferent pastry is indigestible and unpalatable ; a mere waste of materials that might be used to advantage in some other way. When we reflect upon the small percentage of tolerable pastry one finds in the multitudinous brigades of pies concocted for family and guest throughout this great land of ours, the wonder remains and grows that The National Pie maintains its sovereignty. A hopeful feature of the outlook is that students of dietetics and educated housewives combine to relegate pastry to the background in making up daily bills-of-fare, and exclude it altogether from the nursery table. No growing child should be allowed to eat pies, good or indifferent, which in this connection is a synonym for bad.

The dictum that pastry should be avoided in summer is almost as rigid as the foregoing sentence of banishment. It is harder to make good pie-crust in hot weather than in cold, and much harder to digest it.

Yet, because excellent puff-paste is so deliriously toothsome, and because people who have once tasted it will have it again and yet again, a select list of pies is herewith presented, with instructions for making the crust that must underpin and mask their contents. A word as to the same contents. Many of them would find equal favor with the eaters if they were baked in deep dishes as puddings, with no crust at all. Many more - notably many kinds of ripe fruit and all kinds of custard and pumpkin pies - would be more acceptable if baked with no bottom crust. This opens a loop-hole of escape for the conscientious house-mother whose "men-folks" must have pie three, four, six days in the week, let the thermometer be what it may.

Let her make excellent pastry for their delectation half or a third of the time, and pudding-pies the rest of the week. Puff-paste on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, costs no more than so-called family pie-crust from Sunday to Sunday.