Most for your money cookbook

Everybody falls for a berry shortcake, especially strawberry, but to make a good one it's necessary to mix a dough and bake. Easy imitations are made by splitting a store cake and heaping juicy crushed strawberries between layers, but we've discovered a quicker, cheaper substitute that we like, although it also only slightly resembles the real thing. Let's call it Breakfast Shortcake. Fill your individual cereal bowl with a good hot cooked cereal such as oatmeal, frumenty, or Pettijohns and plant a big pat of butter in the middle. Have ready plenty of cold strawberries crushed with sugar in their own juice, heap it liberally on top of the cereal and dip your spoon deep, bringing up the buttery hot cereal with a sauce of fresh strawberries and juice. You'll find that the steamy exhalation of the cereal mingles so perfectly with the fresh berry flavor that if you close your eyes you'll have a hard time telling it from a real old-fashioned shortcake. You can use a FRUITY DESSERTS 1 83 butter substitute at about % price. We like the vegetable Nucoa for cooking and in some dishes it's hard to tell from real cow butter, although none of these margarines, derisively called " bull butter," can equal the real thing. The old saying that ** fruit is golden in the morning, silver at noon and leaden at night" has about as much scientific basis as most old sayings. A Chinese friend told us he was brought up on midnight feeds of fruit left over or thrown out in the market where he worked, and he grew up healthier than any rice-fed coolie. For us, oranges are golden in the morning and apples equally golden at night, although we do think that cooked fruit is more digestible than most raw fruit for the evening meal, and an apple before bed may bring the doctor instead of keeping him away; it all depends on personal reactions. If you live where you can get it, juicy joints of sugar cane, cut in handy lengths and peeled, make a novel and satisfying dessert at a fraction of a cent a piece. Fresh figs are about the finest fruit we know, and they're now produced so abundantly in the South and West that they shouldn't cost more than a cent or two apiece. They're perfect to eat out of hand or to skin, slice and serve with sugar and cream, plain or whipped. And this goes for fresh guavas too, if there're any around. And peaches, of course — always ripe peaches and rich cream, if you can afford a nickel for dessert. As for grapes, the small, seedless green ones are our pick of the pushcart and we eat them vineyard style by throwing the head back and holding up a whole stem of them above our lips. As Caruso gargled his spaghetti, we nibble off half a dozen at once to make a whole mouthful of grape juice at a time. But maybe it's more refined or something, to pick them off one at a time; so if you eat them that way, please wait until you've got a palmful and then pop them into your mouth all at once. It'll be a pleasant surprise to your taste buds, for the juice of each grape helps flavor the other and your palate gets a big kick out of that. We don't want to be accused of tempting to extravagance by giving sweet cream as an ingredient; we'd rather use sour cream or evaporated milk; yet some fruits, especially peaches, fresh figs and strawberries simply holler for cream; so try sour cream at