What to Eat, How to Serve it. Christine Terhune Herrick

      THE apartment in which the members of a family assemble three times a day for meals must be pleasant. There is a chance to escape from any other part of the house. The business man rarely sees his drawing-room until after the shades are drawn and the lamps lighted. The wife and mother divides her time between nursery, sewing-room, and kitchen, while school-children are out of the house nearly as much as they are in it—at least during their waking hours. But no matter how widely the little flock may be scattered by their different employments, always twice and often three times a day they are all together in this common rallying-place of the home.

      Only in the houses of the wealthy, or of those possessed of exceptionally large dwellings, is there found a breakfast-room other than that in which are eaten all the meals of the family. English mansions frequently possess both a family and a state dining-room, and the same custom prevails in some of the private palaces of our own millionaires; but in the average American home one room must do duty for every repast, whether simple or superb; and in our large cities this apartment is too likely, alas! to be situated in the basement.

      The immeasurable superiority of a dining-room built above-ground over one even partially beneath it hardly needs demonstration—it is more cheerful, more airy, and as a consequence more healthful, better lighted, of finer proportions, and more susceptible of effective decoration and furnishing—the advantages might be continued ad infinitum. No one who has ever had the pleasure of using an up-stairs dining-room can contentedly descend to one below the level of the street. Apart from every other consideration, such rooms are very liable to be damp. It is not uncommon to have carpets grow musty and mouldy on their floors, or to find a perceptible dampness on their walls. These faults may be to some extent remedied by a layer of thick felt paper under the carpet, and by good fires and constant and thorough ventilation.

      A few housekeepers express their preference for basement dining-rooms because of the nearness of these to the kitchen, and the work saved thereby. This is an important consideration in houses where but one maid is kept. Her work as cook and waitress is almost doubled when she has to run up-stairs to remove the dishes from the dumb-waiter, and then fly back to her kitchen between the intervals of waiting