KITCHEN FUGUE

A domestic miscellany based on three years experience as a ""mug"" cook, who from ignorance and lack of materials managed to concoct dishes and menus out of necessity. This shuffles reminiscences of cooks, and servants, cats, reading, wartime scarcities, woman's leisure, contrasts of English, French and American ways of doing things, with recipes and recipes --specially described for those who need basic instruction for every step of the way. There are the ways of hens, and ducks, and rabbits, of the Sussex speech and character, of country living, its problems and its compensations, of ordering one's life around writing and meal making, of substitutes and improvisations, of Jane Austen and gardens. In and out of the kitchen, though never let it be tagged as a cook book, with a woman who can write smoothly, pointedly of the diversion of an unfamiliar activity and the many tangents it brings to mind.