XI

O PIONEERS!

America

It is a good thing that we have in this country a day set aside for the special thanksgiving to our gods for what mercies they have let fall upon us during the past year. It is good, too, that we choose to show our gratitude by the age-old gesture of eating and drinking in their names.

Of course it can be said with some rightness that occasionally we dwell more on the gastronomical delights of Thanksgiving Day than we should upon the mystical significance of our well-filled bellies. That has doubtless been so since the first of such holidays was celebrated by the Pilgrims with a three-day orgy of venison and wine . . . and prayers in their proper places. Certainly it was so when I was a child and the Day became, for one reason and another, a routine observance of my grandparents’ wishes, complete with bilious attacks and over-stuffed emotions which, on the part of the children, at least, had nothing to do with giving thanks.

We were unconscious of any reason for doing so. We had been raised to think that good and plenteous food, and warmth and protection as well, were the prerogatives of little middle-class Americans. We had no conception of hunger as such, in practice or even in theory.

Things have changed, perhaps for the better. At any rate we are wise enough now to acknowledge the existence of other kinds of starvation than that of the human body, and to give thanks humbly for whatever we can cultivate to feed our souls.

The legend of the first Thanksgiving, in 1621, has become more and more apocryphal, naturally, as it has been retold by men of varying creeds and political bents. I like it best, because it seems least varnished with religious hero-worship and patriotism, as it is reported by George F. Willison:

From Saints and Strangers by George F. Willison, 1896–

Indian summer soon came in a blaze of glory, and it was time to bring in the crops. All in all, their first harvest was a disappointment. Their twenty acres of corn, thanks to Squanto, had done well enough. But the Pilgrims failed miserably with more familiar crops. Their six or seven acres of English wheat, barley, and peas came to nothing, and Bradford was certainly on safe ground in attributing this either to “ye badnes of ye seed, or latenes of ye season, or both, or some other defecte.” Still, it was possible to make a substantial increase in the individual weekly food ration which for months had consisted merely of a peck of meal from the stores brought on the Mayflower. This was now doubled by adding a peck of maize a week, and the company decreed a holiday so that all might, “after a more special manner, rejoyce together.”

The Pilgrims had other things to be thankful for. They had made peace with the Indians and walked “as peaceably and safely in the woods as in the highways in England.” A start had been made in the beaver trade. There had been no sickness for months. Eleven houses now lined the street—seven private dwellings and four buildings for common use. There had been no recurrence of mutiny and dissension. Faced with common dangers, Saints and Strangers had drawn closer together, sinking doctrinal differences for a time. Nothing had disturbed the peace but a duel, the first and last fought in the colony, with Stephen Hopkins’ spirited young servants, Edward Dotey and Edward Leister, as principals.

As the day of the harvest festival approached, four men were sent out to shoot waterfowl, returning with enough to supply the company for a week. Massasoit was invited to attend and shortly arrived—with ninety ravenous braves! The strain on the larder was somewhat eased when some of these went out and bagged five deer. Captain Standish staged a military review, there were games of skill and chance, and for three days the Pilgrims and their guests gorged themselves on venison, roast duck, roast goose, clams and other shellfish, succulent eels, white bread, corn bread, leeks and watercress and other “sallet herbes,” with wild plums and dried berries as dessert—all washed down with wine, made of the wild grape, both white and red, which the Pilgrims praised as “very sweete & strong.” At this first Thanksgiving feast in New England the company may have enjoyed, though there is no mention of it in the record, some of the long- legged “Turkies” whose speed of foot in the woods constantly amazed the Pilgrims. And there were cranberries by the bushel in neighboring bogs. It is very doubtful, however, if the Pilgrims had yet contrived a happy use for them. Nor was the table graced with a later and even more felicitous invention—pumpkin pie.

