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challenge to her creative imagination. Furthermore, she’ll know
how
to season it well (coriander? chervil?) and while the result may not be precisely Scrumptious, it will probably be reasonably okay.
    However, if you hate to cook, you’ll do better to skip the creamed-corn gambit and simply slice those nice red tomatoes into thick chunks and spread them prettily on some nice green parsley or watercress and sprinkle them with salt and pepper and chopped chives and serve them forth. Because you’re not about to use much creative imagination on that stuffing, inasmuch as the whole idea didn’t send you very far to begin with; and your Scrumptious Stuffed Tomatoes are going to taste like tomatoes stuffed with leftover corn.
    Then there is another thing these cookbooks do. They seem to consider
everything
a leftover, which you must do something with.
    For instance, cake. This is like telling you what to do with your leftover whisky. Cake isn’t a leftover. Cake is cake, and it is either eaten or it isn’t eaten; and if the family didn’t go for that Mocha Frosting, you give the rest of the cake to the neighbor or to the lady downstairs before it gets stale. (Maybe
she’ll
make something out of it, but you won’t have to eat it. Maybe she’ll even throw it away, but if so, you won’t know about it, so it won’t hurt. Like what happened to that twenty-second batch of nameless kittens you finally had to take to the city pound, there are some things you don’t exactly want to know.) And certainly you don’t want to let the cake get stale so you can make a Stale-Cake Pudding for the family. They’re the ones who left so much of it the first time, remember?
    Or cheese. Cookbooks will tell you what to do with your leftover cheese. But cheese isn’t a leftover; it’s a staple. If you’ll grate those odd bits and put them in a covered jar in your refrigerator,
toward the front
, you may remember to sprinkle it on things, sometimes, and use it for grilled cheese sandwiches. (Don’t believe what they tell you about wrapping cheese in a cloth dipped in wine to keep it fresh, because this doesn’t work; it just wastes the wine. Vinegar, used the same way, is somewhat more satisfactory, but it is still an awful nuisance.)
    And eggs! Most recipe books show tremendous concern about the egg white, if you didn’t use the white, or the egg yolk, if you didn’t use the yolk. There are four thousand things you can make and do with an egg white or an egg yolk, all of which call for more cooking and usually result in more leftovers, which is what you were trying to get away from in the first place.
    The one thing they don’t mention is giving the egg yolk or the egg white to the dog. It’s very good for his complexion, and for cats’ complexions, too. What did that egg cost? No more than a nickel, probably, and half of that is two and a half cents, which would be cheap for a beauty treatment at twice the price.
    Right here we’ve come to the heart of the matter. Your leftovers were never very expensive to start with. Does the wild rice get left over? Or the choice red out-of-season strawberries? No. It’s that dreary little mess of mixed vegetables, worth about six mills in a bull market. You have to think these things through.
    Just one more word about the leftover before we get down to where the work is. Home Ec-sperts and other people who made straight A’s in Advanced Cream Sauce have gone so far as to rename leftovers “Plan-overs.” They actually want you to cook up a lot more of something than you’ll need, and then keep it around to ring exciting changes on, as they put it, through the weeks to come.
    It’s true that certain people like certain things better the next day. Scalloped potatoes, when they’re fried in butter. Or potato salad. Or baked beans. Every family has its little ways. And it’s perfectly true that leftover Spanish Rice or Tamale Loaf makes an adequate stuffing for Baked Stuffed Green Peppers,