SOME CULINARY REMINISCENCES.
I lived once with an unbalanced cook. Culinarily he was not self-poised.
He lacked judgment. He was always taking too large cooking contracts. He
was for a time my partner. He was a lover of good living and willing to
work hard for it over a cook stove. He would for a single Sunday’s
dinner plan more dishes than his mind could eventually grasp or his
hands handle. And when he had exhausted the whole of the limited
gastronomical repertoire within our reach he would be suddenly inspired
with a troublesome propensity to add hash to the programme. In cooking,
as I have said, he lost his balance. His imagination pictured more
possibilities than his body had strength to carry out. So busied in
getting up a varied meal, he would in a few minutes’ leisure attempt to
shave himself or sew on shirt or pantaloon buttons. This put too many
irons in the fire. A man who attempts to shave while a pot is boiling
over or a roast requiring careful watching is in the oven, will neither
shave nor cook well. He will be apt to leave lather where it is not
desirable, as he sometimes did. Trousers-buttons are not good in soup. I
do not like to see a wet shaving brush near a roast ready to go into the
oven. The æsthetic taste repudiates these hints at combination. Then
sometimes, in the very crisis of a meal, he became flurried. He rushed
about in haste overmuch, with a big spoon in one hand and a giant fork
in the other, looking for missing stove-covers and pot-lids, seldom
found until the next day, and then in strange places. Nothing is well
done which is done in a hurry, especially cooking. Some argue that men
and women put their magnetic and sympathetic influences in the food they
prepare. If a man kneading bread be in a bad temper he puts bad temper
in the bread, and that bad temper goes into the person who eats it. Or
if he be dyspeptic he kneads dyspepsia in his dough. It is awful to
think what we may be eating. I think the unbalanced cook puts flurries
in his stews, for I felt sometimes as if trying to digest a whirlwind
after eating this man’s dinners. He ruled the house. I was his
assistant. I was his victim. I was the slave of the spit, and the peon
of the frying-pan. When his energies culminated and settled on hash,
when already the stove-top was full of dishes in preparation, I was
selected as the proper person to chop the necessary ingredients. We had
neither chopping-knife nor tray. The mining stores then did not contain
such luxuries. This to him made no difference. He was a man who rose
superior to obstacles, circumstances, and chopping trays. He said that
hash could be chopped with a hatchet on a flat board. He planned; I
executed. He theorized and invented; I put his inventions in practice.
But never successfully could I chop a mass of beef and boiled potatoes
with a hatchet on a flat board. The ingredients during the operation
would expand and fall over the edge of the board. Or the finer particles
would violently fly off at each cut of the hatchet, and lodge on the
beds or other unseemly places.
I do not favor a dinner of many courses, especially if it falls to my
lot to prepare these courses. Few cooks enjoy their own dinners. For two
reasons: First--They eat them in anticipation. This nullifies the flavor
of the reality. Second--The labor of preparation fatigues the body and
takes the keen edge from the appetite. You are heated, flushed,
exhausted, and the nerves in a twitter. The expected relish palls and
proves a myth. Ladies who cook will corroborate my testimony on this
point. It is a great, merciful and useful vent for a woman that a man
can come forward able and willing to sympathize with her in regard to
this and other trials of domestic life. Having kept my own house for
years I know whereof I speak. Two hours’ work about a hot stove exhausts
more than four hours’ work out of doors. Americans in Europe are shocked
or pretend to be at sight of women doing men’s work in the fields. They
are much better off than the American woman, five-sixths of whose life
is spent in the kitchen. The outdoor woman shows some blood through the
tan on her cheeks. The American kitchen housewife is sallow and bleached
out. I have in Vienna seen women mixing mortar and carrying bricks to
the sixth story of an unfinished house, and laying bricks, too. These
women were bare-legged to the knee, and their arms and legs were
muscular. They mixed their mortar with an energy suggestive of fearful
consequences to an ordinary man of sedentary occupations. They could
with ease have taken such a man and mixed him with their mortar. Coarse,
were they? Yes, of course they were. But if I am to choose between a
coarse woman, physically speaking, and one hot-housed and enervated to
that extent that she cannot walk half a mile in the open air, but
requires to be hauled, I choose the coarse-grained fibre.
I once lived near a literary cook. It was to him by a sort of natural
heritage that fell the keeping of the Hawkins Bar Library, purchased by
the “boys” way back in the <small>A.D.</small> eighteen hundred and fifties. The
library occupied two sides of a very small cabin, and the man who kept
it lived on or near the other two sides. There, during nights and rainy
days, he read and ate. His table, a mere flap or shelf projecting from
the wall, was two-thirds covered with books and papers, and the other
third with a never-cleared-off array of table furniture, to wit: A tin
plate, knife, fork, tin cup, yeast-powder can, pepper-box, ditto full of
sugar, ditto full of salt, a butter-plate, a bottle of vinegar and
another of molasses, and may be, on occasions, one of whiskey. On every
book and paper were more or less of the imprint of greasy fingers, or
streaks of molasses. The plate, owing to the almost entire absence of
the cleansing process, was even imbedded in a brownish, unctuous
deposit, the congealed oleaginous overflow of months of meals. There he
devoured beef and lard, bacon and beans and encyclopedias, Humboldt’s
“Cosmos” and dried apples, novels and physical nourishment at one and
the same time. He went long since where the weary cease from troubling,
and the wicked, let us hope, are at rest. Years ago, passing through the
deserted Bar, I peeped in at Morgan’s cabin. A young oak almost barred
the door, part of the roof was gone, the books and shelves had vanished;
naught remained but the old miner’s stove and a few battered cooking
utensils. I had some thought at the time of camping for the night on
the Bar, but this desolate cabin and its associations of former days
contrasted with the loneliness and solitude of the present proved too
much for me. I feared the possible ghost of the dead librarian, and left
for a populated camp. Poor fellow! While living, dyspepsia and he were
in close embrace. A long course of combined reading and eating ruined
his digestion. One thing at a time; what a man does he wants to do with
all his might.
