A once famous American actress, Miss Mary Anderson—sometimes, I think,
called “Our Mary”—was an accomplished baker. Among her personal
friends, those at least who had the happiness to dine at her home,
she had a distinguished reputation as a bread-maker. She was once
persuaded to make public the prescription that she used, through the
London _Times_, thus materially enlarging her practice by addition of
many new patients. I regret my inability to reproduce the prescription
here for the benefit of such house-keepers as are unfettered by
Colonial tradition—who, not having inherited the New World system from
their great-grandmothers, might be accessible to the light of a later
dispensation. For bread-making is, I think, a progressive science in
which perfection is not attained at a bound by merely “dissolving the
political bands” which connect one country with another.
History is garrulous of our Revolutionary sires: their virtues and
other vices are abundantly extolled; but concerning our Revolutionary
dames the trumpet of fame remains mysteriously and significantly
reticent—a phenomenon not easily accounted for on any hypothesis
which assumes or concedes their worth. Historians, poets and those,
generally, who have possession of the public ear and hold it from
generation to generation, seem to feel that the less said about these
merry old girls the better. I believe the secret of it lies in the
consciousness of the literary class that the mothers of the Republic
made treasonably bad bread, and that their sins of that sort are
being visited upon their children, even to these third and fourth
generations, and (which is worse) practiced by them. No doubt the
success of the Revolutionary War would have been achieved later if
our brave grandfathers had not been fortified in body and spirit by
privation of the domestic loaf of the period, known to us through the
domestic loaf of our own. To immunity from the latter desolating agency
the soldiers on both sides in the more recent and greater conflict were
obviously indebted for the development of that martial spirit which
made them so reluctant to stop fighting and go home. It must be said,
however, in defence of the Bread of Our Union that if one is going to
eat the salt-spangled butter which also appertains to the home of the
brave it really does not greatly matter what one eats it on.
America’s dyspepsia is not entirely the product of the frying-pan,
the pie and the use of the stop-watch at meals. Any wholesome reform
in bread-making as practiced darkly in the secrecy of our kitchens,
will materially mitigate the national disorder; though even bread made
according to the plans and specifications of Our Mary can hardly be
expected to manifest all its virtues if eaten blazing hot. Whatever
may be the outcome of Mistress Mary’s quite contrary way of imparting
her sacred secret to a foreign newspaper and ignoring the press of her
own country—whether anybody now compounds bread after her prescription
or not, or if anybody does, whether anybody else will eat it—this much
was accomplished: she showed that at least one American woman was not
afraid to tell the world and the public prosecutors how she made bread.
As a bread-maker she was indubitably gifted with the divine audacity of
genius.