Nothing differentiates more decidedly the plain from the elegant dinner than the sauces ; in fact, it is often the lack of the sauce that makes the plain dinner, its presence that converts the simple into the elegant meal.

Only lately has the American housekeeper begun to appreciate the culinary value of the sauce; not even yet has the unpractised cook overcome her terror of it. The legend appended to recipes that she has read with confidence, "Serve with a Holland-aise (or a Bechamel, or a Soubise, or a Bordelaise) sauce," is to her as a red flag that warns her back from dangerous ground.

Not altogether in vain, however, have culinary missionaries gone up and down through the country in person or by printed representative preaching the gospel of good cookery. Their labors have been already crowned with some measure of success, and from them the American housewife is learning that closer acquaintance with French names and dishes robs them of their terrors. The firmly grounded dread of them has been largely due to the unfamiliar terms in which they were conveyed, and when these are swept away and plain, every-day " kitchen English "substituted, the preparation of the formidable compounds is seen to be a very simple affair after all.

The fancied difficulty of mixing and cooking is not, however, the only obstacle sauces have had to vanquish on the road to popularity. They have long enjoyed a reputation of unwhole-someness and costliness that has influenced many persons to keep them from their tables. There is no more potent enemy than a well-turned phrase, and the concise saying, "Plain living and high thinking," has been responsible for many of the defects of the American cuisine - a dearth of sauces among them. (How as sensible a race as the Yankee could place pie among the articles of diet that help make up plain living is a problem that has never been solved.) It is the general opinion that plain living and sauces are incompatible. Perhaps they are, but people may "strive mightily'' and yet eat generous food, and they are beginning to acquire the valuable knowledge that a palatable diet is, for good physiological reasons, more likely to be easy of digestion than food which does not tempt the appetite. A well-prepared sauce adds materially to the gustatory properties of a dish, and, all things being equal, there is no reason in the world why it should be unwholesome to a person who has a gastric apparatus in fairly good working order.

Of course there are sauces and sauces. It is possible to make a rich, highly spiced fat and starch-laden concoction that would tax the digestion of an ostrich almost as severely as would the New England doughnut or the Knickerbocker mince-pie. But the woman of dietetic prudence does not put these before her family as a steady diet, and she rules them entirely off the nursery bill-of-fare. In like manner she serves upon ordinary occasions simple sauces containing a few well-cooked ingredients and reserves the dyspepsia-producers for high-days and holidays when the independent citizen shows his joy in the Christmas or Thanksgiving season by overeating on an assortment of foods that only American ingenuity would have thought of combining.

The other difficulty - that of the expense of sauces - may be best settled by the common-sense of the housekeeper. She is not the wise woman I think her if she has not, early in her professional career, established a system of debit and credit by which the costly viands of one day are offset by the simpler food of the next. It does not take her long to learn that by the addition of a savory, though inexpensive, sauce the ' cheaper meal may be made every whit as palatable as the high-priced one. The rolled neck of lamb is a popular dish when masked with tomato sauce; the white sauce makes a dainty plat of the warmed-over chicken or veal, and a brown sauce, seasoned with paprica, converts the stew from yesterday's cold beef into an appetizing ragout. And so on through endless combinations which the good cook is quick to learn and utilize, for the sauce-boat is only rivalled by the stock-pot as a means of making a satisfying disposition of odds and ends of left-overs of soups and gravies and vegetables.

In making sauces it must always be borne in mind that cookery is an exact science. There must be no guessing at quantities, no carelessness in measures. Given amounts, mixed in a certain way, will produce a sauce of the correct consistency, and the most experienced chef is the last one to take liberties with the proportions of solid and liquid ingredients in a sauce. When the proper method of combining them has once been mastered the secret of all sauces is in the hands of the learner. The most elaborate are but variations upon the original simple formula.