Toast is particularly acceptable with nearly all kinds of cooked oysters, and fancy shapes, such as tiny rounds, squares, and points, are excellent with stews, soups, and roasts, instead of crackers. Dry toast ought to be eaten directly off the toaster, and, except in serious illness, butter may be given with it. Orange, gooseberry, raspberry, and other marmalades, currant, apple, and grape jellies, and baked sweet apples or apple-sauce, are excellent with either dry or water toast. Cooked apples in any form are delicious with milk and cream toasts. It is the fashion just now to serve junket, slip, soft custard, lemon cream, tapioca cream, and similar delicate desserts in cups and saucers, not glasses. The quainter the pattern of the china, the prettier the effect. * * * * * A plan for a breakfast, to consist of a peach, rolled wheat porridge, beefsteak, baked potato, coffee, and toast: (1) Put the porridge, which should have been cooked the day before, on the fire to heat, and the potato into the oven to bake. (2) Set some water to boil for the coffee, and the milk to heat to serve with it. (3) Trim the steak, which should be a small piece an inch thick, an inch and a half wide, and three or four inches long; cut the bread, and make a butter-ball by rolling a bit of butter between two spatters made for the purpose.[46] (4) Set a plate, cup and saucer, and dishes for serving the food, in the warming-oven to heat. (5) Arrange the tray with a fresh napkin, knife, fork, spoons, salt and pepper, fine granulated sugar and cold cream for the porridge, and some lumps of loaf sugar for the coffee. (6) Fifteen minutes before the potato is done make the coffee, and ten minutes later broil the steak; in the interim pare the peach, laying it open from the stone, and toast the bread. Now, if calculation as to the time has been well made, everything will be ready--the potato baked, the porridge steaming, the coffee cooked, and the steak and toast waiting in the oven. (7) Serve the fruit on a tiny fruit-plate, the porridge in a hot saucer, and the coffee, together. When the fruit and porridge are finished, offer the potato, wrapped in a doily to keep it warm, the steak in a hot covered silver dish, and the toast on an individual bread-plate. Or all may be served together when for any reason it seems best to do so: for instance, if the tray has to be carried a long distance, or up many flights of stairs. The above arrangement is simply beginning with the things which require the longest time, and then taking each in such order that all shall be finished at the same moment. By understanding the length of time required for each dish, there need be no hurrying, nor will anything be cooked too soon.