In foreign kitchens

Mould of Cream with Wood Strawberries. — This most delicious cream is sufficient for eight or ten persons. One large cup of sweet cream or half milk and cream, half a packet of gelatine soaked in a small cup of warm water, one large cup of fine sugar, and a cup of strawberry- juice with eight eggs. Bring the milk to boiling-point, add sugar, juice, and gelatine, and boil up once. Beat the eggs smooth and add slowly till all is smooth. When it is quite cold, but not yet hardened, beat in half a pint of sweet cream which has been whipped stiff, and a cup of wood strawberries, and put in a large oval mould to harden. Serve with a garland of leaves and flowers about it. HOW shall one write of housekeeping, or cooking, or any sober phase of daily life and work, when the word " Italy " itself means a dream into which, with the hearing, one straightway falls, and remembers no more anything but blue sky and shining sea, and vineyards climbing every hill, and dusty olives spreading crooked branches, as gnarled and twisted as old New England apple-trees? These serious faces, lightened for a moment by the sweet Italian smile, wear so seldom the look of placid, animal contentment found in the heavier feeders of more northern peoples — they are so abstinent — that one forgets to ask what they eat; and seeing them content with the flask of wine, and often only the bit of black bread with it, settle that macaroni is the only luxury, and actual dinners quite unknown. And, if it chances that one's way has lain off railroad lines, and nights have been spent in little villages, one finds no vestige of modern improvements, but a kitchen still after the old fashion. In such a kitchen the fireplace is of the purest order of Italian architecture; in other words, quite invisible for the smoke which rises from a fire built on a stone platform three or four feet high, big enough to roast an ox if need be, about which all the familygather in chill autumn evenings, since this is the only point where warmth is to be had. One can cook by this fire, it is true, but the demand upon it by its owners is of the slightest, and a formal dinner or supper evolves itself with difficulty. But the hungry traveller, who has learned at last that a chicken is always possible, gives an order with confidence that something will presently be forthcoming, and is not disappointed. In the mean time, there is the upper floor of the rambling house, where one finds a big sdla, all windows and doors, the big doors opening into big bedrooms with brick floors, and often only the rafters for ceiling. The doors yawn, the windows bang, the horses are stabled under the bed, and the cows below the other side of the room, and the family share their quarters amicably with pigs and hens and geese. But it is all friendly, and, after a fashion, comfortable; and at last is served precisely such a dinner as Dickens ate, in precisely such a house, almost fifty years ago, and then wrote : — " There is something with a vegetable or some rice in it, which is a sort of short-hand or arbitrary character for soup, and which tastes very well when you have flavored it with plenty of grated cheese, lots of salt, and abundance of pepper. There is the half fowl of which this soup has been made. There is a stewed pigeon, with the gizzards and livers of himself and other birds stuck all round him. There is a bit of roast beef the size of a small French roll. There are a scrap of Parmesan cheese and five little withered apples, all huddled together on a small plate, and crowding one upon the other, as if each were trying to save itself from the chance of being eaten. Then there is coffee, and then there is bed." This is the dinner provided when one is supposed to have English tastes ; but if one