The celebration was a great success, warmly satisfying to body and soul alike, and the Pilgrims held another the next year, repeating it more or less regularly for generations. In time it became traditional throughout New England to enjoy the harvest feast with Pilgrim trimmings, a tradition carried to other parts of the country as restless Yankees moved westward. But it remained a regional or local holiday until 1863 when President Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War, proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving, setting aside the last Thursday in November for the purpose, disregarding the centuries-old Pilgrim custom of holding it somewhat earlier, usually in October as on this first occasion.

There are two other bits from books I like that are a part of the picture of Thanksgiving Day as a completely and wholeheartedly American festival. Although there can be no comparison between them as literature, they are alike in their sensuous preoccupation with what is almost an idealization, a dream-telling, of plenty . . . plenty to eat, plenty to see and smell and then feast upon.

The first is about a family Thanksgiving in Michigan toward the end of the last century. It is, in its own kindly nostalgic way, almost a caricature of such traditional “harvest-homes,” like a magazine cover by Norman Rockwell.

It is taken, more or less piecemeal (if such a banquet could be referred to even indirectly by so stark a word as meal!), from The Country Kitchen, by Della T. Lutes, and is, by courtesy, the story of Little Runt, the predestined baked-meat for the feast:

From The Country Kitchen, 1936, by Della T. Lutes

Thanksgiving was the day of days, after my father’s birthday, for intimate family gathering and unstinted feasting. There were times when my mother resented the invasions of my father’s numerous relatives, but on this day she welcomed numbers. Only numbers could provide suitable scope for her prowess as a cook. A meagre family of three, even though augmented by a hired man, was no excuse for the array of meats, vegetables, cakes, cookies, pies and puddings and bread, and the orgy of preparation which, on this day, were her great delight.

Such preparations were sometimes in progress far ahead of the eventful date, as in one particular instance when Aunts Hanner and Sophrony, Uncle Frank and Aunt Catherine, with Amelia and Saryette, their daughters, and Uncle Matt and Aunt Martha, who were all within reasonable visiting distance, were invited to partake of the Thanksgiving dinner.

That year a young sow mistook, in the exuberance of her youth, the proper season for mating and, in early fall, presented herself with a lively litter of thirteen husky pigs. All but the thirteenth. The thirteenth was one too many for the calculations of nature and he, being shriveled and feeble, was rooted out of place by the others and repudiated by his mother. My father brought him into the house, scrawny, unable to stand on his little spindling legs, blear-eyed and livid, and laid him on my mother’s lap. . . .

“Fat him up,” said my father . . . , “and we’ll have him for Thanksgiving dinner. I’ve always wanted roast pig for Thanksgiving.”

My mother reminded him that he had had roast pig once some years before at Uncle Frank’s house and that he had not liked it. In fact he had pronounced the whole dinner an utter failure because he had not liked the Pig.

“Fed on sour milk,” retorted my father tersely. “Flabby and tough. Frank’s too tarnation stingy to feed a pig fit for roasting. Feed the critter up,” he advised, “on sweet milk and corn-meal mush, get him nice and fat, and we’ll ask the ole curmudgeon over here Thanksgiving and show him what a roast pig’s like.”

So Little Runt was fed on sweet milk, fresh corn meal and vegetables, and he throve to a state of porcine beauty beyond all rightful expectation, considering his early state. . . .

He tagged at my mother’s skirts when she looked for eggs and when she fed the hens, always sniffing at everything in his path, continuously expressing his affection, gratitude, and general satisfaction in life, with cheerful little ungh-ungh-unghs or a high-pitched protesting squeal.

He allowed me to wash and scrub him until his skin was pink and smooth and firm as that of any buxom farmer’s child, and made no serious objection to the still pinker ribbon sometimes tied about his neck. With his little round quirking nose, his small bright watchful eyes, and his up-curled wiry tail, Little Runt was a pig to be proud of . . .

“Going to look pretty good spread out on a dripping pan ’long about the twenty-ninth,” observed my father early in November, sitting on the back stoop and watching Little Runt nuzzle the cats away from their rightful pan of milk.

