Page:The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 1.djvu/136

 very fond of butter, you can have a penny worth of butter in which case your dinner would be 51/2d. The following variety of dinners can be had for and under 5d: Pea soup and bread and stewed fruit or fresh fruit, rice, milk and bread and radishes and cheese. Potato soup, bread and semolina with stewed fruit or milk. Tapioca pudding bread with almonds and raisins, etc., etc. Supper may consist of bread, butter and cocoa (3d), bread and butter and cheese (2 1/2d), toast and milk and radishes (3d), porridge and fruit and bread (3d), bread, butter, celery and cheese, etc. Thus, three meals can be had for 11d or say 1s. These meals are quite sufficient and nourishing and give as much nutrition as a sumptuous meat meal with no dyspepsia or other disease which is generally the consequence of the latter. Thousands subsist well on such meals. The three meals or two of them may be cooked by you or by your landlady. When the cooking is entrusted to the landlady, all the things must be bought by you so that you may be sure that you get the right thing at the right price. It may be remarked here that only those fruits and vegetables must be bought which are in season, otherwise they are very expensive. Moreover, they must be bought at the proper place. If you go to Regent Street and think of buying the hot-house grapes, they would cost 3s per pound. These, of course, you cannot buy; but you can easily buy the grapes at 4d per pound when they are in season. Sometimes, I was going to say very often, it is found convenient to take the dinner outside. Whether you be a traveller or a student, you would go out after breakfast and return in the evening. In such a case, you would not care to return home for dinner. That entails a great loss of time and trouble and you would not care to go home from your library, especially if it be some distance from your house. There are vegetarian restaurants in all the busy quarters of London for such people. They have generally two divisions. One division provides sixpenny dinners of 3 courses. You buy a ticket and, on presenting the ticket, you get a selection of 3 out of about 20 courses. The popularity of these dinners is immense. From 1 p.m. to 2 p.m., very often it becomes very difficult to find a place owing to the large number of customers. In the other division, you can have any number of courses and you pay for what you eat. A list of items called the menu is shown