THIS IS NOT AN ADVERTISEMENT. THIS IS THE TRUTH.

New Zealand Tablet, 15 March 1917, Page 35

THIS IS NOT AN ADVERTISEMENT. THIS IS THE TRUTH.

' Your quarrelling with each other on the subject of bkead and butter is the most usual thing in the world.' —Swift. However expert and artistic at the game, and although supplied with the same amount of solid slander and the same want of solid truth, no three women can tell lies about their neighbors alike. In the same way, and perhaps for the same reason —the lack of brain power —no three women given the same ingredients can make three cakes precisely alike. This is not our assertion, but that of the poets and philosophers, writers and speakers from the earliest times in all languages; such as Plato and Socrates in Greek ; Caesar and Virgil in Latin. Napoleon in French, Le Sage in Spanish, Dante (in the Inferno) in Italian, and last but not least, the Ploughman Poet, Bobbie Bums, in Broad Scotch, and the gentle Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare, and the genial County Inspector in excellent English. If that be so, it must be so. But now that £ we are convinced by these dogmatic statements down through' the ages of such eminent Thinkers, living aiifl dead, that three women given the same ingredients cannot make the same cake, there is surely clear logical proof how difficult it is to make a good cake at all. Only recently has the question of the people's food

risen to its proper eminence and position in public thought. But only recently have people come to the conclusion that the principal food in life is bread, whether we are at the front in war, or at home in comparativevery comparativepeace. It is still, as it has been from the beginning of the world, the Staff of Life. History does not record, satisfactorily at least, whether Eve was a good cook or not, or whether she made cakes or bread. Some women in speaking pretty highly of her as their foremother, proudly assert that she was a good cook in the sense that, right enough, she cooked poor Adam’s goose. But from a little after her time, there is no doubt whatever that the Phoenicians, and Greeks, and Romans in the days of their mighty wars and mighty empires paid a great deal of attention to the making and eating of their bread before they went to battle, and especially after the wars in their triumphal marches celebrating their victories when their feasts lasted for several months without a rest.