Vacant it was now, and looking
quite as if the bailiffs had been in.
"He couldn't cook ham and eggs proper," suggested Cousin Egbert. "I
tried him three times, and every time he done something French to 'em
that nobody had ought to do to ham and eggs."
Hereupon I ventured to assert that a too-intense nationalism would
prove the ruin of any chef outside his own country; there must be a
certain breadth of treatment, a blending of the best features of
different schools. One must know English and French methods and yet be
a slave to neither; one must even know American cookery and be
prepared to adapt its half-dozen or so undoubted excellencies. From
this I ventured further into a general criticism of the dinners I had
eaten at Red Gap's smartest houses. Too profuse they were, I said, and
too little satisfying in any one feature; too many courses,
constructed, as I had observed, after photographs printed in the back
pages of women's magazines; doubtless they possessed a certain
artistic value as sights for the eye, but considered as food they were
devoid of any inner meaning.
"Bill's right," said Cousin Egbert warmly. "Mrs. Effie, she gets up
about nine of them pictures, with nuts and grated eggs and scrambled
tomatoes all over 'em, and nobody knowing what's what, and even when
you strike one that tastes good they's only a dab of it and you
mustn't ask for any more.
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