Eggs in the early days were great luxuries. Eggs then filled the place
of oysters. A dish of ham and eggs was one of the brilliant
anticipations of the miner resident in some lonesome gulch when footing
it to the nearest large camp. A few enterprising and luxurious miners
kept hens and raised chickens. The coons, coyotes, and foxes were
inclined to “raise” those chickens too. There was one character on
Hawkins Bar whose coop was large and well stocked. Eggs were regularly
on his breakfast-table, and he was the envy of many. Generous in
disposition, oft he made holiday presents of eggs to his friends. Such a
gift was equivalent to that of a turkey in older communities. One foe to
this gentleman’s peace and the security of his chickens alone existed.
That foe was whiskey. For whenever elevated and cheered by the cup which
does inebriate, he would in the excess of his royal nature call his
friends about him, even after midnight, and slay and eat his tenderest
chickens. Almost so certain as Kip got on a spree there came a feast and
consequent midnight depletion of his chicken-coop--a depletion that was
mourned over in vain when soberer and wiser counsels prevailed. The
pioneer beefsteaks of California were in most cases cut from bulls
which had fought bull-fights all the way up from Mexico. Firm in fibre
as they were, they were generally made firmer still by being fried in
lard. The meat was brought to the table in a dish covered with the
dripping in which it had hardened. To a certain extent the ferocity and
combativeness of human nature peculiar to the days of “’49” were owing
to obstacles thrown in the way of easy digestion by bull beef fried to
leather in lard. Bad bread and bull beef did it. The powers of the human
system were taxed to the uttermost to assimilate these articles. The
assimilation of the raw material into bone, blood, nerve, muscle, sinew
and brain was necessarily imperfect. Bad whiskey was then called upon
for relief. This completed the ruin. Of course men would murder each
other with such warring elements inside of them.
The ideas of our pioneer cooks and housekeepers regarding quantities,
kinds, and qualities of provisions necessary to be procured for longer
or shorter periods, were at first vague. There was an Argonaut who
resided at Truetts’ Bar, and, in the fall of 1850, warned by the dollar
a pound for flour experience of the past winter, he resolved to lay in a
few months’ provisions. He was a lucky miner. Were there now existing on
that bar any pioneers who lived there in ’49, they would tell you how he
kept a barrel of whiskey in his tent on free tap. Such men are scarce
and win name and fame. Said he to the Bar trader when the November
clouds began to signal the coming rains, “I want to lay in three months’
provisions.” “Well, make out your order,” said the storekeeper. This
troubled G----. At length he gave it verbally thus: “I guess I’ll have
two sacks of flour, a side of bacon, ten pounds of sugar, two pounds of
coffee, a pound of tea, and--and--a barrel of whiskey.”
My own experience taught me some things unconsidered before. Once, while
housekeeping, I bought an entire sack of rice. I had no idea then of the
elastic and durable properties of rice. A sack looked small. The rice
surprised me by its elasticity when put on to boil. Rice swells
amazingly. My first pot swelled up, forced off the lid and oozed over.
Then I shoveled rice by the big spoonful into everything empty which I
could find in the cabin. Still it swelled and oozed. Even the washbasin
was full of half-boiled rice. Still it kept on. I saw then that I had
put in too much--far too much. The next time I tried half the quantity.
That swelled, boiled up, boiled over and also oozed. I never saw such a
remarkable grain. The third time I put far less to cook. Even then it
arose and filled the pot. The seeds looked minute and harmless enough
before being soaked. At last I became disgusted with rice. I looked at
the sack. There was the merest excavation made in it by the quantity
taken out. This alarmed me. With my gradually decreasing appetite for
rice, I reflected and calculated that it would take seven years on that
Bar ere I could eat all the rice in that sack. I saw it in imagination
all boiled at once and filling the entire cabin. This determined my
resolution. I shouldered the sack, carried it back to the store and
said: “See here! I want you to exchange this cereal for something that
won’t swell so in the cooking. I want to exchange it for something which
I can eat up in a reasonable length of time.”
The storekeeper was a kind and obliging man. He took it back. But the
reputation, the sting of buying an entire sack of rice remained. The
“boys” had “spotted” the transaction. The merchant had told them of it.
I was reminded of that sack of rice years afterward.