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 PUBLISHERS' PREFACE

N presenting to the public the "" the publishers believe they can justly claim that it more fully represents the progress and present perfection of the culinary art than any previous work. In point of authorship, it stands preëminent. Hugo Ziemann was at one time caterer for that Prince Napoleon who was killed while fighting the Zulus in Africa. He was afterwards steward of the famous Hotel Splendide in Paris. Later he conducted the celebrated Brunswick Cafe in New York, and still later he gave to the Hotel Richelieu, in Chicago, a cuisine which won the applause of even the gourmets of foreign lands. It was here that he laid the famous "spread" to which the chiefs of the warring factions of the Republican Convention sat down in June, 1888, and from which they arose with asperities softened, differences harmonized and victory organized.

Mrs. F. L. Gillette is no less proficient and capable, having made a life-long and thorough study of cookery and housekeeping, especially as adapted to the practical wants of average American homes.

The book has been prepared with great care. Every recipe has been tried and tested, and can be relied upon as one of the best of its kind. It is comprehensive, filling completely, it is believed, the requirements of housekeepers of all classes. It embodies several original and commendable features, among which may be mentioned the menus for the holidays and for one week in each month in the year, thus covering all varieties of seasonable foods; the convenient classification and arrangement of topics; the simplified method of explanation in preparing an article, in the order of manipulation, thereby enabling the most inexperienced to clearly comprehend it.

The subject of carving has been given a prominent place, not only because of its special importance in a work of this kind, but (iii)