Cooking for profit

Took puff paste, left over from dinner pastry, rolled out thin, cut out with a fancy scallop-edge cutter, large as the top of a coffee cup, and pressed the flats into shallow gem pans. Put a teaspoonful of lemon honey (506) — called lemon cheese cake by the English — in each; baked in a slack oven; took out just before the "cheesecake" began to boil over the edges and spoil the appearance. Served on small pastry plates, four in each set, at intervals down the table. 506— Lemon Butter; or Paste; or Cheesecake; or Lemon l-Soney. A world-wide favorite made of— I cup sugar — 8 ounces. 3 lemons. Butter, size of an egg — 2 ounces. 4 to 6 yolks or 3 whole eggs — not particular. Put the sugar, butter and grated rinds and juice into a_ saucepan and boil, add the yolks and stir until it becomes thick. It looks like cold honey when it is cold. May be kept for weeks. Is good to spread jelly cakes with and to fill tartlets and eclairs. It is seldom worth while to make less than double the above amount. Washed them in a large jar of cold water to free them from sand. Picked and heaped them in three glass bowls with individual pitchers of cold cream and bowls of powdered sugar at hand, and piles of glass sauce dishes. Cake of two or three varieties in the usual cake baskets on folded napkins. It was not, then, a strictly cold supper after all, since the devilled crabs were fresh and warm, but what was of more consequence than that, the entire party expected, did not come. There was a moonlight excursion by steamboat that night and Miss Ophelia, and the two ladies and the two newspaper men went off on the boat and only twelve remained; still, the inroads these made upon the eatables showed plainly that had all been there, there would only have been just provisions enough. The Art of Charging Enough. June 26. This morning I asked the proprietor of the Hotel D'Arlington : "Have you any objection to telling me what you charged for last night's supper?" "What would you have charged?" he returned, with the complacent smile of one who knows how. While I was figuring on a dollar a plate and not knowing what was to be done about the odd number and the absentees, he added : *T charged them twenty dollars for the supper and there was a profit on wine and cigars, and they were pleased and satisfied. If it had oeen a party of our town boys from the college I might have had to take seventy-five cents a plate, but these actors would have gone away thinking they had been treated in a second-class manner if I had charged them less — and I do not work for nothing." "A very close friend of mine lost his chance of a fortune in the restaurant business some years ago through not knowing how to charge enough." "It is a very essential thing to know in our business.*' "Yes. He took a place and went on serving the best that was to be obtained in a superior style on a sort ot ten-percent profit plan until all the one-horse eating houses around him closed, one after the other and he had all the trade." "And then he raised his prices!'* "No." "He was a fool." "Yes. And went on doing more business and working harder and making less money, until — " "He took sick?"