Mother made no reply, and as for myself I looked at my father with positive distaste. . . .

“Just how,” queried my father at another time, as Little Runt grew in stature and rotundity, “do you make the stuffing for roast pig?”

For quite a few moments my mother did not reply. Her face reflected none of the gustatory fervor that lightened my father’s, and she even turned her head away from where he was scratching Little Runt’s back with a stick. . . .

Surprised at her silence, he set his penetrating eyes upon her and said, “Huh?”

“Stuffing?” she repeated with apparent reluctance. “Oh, I make it ’bout the same as for turkey. Little more sage, maybe.”

“Umm-m!” My father made plesant reminiscent sounds in his throat. “Sage! You picked the sage yet?”

“Yes,” she replied, “long ago. Savory, too, and all the herbs.”

“Put any onion in it?” With the pertinacity of the obstinate mind, he seemed intent upon teasing his always latent appetite.

“Yes,” said my mother, shortly, “plenty of it.”

After an interval of silence in which Little Runt kept up a running commentary on the salubrious effect of back-scratching, he asked solicitously, “You begun to save up dried bread yet?”

My mother lifted her hands impatiently. “Good gracious!” she exclaimed irritably. “What do you think that pig’s goin’ to be—an elephant?” With which crushing remark she left the room.

And then, all of a sudden, Little Runt took to following my father about, his nose close to the heel of the man whose favor he seemed to think it vital that he should gain. . . .

And into my father’s voice crept an extra note of bravado when he referred to the succulent dish so soon to be served upon his plate.

“You goin’ to have anything besides roast pig?” he asked of my mother in what was intended for a casual tone, but which certainly bordered upon the anxious.

“Potatoes,” replied my mother promptly, “and squash, and boiled onions—”

“I mean any—any other—meat?” he persisted in a manner strangely hesitating for one of his forthright spirit. “I didn’t know as just the—the— pig’d be enough.”

“Well,” said my mother judicially, “I didn’t know as ’twould be, myself, seein’ how your mouth’s waterin’ for it. So I thought I’d roast a turkey. Old Tom’s good and fat.”

My father’s face lightened unwarrantably.

“May be’s well,” he replied carelessly. “When you want him killed?”

“Any way, not yet,” replied my mother shortly. “You can kill him when you butcher the pig “

My father rose and went outside, where we heard him vociferously greeted by Little Runt, with his own response made in loud and threatening tones. My mother smiled with her eyes, but her lips were tightly shut as she went about her work of clearing away supper. After that he talked loud and often of the Thanksgiving feast so rapidly approaching. He asked my mother if she was going to put a raw apple or a cooked one in Little Runt’s mouth. He enlarged the daily rations of meal and milk and even gave him a few small ears of corn. He cut up pumpkins and fed him bit by bit. He stood by the pen (Little Runt now had a shelter all his own, so, as my father said, he “wouldn’t run the fat off”) and scratched his back and talked to him, always loudly and truculently of his approaching fate when anyone was within hearing. . . .

With the imminent approach of the festal day, my father haunted the kitchen. He watched the filling of the cookie jars—gray stone for sugar cookies and a brown glazed one for molasses. He sampled each batch of doughnuts as it came from the kettle and said they were not quite up to my mother’s usual standard. He took, at my mother’s invitation, repeated tastes of the mincemeat under preparation and with the air of a connoisseur suggested the addition of a lee-tle more boiled cider, just a speck more of allspice, and, finally, with a tentative glance at my mother’s face, just a touch of brandy. Adding and mixing and stirring and tasting, together they brought the concoction to what both were satisfied was a state of perfection. . . .

