The Plainfield boys always had the name of being smart, and I guess
Lute Baker was just about the smartest boy the old town ever turned
out. Well, he came by it naturally; Judge Baker was known all over
western Massachusetts as the sage of Plainfield, and Lute's mother--she
was a Kellogg before the judge married her--she had more faculty than a
dozen of your girls nowadays, and her cooking was talked about
everywhere--never was another woman, as folks said, could cook like
Miss Baker. The boys--Lute's friends--used to hang around the back
porch of noonings just to get some of her doughnuts; she was always
considerate and liberal to growing boys. May be Lute would n't have
been so popular if it had n't been for those doughnuts, and may be he
would n't have been so smart if it had n't been for all the good things
his mother fed into him. Always did believe there was piety and wisdom
in New England victuals.
Lute went to Amherst College and did well; was valedictorian; then he
taught school a winter, for Judge Baker said that nobody could amount
to much in the world unless he taught school a spell. Lute was set on
being a lawyer, and so presently he went down to Springfield and read
and studied in Judge Morris' office, and Judge Morris wrote a letter
home to the Bakers once testifying to Lute's "probity" and
"acumen"--things that are never heard tell of except high up in the
legal profession.
How Lute came to get the western fever I can't say, but get it he did,
and one winter he up and piked off to Chicago, and there he hung out
his shingle and joined a literary social and proceeded to get rich and
famous. The next spring Judge Baker fell off the woodshed while he was
shingling it, and it jarred him so he kind of drooped and pined round a
spell and then one day up and died. Lute had to come back home and
settle up the estate.
When he went west again he took a wife with him--Emma Cowles that was
(everybody called her Em for short), pretty as a picture and as likely
a girl as there was in the township. Lute had always had a hankering
for Em, and Em thought there never was another such a young fellow as
Lute; she understood him perfectly, having sung in the choir with him
two years. The young couple went west well provided.
Lute and Em went to housekeeping in Chicago. Em wanted to do her own
work, but Lute would n't hear to it; so they hired a German girl that
was just over from the vineyards of the Rhine country.
"Lute," says Em, "Hulda does n't know much about cooking."
"So I see," says Lute, feelingly. "She's green as grass; you'll have
to teach her."
Hulda could swing a hoe and wield a spade deftly, but of the cuisine
she knew somewhat less than nothing. Em had lots of patience and
pluck, but she found teaching Hulda how to cook a precious hard job.
Lute was amiable enough at first; used to laugh it off with a cordial
bet that by and by Em would make a famous cook of the obtuse but
willing immigrant. This moral backing buoyed Em up considerable, until
one evening in an unguarded moment Lute expressed a pining for some
doughnuts "like those mother makes," and that casual remark made Em
unhappy. But next evening when Lute came home there were doughnuts on
the table--beautiful, big, plethoric doughnuts that fairly reeked with
the homely, delicious sentiment of New England. Lute ate one. Em felt
hurt.
"I guess it's because I 've eaten so much else," explained Lute, "but
somehow or other they don't taste like mother's."
Next day Em fed the rest of the doughnuts to a poor man who came and
said he was starving. "Thank you, marm," said he, with his heart full
of gratitude and his mouth full of doughnuts; "I ha' n't had anything
as good as this since I left Connecticut twenty years ago."
That little subtlety consoled Em, but still she found it hard to bear
up under her apparent inability to do her duty by Lute's critical
palate. Once when Lute brought Col. Hi Thomas home to dinner they had
chicken pie. The colonel praised it and passed his plate a third time.
"Oh, but you ought to eat some of mother's chicken pie," said Lute.
"Mother never puts an under crust in her chicken pies, and that makes
'em juicier."
Same way when they had fried pork and potatoes; Lute could not
understand why the flesh of the wallowing, carnivorous western hog
should n't be as white and firm and sweet as the meat of the swill-fed
Yankee pig. And why were the Hubbard squashes so tasteless and why was
maple syrup so very different? Yes, amid all his professional duties
Lute found time to note and remark upon this and other similar things,
and of course Em was--by implication, at least--held responsible for
them all.
And Em did try so hard, so very hard, to correct the evils and to
answer the hypercritical demands of Lute's foolishly petted and spoiled
appetite. She warred valorously with butchers, grocers, and hucksters;
she sent down east to Mother Baker for all the famous family recipes;
she wrestled in speech and in practice with that awful Hulda; she
experimented long and patiently; she blistered her pretty face and
burned her little hands over that kitchen range--yes, a slow, constant
martyrdom that conscientious wife willingly endured for years in her
enthusiastic determination to do her duty by Lute. Doughnuts,
chicken-pies, boiled dinners, layer-cakes, soda biscuits, flapjacks,
fish balls, baked beans, squash pies, corned-beef hash, dried-apple
sauce, currant wine, succotash, brown bread--how valorously Em toiled
over them, only to be rewarded with some cruel reminder of how "mother"
used to do these things! It was terrible; a tedious martyrdom.
