If your cook can make neither clear nor cream soup, but can make a delicious clam chowder, better far to have a clam chowder!  On no account let her attempt clear green turtle, which has about as good a chance to be perfect as a supreme of boned capon—­in other words, none whatsoever!  And the same way throughout dinner.  Whichever dishes your own particular Nora or Selma or Marie can do best, those are the ones you must have for your dinners.  Another thing:  it is not important to have variety.  Because you gave the Normans chicken casserole the last time they dined with you is no reason why you should not give it to them again—­if that is the “specialty of the house” as the French say.  A late, and greatly loved, hostess whose Sunday luncheons at a huge country house just outside of Washington were for years one of the outstanding features of Washington’s smartest society, had the same lunch exactly, week after week, year after year.  Those who went to her house knew just as well what the dishes would be as they did where the dining-room was situated.  At her few enormous and formal dinners in town, her cook was allowed to be magnificently architectural, but if you dined with her alone, the chances were ten to one that the Sunday chicken and pancakes would appear before you.

=DO NOT EXPERIMENT FOR STRANGERS=

Typical dinner-party dishes are invariably the temptation no less than the downfall of ambitious ignorance.  Never let an inexperienced cook attempt a new dish for company, no matter how attractive her description of it may sound.  Try it yourself, or when you are having family or most intimate friends who will understand if it turns out all wrong that it is a “trial” dish.  In fact, it is a very good idea to share the testing of it with some one who can help you in suggestions, if they are needed for its improvement.  Or supposing you have a cook who is rather poor on all dinner dishes, but makes delicious bread and cake and waffles and oyster stew and creamed chicken, or even hash!  You can make a specialty of asking people to “supper.”  Suppers are necessarily informal, but there is no objection in that.  Formal parties play a very small role anyway compared to informal ones.  There are no end of people, and the smartest ones at that, who entertain only in the most informal possible way.  Mrs. Oldname gives at most two formal dinners a year; her typical dinners and suppers are for eight.

=PROPER DISHING=

The “dishing” is quite as important as the cooking; a smear or thumb-mark on the edge of a dish is like a spot on the front of a dress!

Water must not be allowed to collect at the bottom of a dish (that is why a folded napkin is always put under boiled fish and sometimes under asparagus).  And dishes must be hot; they cannot be too hot!  Meat juice that has started to crust is nauseating.  Far better have food too hot to eat and let people take their time eating it than that others should suffer the disgust of cold victuals!  Sending in cold food is one of the worst faults (next to not knowing how to cook) that a cook can have.