Two days before Thanksgiving my father beheaded Old Tom, filled the big brass kettle with boiling water, scalded and plucked him. The wing tips were cut off whole for brushing the hearth and the tail feathers were finally gathered up and tied together in the form of a duster. He was then handed over to my mother with the somewhat ostentatious remark, “There’s your turkey. I’ll fetch the pig in tonight. Stib Obart’s goin’ to butcher him for me.” . . .

. . . My mother lifted a corner of her apron to wipe her eyes. As for me, I was openly bawling. No miracle had happened, no ram in the bushes to save Little Runt. Stib Obart and his hideous knife stood, a menacing shadow, in the too near future. . . .

After supper that night [my father] set off with Little Runt, squealing, kicking, protesting, in a box in the back of the pung, it having snowed enough during the day to warrant the use of that vehicle. . . .

Along about nine o’clock [he] returned. He put the horse in the barn and then came stomping up to the door—the back kitchen door where a light had been left burning.

“Where you want him?” he called lustily.

“Put him down cellar,” my mother replied. “On the table.”

She did not rise, she made no inquiries. She took me off to bed and sat with me until I slept.

My mother always stuffed her meats at least twenty-four hours before roasting, so for one day Old Tom hung head down in an outer room to cool, while the little pig lay supinely upon the mahogany table in the cellar. I crept down once for a peep at him, but the sight of the now too-white form sticking stiff, inglorious feet in the air was too much for me. I ran whimpering upstairs to the comfort of my mother’s arms.

Early in the morning of the day before the feast a big bowl of stuffing was prepared—sage, savory, marjoram, and thyme crumbled between the fingers into well-moistened bread; onion chopped and added; salt and pepper, and lastly the generous half cup of melted butter, with frequent tastings as the rite proceeded.

When it was finally enriched to my mother’s satisfaction, the turkey’s ample cavities were filled and sewed. The wings were trussed, the neck bent back; and then, dipping her hand in the moist stuffing, my mother rubbed the entire exterior of the bird with the savory dressing. Over this paper-thin slices of fat salt pork were laid, and the bird, now in the roaster, was again consigned to the cold room to await his final call to glory.

On Thanksgiving morning the family were early astir. There was much to be done. The company would begin to arrive before eleven and my mother wanted to make progress before they came.

“Once your Aunt Catherine gets here, and your Aunt Hanner, there’ll be so much talk I shan’t be able to think.”

The little pink carcass was brought up as soon as breakfast was over, and at sight of it I burst into tears and fled the kitchen, but could not remain long away. And neither could my father. . . .

Particularly he was interested in the preparation of the pig for roasting.

“You do rub it with butter, don’t you?” he demanded with eager interest.

“Who said I didn’t?” countered my mother a shade tartly, as well she might with a small girl following her about, tiptoe with excitement, and a restless, curious man under her feet when she had a thousand things to do. . . .

“I wish you’d get out of the kitchen, ’Lije Thompson,” she told him. . . , “and go and do something. Fill up the wood box and the water pail, and stay out.”

He went, and so did I, for I could bear neither the sight of Little Runt in his defenseless state of abrogation, nor my mother’s face as she bent over him. . . .

Holidays and company-coming were usually the occasion for exuberant spirits on all our parts, for excited anticipation, chatter, and comment, but today my mother’s grim face cast a shadow upon the day and there was small pleasure in the prospect of a bountiful table, the pièce de résistance of which was to be our so recent companion.

Time, however, is no respecter of emotion, and as the hours wore on the tempo of activity increased. Potatoes were pared and left in a kettle of cold water that they might not discolor. My father brought a huge Hubbard squash up from the sand pit in the cellar, . . . broke it into small pieces with the axe . . . scraped out the seeds and loose pulp, emptied the waste, and stacked the green and golden sections neatly on the kitchen table.

“Anything more I can do, ’Miry?” he inquired solicitously, only to meet with a suspicious glance from my mother.

“Yes,” she said shortly, “you can peel the onions.” This was more than he had bargained for, but his quick, rather shocked look into her face brought him no quarter.

