If the yolks of two hard boiled eggs are minced and mixed with part of the raw white of one, the paste then formed into balls like marbles and dropped into boiling water, one has little yellow spheres to lend an enlivening color note to clear soups. Two or three of these dropped into each plate just before serving makes a pleasing change from the usual croutons. Sprigs of fresh chickory make the daintiest of garnishes for cold meats, and a few of the tender green stalks will add to the appearance of practically any salad. As for water-cress and pepper-grass and, of course, parsley, minced and otherwise, no French chef would think of preparing a meal without a plentiful supply of them on hand. It isn't essential that every dish should be turned into an elaborate work of art, as if it were to be entered at the annual exhibition of the Société des Chefs de Cuisine, but neither is there any reason, even with modest means at command, for giving cause for that old slogan of the great American dinner table: "It tastes better than it looks." SAUCES, SIMPLE AND OTHERWISE Brillat-Savarin, who would be remembered as a wit had he not been even more brilliant as a chef, paid his respects to the English by saying they were a nation of a hundred religions and only one sauce. Being a true Frenchman he believed a reversal of the numbers better for the soul. It is certainly better for the appetite. To be sure the proper mental sauce for a good dinner is wit, and the best physical one, hunger, but as we all of us have more or less of an Epicurean strain in us and do not eat solely to satisfy bodily needs, it is well that the American cook who essays to bring variety to her board should have some knowledge of those Gallic creations, the sauces, by which she is enabled to transform plain dishes into seemingly pretentious ones, even though she never attain that sauce that Balzac knew, "in which a mother might unsuspectingly eat her own child." In the first place every French chef keeps three kinds of what he calls _roux_ on hand, ready for making meat and fish sauces. These are made by cooking together eight ounces of butter and nine ounces of flour. That intended for use with brown meats is stirred together till it becomes a medium brown in shade; white _roux_ is cooked only sufficiently to banish the raw taste and not allowed to color, while pale _roux_ is kept over the fire just long enough to attain a deep cream color. These are mixed with milk, soup stock, water or gravy as the case may be when a sauce for fish, meat or vegetables is needed.