_Le dessert est tout le dîner pour une jolie femme._ Let her enjoy it and the sweet champagne or Muscat-Lunel that goes with it, even if to her opposite "things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour." For, after all, it is unquestionably to woman that we must look for the improvement of cookery. The highest art will still find its expression through the professional chef; the useful, the daily alimentation of the household, must depend upon the ministrations of the housewife and her capacity for extending and improving the list of dishes _à la bonne femme_. Assuredly, appetising cookery will tend more than any other means to maintain the masculine element in good humour, and thereby foster a spirit of liberality and the condoning of feminine foibles. The dessert is said to be to the dinner what the madrigal is to literature--it is the light poetry of the kitchen, addressed largely to the gentler sex. To the finer fancy of woman, the many forms of dainties which figure in the last course are mainly due; and that they are not more appreciated by man is no doubt owing to the fact that the consumption of tobacco and the use of ardent spirits have blunted his perceptivity in this respect. Herein he is the loser; the mission of the dessert being that of a comforter of the stomach, which, already appeased, nevertheless craves a little reflex flattery through the palate. There are those of the sterner sex, notwithstanding, who still preserve the sweet tooth of childhood, and others who enjoy pastry equally with its most devoted feminine admirers. Charles Lamb held that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple-dumplings. Tasso was so fond of sweetmeats that he even ate his salad with sugar. Henry VIII presented a manor to the inventor of a new pudding-sauce. Goethe adored sweet champagne, and of Horace's partiality for sweets he has doubly assured us. For all such the cook whose pies are perfect will not have lived in vain; the more so as the artist in pie-making is usually an adept at frying,--and to bad frying and poor pie-making may be charged much of the misery inflicted upon mankind where eating is regarded solely as a necessary function. A cook, moreover, who can make fine puff-paste is more apt to succeed in all the more substantial parts of the art. So that to encourage the dessert and sweetmeats is to beguile and conciliate woman, and thus indirectly promote progress in other branches of cookery. With a little tact and perseverance it becomes relatively easy to persuade her that her fondness for sweets is injurious to her complexion; and this much instilled, it is the less difficult to lead her by gradual steps to the perfection of the entrée and dishes more favoured by man.