“They’re in the butt’ry,” she said tersely, “and you better peel ’em all.”

To my certain knowledge, my father had never up to this time peeled an onion or any other vegetable in his whole life. Nor had he ever washed a dish or in any other way shown any inclination toward self-preservation so far as the preparation of food was concerned. My mother often said that if he were left alone he would probably starve to death before he would cook himself a meal. And now there he was standing at a kitchen table peeling onions and surreptitiously wiping his weeping eyes, while my mother stepped briskly from room to room, her hands filled with one delectable dish after another, her lips grimly set, her eyes unsmiling and hard.

The onions peeled and standing in a pan of water, my father scrubbed his hands in the tin basin, wiped them on the roller towel hanging on the back of a door, and then, without a word or a glance in my mother’s direction, put on his hat and escaped.

To a little girl accustomed to basking in the warmth, the approval, the impregnable security of a united family life, there was something oppressive and sinister in the atmosphere of this morning. Still, there was assurance in the wealth of delicacies stored against the day.

In the buttery were the pumpkin pies that had been baked earlier in the morning, the ruffled edges of their biscuit-brown crusts encircling smooth plaques of yellow custard coated with a thin, almost transparent veil of dappled russet and bronze.

From these were exhaled a most flavorsome odor reminiscent of autumn days when the lusty vine strewed its golden fruit wantonly amongst the corn, mingled with the spicy fragrance of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and allspice.

Alongside these were the mince pies baked a week earlier, stored in cold and now brought out to be warmed at the last moment on the oven top. Marked with an “M” they were, and through the delicate tracery of the letter one caught tantalizing whiffs of meat preserved in heavenly juices, apple, currant, and raisin all melded into one sweetly tart aroma, itself bathed in the effluvious bouquet of rich old brandy, such aroma as the Olympian gods may have dreamed of but never met.

Here, too, arranged in glass sauce dishes, pickle dishes, preserve dishes that were the possessions of but ordinary women, but which are now elevated to the high estate of the rare, were pickled peaches with the pointed ears of cloves dotting their amber sides; mustard pickles to neutralize the too-rich content of the young pork; bowls of crimson cranberry sauce; globules of currant jelly for those who did not favor the fruit of the bog; long, green sections of cucumber pickle standing upright in the crystal dish swinging censer-like in its silver frame with hanging fork beside.

And then, here was the comp’ny! Uncle Frank and Aunt Catherine with the two third cousins, Saryette and Amelia. . . . The horses having been attended to, and greetings exchanged, Uncle Frank and my father betook themselves to the front room, where the round chunk stove sent vibrations of heat quivering upon the air. Aunt Catherine unfolded a voluminous apron from her sewing bag, tied it around her ample waist, and laid capable hands to the setting of the table. By the time Aunt Hanner and Aunt ’Phrony had arrived with the remainder of the guests, the table was dressed in its long white linen cloth, the tall silver caster and its five crystal bottles as a centrepiece, and the various relishes, jellies, and preserves clustered about it.

At two o’clock the family was seated around the board, the turkey, his crisp juicy skin bursting here and there in the plenitude of his stuffed insides, before my mother at one end of the table, and the rosy-brown, crackling-coated, well-rounded porcine frame before my father. The little pig’s legs, now untied, squatted wantonly beneath his well-padded hams and shoulders, his golden belly crouched upon the plate.

. . . My mother had left the head intact, with upstanding ears and truculently extended snout. In his mouth was a beautiful red apple, polished (for I saw him do it) on the sleeve of my father’s wamus, and inserted by him, at my mother’s request, into the open mouth after the pig was placed on the table. Over his haunches a small crisp tail upcurled with a realism seldom equaled in culinary lore.

A beautiful creature he certainly was, smoking, steaming, reeking of succulent juices, and rich with fragrance of herbs sun-ripened in our own garden.

