In spite of all that has been written by travellers and novelists about certain American delicacies—the ham of Virginia, the chicken of Maryland, the pies and doughnuts of New England, the pompano of New Orleans—the fact remains that Americans, as a people, are not good cooks. This assertion may be ridiculed by some of my readers, but, generally speaking, it is true. Almost any Frenchman can prepare from the cheapest materials a well-cooked and tempting meal; the ability of most Americans in the culinary art is confined to boiling eggs. A man who spends his days in an office can sit down to a breakfast consisting of soggy biscuits, poorly prepared coffee, and an omelet that looks and tastes as though it were made of chrome leather, and though it may affect his disposition it will not seriously affect his work, for when the noon-hour comes around he can go over to Delmonico’s or step into Childs’s, as his tastes and pocketbook may dictate, and restore his balance of digestion by a well-cooked meal. But the soldier had no such resource. There were no Delmonicos or Childses at the front. He had to eat what was given him. And as his vigor and staying powers depended on his food, it was essential that that food should be well cooked. To tell the truth, the Italian débâcle of 1917 was due as much to poor and insufficient food as it was to Austrian propaganda, for nothing affects morale like an empty stomach. When war was declared the Regular Army and the National Guard already had, of course, their complements of experienced cooks and bakers, though in wholly insufficient numbers, but the huge National Army had nothing of the sort. One of the earliest and most pressing problems of the Quartermaster Corps, therefore, was to train sufficient numbers of men for this work, which it did by expanding the fourteen Cooks’ and Bakers’ Schools of the regular establishment to twenty and by starting new schools at the various National Army cantonments. Before these schools could be successfully operated, however, it was necessary to obtain an adequate staff of instructors, who themselves had to be trained, the plan being to give at least one officer in each regiment or separate battalion sufficient training to make him competent to conduct a school for cooks and bakers in his own organization. As a result of this system of culinary education, within a year after the first American troops set foot in France the Quartermaster Corps had trained 1,200 instructors in cooking, 16,000 mess sergeants, and 50,000 cooks, in addition to which there were 40,000 others who, though they had not received sufficient training to give them a cook’s rating, were nevertheless entirely competent to prepare food. From the soldiers thus trained there were organized about seven-score Bakery Companies, more than half of which saw service overseas. Now that these hundred-odd thousand cooks and bakers have returned to civil life, there is reason to hope that there will be