George the Housewife is nice: he starts out giving helpful tips around the house, but as he goes on he’s clearly getting bored of what he’s doing and the book is increasingly taken up with descriptions of the restaurants of New York (photos of their menus are included) and explanations of how they are no good. Typical is this review of The Forum of the Twelve Caesars, 57 W 48th St:

This is a very plush, small expensive place. The restaurant is decorated with large oil paintins of the Caesars. The food is a mixture of French, Italian and Midwest American. As a whole the food is good but expensive. A good place to take your wife if she is really made at you. One thing about the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, that I like very much, is that it features leeks in a number of food items. Leeks, although similar to onions, have a very different flavor all of their own, that I like very much. The Forum of the Twelve Caesars, makes the very bad mistake of serving Belgian endive in salad. Belgian endive is only meant to be served as a vegetable fried in butter. The correct name for it is not endive but chicory. The roots sprout and the sprout of the root is what you eat. Chicory sprouts are undoubtedly one of the best vegetables in the whole world.

He goes on to explain that all of their recipes are easy to make, and gives the recipe for fruit cocktail as first made by Franz Liszt, which starts out “Buy a large can of a good brand of fruit cocktail.”

And finally: it’s worth mentioning the two short stories tacked on to the end of Bull Cook II, titled “A Christian Murder” and “And Then There Were None” which suggest that a collection of the fiction of George Leonard Herter would be a force to be reckoned with. The first tells how the narrator, an outdoor Minnesota bachelor who’d been through the wars avenges his dead sister by killing her widower in a hunting accident. The second is a post-apocalyptic fantasia in which the narrator, another bachelor, survives a nuclear war to see God recreating humanity out of mud, only doing it right this time. He writes out his narrative for the new people to find, adding an injunction: “Do not let scientists rule the world for among them are dictators and tyrants and they have destroyed the world once” before collapsing into an alcoholic stupor.