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It has always been a matter of considerable surprise to me that so few people really read their Cookery Book with any diligence and attention. There is no subject of conversation so popular as Cookery Book. It blends together all persons in a common chorus of talk irrespective of rank, age, sex, religion and education. The dullest eye lights up and a ripple crosses the most stagnant mind when the dying embers of formal conversation are called into brilliant flames by a few pages from the Cookery Book. Every one lays claim to take a hand at Cookery Book talk, no one is too bashful or ignorant in his own seeming, and yet how few really bring to the discussion a sound literary knowledge of even Mrs. Beeton and Francatelli, and how many prate of cookery to whom Mrs. Glasse and John Farley are unknown names. No one will talk of Shakespeare and the musical glasses without at least a slight knowledge of Charles Lamb’s delightful nursery tales and the study of an article on the theory of music in “Snippy Bits.” But if Cookery Book is mentioned—and in ordinary society the subject is generally reached in the first ten minutes after the introduction—the humblest and most ignorant is found laying down the law with the misplaced confidence of a county magistrate. And yet with Cookery Book as with lower forms of learning one can never tell whence illumination may spring. True indeed is it that out of the mouths of babes and sucklings strength is ordained.