Lute--mind you--Lute was not wilfully cruel; no, he was simply and
irremediably a heedless idiot of a man, just as every married man is,
for a spell, at least. But it broke Em's heart, all the same.
Lute's mother came to visit them when their first child was born, and
she lifted a great deal of trouble off the patient wife. Old Miss
Baker always liked Em; had told the minister three years ago that she
knew Em would make Lute a good Christian wife. They named the boy
Moses, after the old judge who was dead, and old Miss Baker said he
should have his gran'pa's watch when he got to be twenty-one.
Old Miss Baker always stuck by Em; may be she remembered how the old
judge had talked once on a time about his mother's cooking. For all
married men are, as I have said, idiotically cruel about that sort of
thing. Yes, old Miss Baker braced Em up wonderful; brought a lot of
dried catnip out west with her for the baby; taught Em how to make
salt-rising bread; told her all about stewing things and broiling
things and roasting things; showed her how to tell the real Yankee
codfish from the counterfeit--oh, she just did Em lots of good, did old
Miss Baker!
The rewards of virtue may be slow in coming, but they are sure to come.
Em's three boys--the three bouncing boys that came to Em and
Lute--those three boys waxed fat and grew up boisterous, blatant
appreciators of their mother's cooking. The way those boys did eat
mother's doughnuts! And mother's pies--wow! Other boys--the
neighbors' boys--came round regularly in troops, battalions, armies,
and like a consuming fire licked up the wholesome viands which Em's
skill and liberality provided for her own boys' enthusiastic playmates.
And all those boys--there must have been millions of 'em--were living,
breathing, vociferous testimonials to the unapproachable excellence of
Em's cooking.
Lute got into politics, and they elected him to the legislature. After
the campaign, needing rest, he took it into his head to run down east
to see his mother; he had not been back home for eight years. He took
little Moses with him. They were gone about three weeks. Gran'ma
Baker had made great preparations for them; had cooked up enough pies
to last all winter, and four plump, beheaded, well-plucked,
yellow-legged pullets hung stiff and solemn-like in the chill pantry
off the kitchen, awaiting the last succulent scene of all.
Lute and the little boy got there late of an evening. The dear old
lady was so glad to see them; the love that beamed from her kindly eyes
well nigh melted the glass in her silver-bowed specks. The table was
spread in the dining-room; the sheet-iron stove sighed till it seemed
like to crack with the heat of that hardwood fire.
"Why, Lute, you ain't eatin' enough to keep a fly alive," remonstrated
old Miss Baker, when her son declined a second doughnut; "and what ails
the child?" she continued; "ha' n't he got no appetite? Why, when you
wuz his age, Lute, seemed as if I could n't cook doughnuts fast enough
for you!"
Lute explained that both he and his little boy had eaten pretty
heartily on the train that day. But all the time of their visit there
poor old Gran'ma Baker wondered and worried because they did n't eat
enough--seemed to her as if western folks had n't the right kind of
appetite. Even the plump pullets, served in a style that had made Miss
Baker famed throughout those discriminating parts--even those pullets
failed to awaken the expected and proper enthusiasm in the visitors.
Home again in Chicago, Lute drew his chair up to the table with an
eloquent sigh of relief. As for little Moses, he clamored his delight.
"Chicken pie!" he cried, gleefully; and then he added a soulful "wow!"
as his eager eyes fell upon a plateful of hot, exuberant, voluptuous
doughnuts.
"Yes, we are both glad to get back," said Lute.
"But I am afraid," suggested Em, timidly, "that gran'ma's cooking has
spoiled you."
Little Moses (bless him) howled an indignant, a wrathful remonstrance.
"Gran'ma can't cook worth a cent!" said he.
Em expected Lute to be dreadfully shocked, but he was n't.
"I would n't let her know it for all the world," remarked Lute,
confidentially, "but mother has lost her grip on cooking. At any rate,
her cooking is n't what it used to be; it has changed."
Then Em came bravely to the rescue. "No, Lute," says she, and she
meant it, "your mother's cooking has n't changed, but _you_ have. The
man has grown away from the boy, and the tastes, the ways, and the
delights of boyhood have no longer any fascination for the man."
"May be you 're right," said Lute. "At any rate, I 'm free to say that
_your_ cooking beats the world."
Good for Lute! Virtue triumphs and my true story ends. But first an
explanation to concinnate my narrative.
I should never have known this true story if Lute himself had n't told
it to me at the last dinner of the Sons of New England--told it to me
right before Em, that dear, patient little martyred wife of his. And I
knew by the love light in Em's eyes that she was glad that she had
endured that martyrdom for Lute's sake.