spent in preparing it--and her skeptical stare means disdain of your
interference, and complacent determination to follow her own way.

She has heard that "country people in furren parts a'most live upon
slops and grass and eggs and frogs, and supposes that's the reason
Frenchmen are so small and dark-complected." She thanks goodness she
was born in America, "where there's plenty to eat and to spare," she
adds, piously, as she puts the chunk of salt pork on to boil with the
white beans, or the brisket of salt beef over the fire with the
cabbage, before mixing a batch of molasses-cake with buttermilk and
plenty of soda.

The corner-stone of her culinary operations might have been cut from
the pillar into which another conservative woman with a will of her
own, was changed. It is solid salt. Salt pork, salt beef, salt fish,
relieve one another in an endless chain upon her board. She averts
scurvy by means of cabbage and potatoes. I know well-to-do farmers'
wives who do not cook what they call "butcher's meat," three times a
month, or poultry above twice a year. Dried and salt meat and fish
replenish what an Irish cook once described to me as "the _meat
corner_ of the stomach."

"Half-a-dozen eggs wouldn't half fill it, mem;" she protested, in
defence of the quantity of steak and roast devoured daily
below-stairs.

Our native housewife does not make the effort to crowd this cavity
with the product of her poultry yard. Eggs of all ages are marketable
and her pride in the limited number she uses in filling up her
household is comic, yet pathetic. Cream is the chrysalis of butter at
thirty cents a pound; to work so much as a tablespoonful into dishes
for daily consumption would be akin to the sinful enormity of lighting
a fire with dollar bills. She sends her freshly-churned, golden rolls
to "the store" in exchange for groceries, including _cooking butter_
to be used in the manufacture of cake and pastry.

These she _must_ have. Appetites depraved by fats--liquid, solid and
fried--crave the assuasives of sweets and acids. "Hunky"
bread-puddings and eggless, faintly-sweetened rice puddings, and pies
of various kinds, represent dessert. Huge pickles, still smacking of
the brine that "firmed" them, are offered in lieu of fresher acids.
Yet she sneers at salads, and would not touch sorrel soup to save a
Frenchman's soul. For beverages she stews into rank herbiness cheap
tea by the quart, and Rio coffee, weak and turbid, w