Most for your money cookbook

When boiled it resembles spinach and is even tastier. Mix with dapper young dandelion leaves, pull them to pieces, dash with salt, pepper and lemon juice and lay them in a bed of butter on bread, to make the tastiest Spring Tonic Sandwich. Among the countless edible herbs we're inclined to pass up and call "weeds,'* there's poke, stinging nettle and Jack-by-the-hedge, so many of these roadside gypsies they'd fill a whole cookbook. So unless you know them by sight, let's let them go, with just the passing hint that Jack-by-the-hedge, whose alias is Sauce-alone, is flavored like garlic, but more subtly, and pokeweed is still keeping the share croppers alive down south. If you like, you can assuage Spring fever of almost any dangerous degree by putting all of the above into one combination salad, except the stinging nettle, which has to be cooked before it loses its prickly heat. And for good measure, you might throw in a few sour dock leaves, plain plantain, the tip-ends of milk weed, a bit of wild onion, some nasturtium leaves and flowers minced together, oxtongue, lamb's quarters, shepherd's purse — in fact any of the luscious leaves, gummy pods and esculent roots you can gather by the basket full in almost any vacant lot in the suburbs. When we lived just outside of Chicago, Italians used to come out with gunny sacks to fill with such "weeds" we hundred-percenters let go to waste. And they carried back wild mushrooms and puflF balls, too, to make into stews and dry for a whole winter's soup supply. Better still, so you won't mix in some skunk cabbage by mistake, if you have access to a bit of land, select your favorite herbs from seeds supplied in great variety by the garden houses, plant them in any corner of good earth and watch them thrive like the weeds they are. Of course if you live in the city, the cops might object to your trying to raise savory, dill, fennel and whatnot at the foot of some Washington monument in the town park, so its safer to fetch home a sack of black loam and start an edible window box in any sunny room. The Department of Agriculture sponsors this practice and recommends the following spicy little plants to be potted — mint, cress, marjoram, basil, chives and rose geranium. Then when your herbary gets going, you'll always have fines herbes on hand to make any plain omelet fancy. If you think earthen pots look ugly, substitute deep glass bowls — even a small terrarium or an old goldfish bowl holds enough earth and gives just the right hot-house protection to supply plenty of basil and chives for a small family. Another very common herb that's been brightening dishes for centuries, at absolutely no cost at all, is the marigold. We think of it chiefly as a decorative flower, yet it's one of the fullest-flavored of culinary herbs. The petals alone are used in making the celebrated: MARIGOLD SOUP Boil mutton bones four or five hours, cool and remove fat, add an onion with a couple of cloves stuck in, a turnip and two potatoes, peeled and sliced, and boil everything until vegetables are soft. Then remove the onion and turnip and stir in two cups of cold boiled rice. At the finish sprinkle the top of the pot with a palmful of marigold petals, which not only give zest to this soup but dart away from the diner's spoon like glinting goldfish and add to the gaiety of eating.