The cult of the chafing dish

In preparing some of the recipes in preceding chapters. Chafers may find some difficulty, if it be summer-time, in keeping one portion of the dish hot whilst the other portion is cooking. When I have no fire in the room, I use a copper tray with two spirit lamps underneath. This is a splendid invention and no Chafer should be without one. Then there is another useful thing to remember. The lower hot-water dish, if filled with water and put over the lamp, only half turned up, will keep food warm in the Chafing Dish for ever so long. This is often useful to know, as it is so pleasant to find something unexpectedly prepared and ready when one had feared that all the cooking had to be done by oneself. After a late night's work such a surprise is very comforting. In preparing a Chafing-Dish meal it is important to remember the sequence of cooking, so that the waits between the courses shall not be too long. I use two Chafing Dishes, so that there need be no delay ; one can be cleaned whilst the other is in use. If you are making soup, have the fish ready so that it only wants hotting up. If your second course takes a little time, fill up the interval with something cold, or a salad. Work out your plan carefully beforehand so that there can be no possibility of accident, and if the occasion be special, and you wish to shine to your very best advantage, I earnestly recommend you to have a full-dress rehearsal the day before, and time yourself accurately for each dish ; then there can be little chance of failure. The setting forth of menus seems to me to be an entirely futile method of filling up a cook-book. No one ever follows them, because things never happen just so as to make all the materials simultaneously available. It is much better to dip here and there in a book — to choose a soup, a meat, and a salad ; or a fish, a bird, and a savoury ; or a soup, a fish, and a sweet (an it be Friday) — to suit your convenience, pocket, and taste of the moment. Further, as I have already explained, I do not pretend to have done more than touch on the fringe of the possibilities of the Chafing Dish. I have only described what I have done, and hinted at what others may do. But what I particularly want to draw attention to is the scope for original research in the cult of Chaffinda. A long winter's evening is much more profitably spent experimenting with the Chafing Dish than — well, playing Patience, for instance. I do not desire to make every unmarried man and woman a cook. Far from it. But it would do us no harm to think a little more of the quality of the food we eat, and less of the quantity. Few of us, however, are so stomach-ridden as Mynheer Welters, Burgomaster of Dilburg, in a delightful novel published thirty years ago, called " The Burgomaster's Family," by Christine MuUer, and translated from the Dutch by Sir John Shaw-Lefevre. Burgomaster Welters worshipped his stomach. What a good dinner was to- him no words can express. It was the realisation of all his dreams and wishes. The content of soul and the feeling . of philanthropy which his eyes expressed after such a dinner must have been seen to be described. He was accused of marrying Widow de Graaf because she knew the recipe of a certain pie which she would _ not divulge at a less price than marriage. If any one spoke of glorious summer, he only thought of early vegetables; France reminded him of Veuve Cliquot, and Germany of Bavarian beer. An American Chafing-Dish book in my possession contains the following quaint apothegm : " The Chafing Dish not only