Most for your money cookbook

A savory way to start a ragout of cooked meat is to get two tablespoons of olive oil smoking hot in a big black kettle. Let it cool for a minute and fry in it the garlic with any minced vegetable or mixture of, say, green peppers, onions, carrots and turnips. Then put in your cooked meat, chopped into handy-sized chunks, cover with boiling water in which a couple of beef cubes have been dissolved, or any broth, add half as much thickly sliced potatoes as meat and simmer until tender, seasoning of course. If you use fresh meat start the other way around by heating a little fat in the kettle and frying in it a pound or two of beef or mutton, cut in small pieces, add a little water, salt and pepper. Then add plenty of sliced potatoes, onions, carrots, or what you will (a cooked sliced beet is always nice and its blood enriches the color of the ragout), and let everything simmer till tender. No dish offers a better chance for originality and if you add mushrooms and wine with the cocks' combs we throw away, though the French sell them at dollars a pound, you can have a Millionaire Mulligan, the type called Ragout a la Financiere on ritzy bills-of-fare. But ordinarily, the simpler the ragout, the better, and here's a story to illustrate: DISHES FOR KNIFE, FORK AND SPOON lOI COOK'S CHOICE Professional cooks do simple dishes for themselves which they prefer to the fancy ones they make for their employers. In Clarisse, or the Old Cook, we find this illuminating anecdote: The "master," named Brumaque, is dining alone while his cook Sophie is out on an errand: "He starts by filling two of his glasses with Loka and White Sicilian and, comfortably seated before a huge table, where, on a snowy cloth river trout, Loire carp au bleu, with its caviar, a pate of wild duck liver au grand Tivollier, a truffle salad, prawns cooked a la Lorraine, black grapes, velvety peaches and barberry preserve please the eye, makes ready to eat, when lo ! through the crack of the door a most delicious smell steals to his nostrils, making his mouth water. "Brumaque rises and follows the savory trail, which leads to his own kitchen. O joy! Sophie the cook is absent. With a trembling hand the amateur takes the cover off the saucepan from which escapes the enticing smell and there, ye immortal gods! he sees the dish! It is one of those which an artist makes for herself and never for her master, a ragout of mutton, the ideal golden-brown ragout, with a thick sauce transparent and warm in color, and potatoes that are like living topazes. Trembling, like the thief he is, Brumaque carefully helps himself to the stew and eats, tasting it, relishing it, and devouring it with such gusto that the plate is licked clean, washed, cleaned better than by a dog. But the terrible Sophie returns; furious, with her arms akimbo: "*So,' she says, *you have stolen my food!* "* Well,' says the master, pale and smiling faintly, 'you can have mine.' "'This time I will let it pass,' says the cook severely, *but don't let it happen again. I don't eat your nastiness.' " CASSOULET lyi PINTS NAVY BEANS I PIECE BACON RIND lyi POUNDS LEAN MUTTON I POUND LEAN PORK, DICED 1 ONION SLICED ^ POUND SMOKED SAUSAGE GOOSE OR BACON FAT I SPRIG THYME 2 GARLIC CLOVES, SLICED I TABLESPOON MINCED PARSLEY I TOMATO SALT AND PEPPER