FOREIGN critic once described America as a country which had one sauce and twenty different religions. 

Evidently he did not reach New Orleans in his travels, or else he would have discovered that its gravies are even more varied than its theology, and that good cooking is one of its religions.

In this thrice blessed city where the art of living has ever been esteemed the chief of the fine arts, and where dining is a function instead of a chore, cooking has reached a degree of perfection that it has not attained anywhere else in this country, and tourists come as definitely to New Orleans to eat as they go to New York to see the plays, or to Washington to behold the seat of government, or to Hollywood to gape at the movie stars.

Many things have contributed to make New Orleans a shrine to which gourmets make reverent pilgrimages. 

One is that it has what an old colored cook once described as the "ingrejuns" necessary to good cooking, for you cannot make omelets without having eggs. 

No other place in the world has such a market, for lying as it does with one hand in the marshes and bayous of its coastal region and the other hand grasping the packing houses of Chicago, as it were, and its head in a perennial market garden and its feet almost touching the tropics, it has a superabundance all the year round of sea foods par excellence, the finest cuts of butchers' meat, fresh vegetables and the exotic fruits that swift steamers bring in from Central American ports.

To properly prepare these gifts of the gods for human consumption there has slowly evolved through the past two hundred years a school of cooking that is part inspiration and sheer genius, and part a happy adaptation of the dishes of many races and lands. 

Founded originally on the French cuisine, it was pepped up, so to speak, by the Spanish, given body and strength by the New England influence, a bit of warmth by the hot breads of Virginia, and finally glorified by the touch of the old negro mammies who boasted that they had only to pass their hands over a pot to give it a flavor that would make your mouth water.

Thousands of hands have stirred and been subtle with onion and garlic, and pinched their thyme and bay leaves, and been spendthrifts with oil and miserly with vinegar, and have tested and tasted to make its incomparable sauces, and its oysters Rockefeller and its shrimp remoulade, and its crabs timbale, and its gumbo file and its courtbouillon, and it is the secrets thus discovered of these sophisticated dishes that this little book offers you.