They would sample a spoonful of the sauce, go Ahhh, blow a French chef's kiss, and make their suggestions as to what little touch would lift it to the airy regions of perfection.

To pull this off, the authority required three things: the ability to identify cases in a timely fashion, and so determine the infection's direction of travel; an understanding of how the disease spread (by water? air? insect vector?), and hence the measures that were likely to block it; and some means of ensuring compliance with those measures. When all three of these ingredients – which we'll describe in more detail in the following sections – were in place, containment could be extremely effective, but a hat-trick was rare.

Two former cult members explain the difficulties they had extricating themselves from it.

[…] when bars and supperrooms and cafés throw out floods of light upon the pavement, crowded with sauntering figures; when the air is heavy with cigarsmoke and filled with the rustle-rustle of stiff silks —then the Haymarket is the Haymarket.