, with
their ample bosoms and their broad hips, the men with their expansive
paunches ... and use your imagination. Why is it, when a singer is
interviewed for a newspaper, that she invariably finds herself tired
of hotel food and wants an apartment of her own, where she can cook to
her stomach's content? Why are the musical journals and the Sunday
supplements of the newspapers always publishing pictures of contralti
with their sleeves rolled back to the elbows, their Poiret gowns
(cunningly and carefully exhibited nevertheless) covered with aprons,
baking bread, turning omelettes, or preparing clam broth Uncle Sam?
You, my reader, have surely seen these pictures, but it has perhaps
not occurred to you to conjure up a reason for them.

Edgar Saltus says: "A perfect dinner should resemble a concert. As the
_morceaux_ succeed each other, so, too, should the names of the
composers." Few dinners in New York may be regarded as concerts and
still fewer restaurants may be looked upon as concert halls, except,
unfortunately, in the literal sense. However, if you can find a
restaurant where opera singers and conductors eat you may be sure it
is a good one. Huneker describes the old Lienau's, where William
Steinway, Anton Seidl, Theodore Thomas, Scharwenka, Joseffy, Lilli
Lehmann, Max Heinrich, and Victor Herbert used to gather. Follow
Alfred Hertz and you will be in excellent company in a double sense.
Then watch him consume a plateful of Viennese pastry. If you have ever
seen Emmy Destinn or Feodor Chaliapine eat you will feel that justice
has been done to a meal. I once sat with the Russian bass for twelve
hours, all of which time he was eating or drinking. He began with six
plates of steaming onion soup (cooked with cheese and toast). The old
New Year's eve festivities at the Gadski-Tauschers' resembled the
storied banquets of the middle ages.... Boars' heads, meat pies,
_salade macedoine_, _coeur de palmier_, _hollandaise_ were washed down
with magnums and quarts of Irroy brut, 1900, Pol Roger, Chambertin,
graceful Bohemian crystal goblets of Liebfraumilch and Johannisberger
Schloss-Auslese. Mary Garden once sent a jewelled gift to the _chef_
at the Ritz-Carlton in return for a superb fish sauce which he had
contrived for her. H. E. Krehbiel says that Brignoli "probably ate as
no tenor ever ate before or since--ravenously as a Prussian dragoon
after a fast." _Peche Melba_ has become a stable article on many menus
in many ci