ese
in a shallow porcelain baking dish, sprinkle with salt, dot them with
butter, add enough water to keep them from sticking and burning. Bake
until thoroughly tender. Use a pancake turner to slide the rings to a
hot platter, and garnish with circles of hard-boiled egg. This you will
find an extremely delicate and appetizing dish.

The second recipe I would offer is to treat this vegetable precisely as
you would creamed asparagus. Cut the stalks in six-inch lengths, quarter
them to facilitate cooking and handling, and boil in salted water.
Drain, arrange in a hot dish, and pour over a carefully made cream
sauce. I might add that one stalk would furnish sufficient material for
several families. This dish should be popular in southwestern states
where the plant grows profusely; and to cultivate these plants for
shipping to Eastern markets would be quite as feasible as the shipping
of asparagus, rhubarb, artichokes, or lettuce.

I have found both these dishes peculiarly appetizing, but I should be
sorry if, in introducing Yucca as a food, I became instrumental in the
extermination of this universal and wonderfully beautiful plant. For
this reason I have hesitated about including Yucca among these articles;
but when I see the bloom destroyed ruthlessly by thousands who cut it to
decorate touring automobiles and fruit and vegetable stands beside the
highways, who carry it from its native location and stick it in the
parching sun of the seashore as a temporary shelter, I feel that the
bloom stems might as well be used for food as to be so ruthlessly
wasted.

The plant is hardy in the extreme, growing in the most unfavorable
places, clinging tenaciously to sheer mountain and canyon walls. After
blooming and seeding the plant seems to have thrown every particle of
nourishment it contains into its development, it dries out and dies (the
spongy wood is made into pincushions for the art stores); but from the
roots there spring a number of young plants, which, after a few years
of growth, mature and repeat their life cycle, while other young plants
develop from the widely scattered seeds. The Spaniards at times call the
plant Quiota. This word seems to be derived from quiotl, which is
the Aztec name for Agave, from which plant a drink not unlike beer is
produced, and suggests the possibility that there might have been a time
when the succulent flower stem of the Yucca furnished drink as well as
food for the Indians.

After ca