Meal

The welcoming warmth of wassail and the hearty sustenance of shepherd's pie will be featured fare Friday and March 1 when the mood turns madrigal at Drexel University. Visitors may fancy themselves the invited guests of 16th-century English lords and ladies at two madrigal dinners, which will include costumed performances by the Drexel Chamber Singers, the Drexel Dancers, a lutenist and a jester. The events, hosted by the School's Department of Performing Arts, will be held within the concrete battlements of MacCallister Hall at 33d and Chestnut Streets, in the school's sixth-floor Faculty Club.

If you're anything like the curious tourists and seasoned down-and-outers in this City of Light, you don't just happen upon the cheapest restaurant in the Western world - you go looking for it. You know you're there when you see Maria Codino, 82, the petite, young-at-heart, chief cook and bottle washer of Restaurant Casa Miguel, holder of the Guinness Book of World Records title for "least expensive restaurant in the Occidental world. " In the city known for haute cuisine, and plus haute prices, Codino serves balanced, three-course luncheons and dinners for five francs - an astonishing 75 cents, at 6.5 francs to the dollar - servis compris.

The best way to cook in the summer is to do as little of it as possible. But after we've used up our biweekly pizza delivery and our quota of tuna salads, what then? One way out of the kitchen is to use the barbecue to get a head start on a week's worth of meals that need little more than assembly each night on their way to the table. By starting off with a gala cookout, and by preparing enough food to ensure a small amount of leftovers from each course, we can create the foundation for a whole week's worth of menus.

If this is May, it must be pumpkin-seed-encrusted chicken breast. Or pesto grilled mahimahi. Or portobello mushroom stuffed with wild rice on a bed of sautéed spinach. The advent of spring brings many seasonal imperatives. Birds fly north. Flowers bloom. Airline food changes — slightly. Swap out the beef tenderloin with bernaise sauce, swap in the beef tenderloin with teriyaki jus. Orange chipotle chicken gives way to barbecue chicken. Out with the tortellini with vodka Alfredo sauce, in with the cavatelli with garlic olive oil. Airlines are refreshing their menus for the busy summer flying season, wooing first-class and international travelers with fare as ambitious as cramped, low-humidity, low-pressure cabins will permit.

Seems like every time you go down the Jersey shore, you hear about a fancy new restaurant, the kind of place that sells wasabi-drizzled tuna carpaccio and hand-picked diver scallops with caviar mashed potatoes. But for each gourmet bistro, there's an old standby where patrons wear shorts and T-shirts and eat a fried fish sandwich from paper basket. Smitty's Clam Bar on Bay Avenue in Somers Point makes eating out a simple pleasure: a restaurant where you can order a fresh flounder sandwich - and never use a piece of silverware.

BOXES OF FIXINGS for Thanksgiving dinner await distribution at the Civic Center. Kim Martin, of the Philadelphia Youth Service Corp., was adding fliers from the Mayor's Office of Community Services to each donated meal yesterday.

May I suggest an adjunct to any regulation of smoking areas vs. non- smoking areas in restaurants? Could we have an area reserved for noisy children and repulsive eaters? I find that observing people eating like pigs and the noise level of obnoxious children in dirty diapers do more to revolt me than the fragrance of a "cigarette and coffee" after a satisfying meal. I seriously doubt the hazard of a nearby cigarette smoker ranks with the revulsion and indigestion I suffer daily in the atmosphere of open-mouth chewing while yelling instructions to "Eat!"

Not long ago, an athlete's pregame meal consisted primarily of steak and eggs. You may even have witnessed the ritual of college athletes huddling in a special corner of the cafeteria for a beef-laden meal just before the big game while the rest of the students chose between the seemingly less-glamorous offerings of spaghetti or fish. But pregame eating habits have changed a great deal in recent years. In fact, the pregame meal has been turned into a nutritional science designed to give athletes an edge over their competitors.

Army ROTC members at Overbrook and Edgewood High Schools did a good deed over the holidays. The students served a pre-Christmas lunch to 80 seniors who live at Clementon Towers. Philadelphia Councilman Lucien Blackwell thanked the students for their community spirit in an address after the meal Dec. 22.