With the steadily increasing cost of all staple foods the need of intelligent buying, cooking, and serving is greater than ever before: more money must be spent for food, or more consideration must be given to selecting and using it. For those who would continue to serve their households well, and whose allowance for food has not kept pace with prices, there is only one alternative, and that is, to use more of the cheaper foods, and to prepare and combine them so skilfully that economy shall not be a hardship. Good meals depend not so much upon expensive material as upon care and good judgment in the use of ordinary material. The time-worn boarding-house jokes about prunes and hash mean simply that these foods, in themselves excellent, are poorly prepared and too frequently served.