“How do I carve him?” inquired my father with suspicious alacrity, poising his instruments above the plate before him, and ignoring the expectant silence with which my mother always recognized religious tendencies accorded to Uncle Frank. Dismissing the too-previous question as unheard, my mother turned in the direction of her guest and politely inquired if he would like to ask a blessing.

Uncle Frank, knowing my father’s contempt for an attitude that he considered lacking in sincerity, waved dismissal of the courtesy.

“Best way to thank the Lord,” observed my father benignly, slipping the razor-edged knife well under the skin of the succulent pig and watching with round eyes the free rich juices run, “is to fall to and eat. Pass up your plate, Cathy, for some of the best roast pig you ever tasted in your life. ’Miry’ll tend to the turkey.”

One by one he filled the huge plates—a slice of well-done pinkish-white young pork, a bit of crackling brown skin, a spoonful of mashed potatoes whipped with cream and butter to a very froth of delectable flavor, a spoonful of the stuffing. My mother, brooding eyes intent upon the work before her, was carving the turkey—a thin piece of white meat rimmed with chestnut-brown, a bit of the dark, laying the pieces on the side of the platter and transferring them to the plates as they reached her.

Finally all were taken care of except Mother, and Father, holding his knife above the riddled carcass, said with odd gusto, “Now, ‘Miry, I’m goin’ to cut you a nice juicy slice.”

My mother, struggling to control herself, said, “I don’t care for any, thank you,” and burst into tears.

We all with one accord turned to look at her, the guests in astonishment, I with streaming eyes and sobbing breath, and my father in consternation and apparent anger.

“Well!” he said with what would seem to be a righteous indignation. “I been wonderin’ if you was goin’ to show some signs of feelin’, ’Miry. Wait a minute.”

He threw down his napkin, shoved back his chair, dashed through the kitchen, snatched his hat from a nail as he went—all, it seemed, in one whirlwind of motion, his guests staring after him in rooted amazement.

My mother wiped her eyes, and in a shamed and shaken voice said, “It was Little Runt. I fed him by hand—he t-tagged us around—I didn’t see—h-how he could—I d-don’t know what he’s up to—”

But her tearful, broken apology was interrupted by a confusion of the strangest sounds—a mingling of the sharp, staccato squeals of a struggling pig, snuffles and grunts, my father’s voice raised in affectionate abuse, the back door opening.

“Hol’ your tongue, you tarnation fool-cuss”—and there he was, white hair flying, hat awry, and in his arms, legs kicking, snout wrinkling, small pink body squirming, was—sure as you live—Little Runt!

“There!” said my father, wheezing a bit from exertion. “Now what you think?”

Every chair had been pushed back. Food was cooling on the plates. I had flown from my chair to greet Little Runt and pull him into my lap.

“Why!” cried my mother, gasping. “What—where—”

“Well,” said my father, flinging off his hat and smoothing hair and beard, and beaming with satisfaction in his own exploit, “when I see you [addressing my mother] was really bent on roast pig for dinner [my mother lifted her hands, opened her mouth, and remained silent], I thought I’d have to fix it some way to save Little Runt’s hide. You see,” he now turned eagerly to the dumbfounded guests, “this was a runt we raised by hand and he took to following me round, so when it came time I didn’t have the heart to—so I took one of the others over to Stib Obart’s instead.” Then, with a swift turn from the still silent table, he addressed the contented, adventuring pig.

“Come along now,” he said, and, executing a flank movement, caught Little Runt by his hind leg and hoisted him to his arms, admonishing him sonorously.

“Thanksgiving for you, all right, you fool runt, you, but hogs don’t celebrate it in the house,” and in an uproar of squeals and protesting kicks Little Runt was borne away.

“’Lije,” said Uncle Frank sententiously in his absence, “always was a sentimental old fool.”

“Let me,” urged my mother politely, ignoring the remark, “give you some of the turkey.”

Almost immediately my father was at his place washed and brushed, passing the squash, asking for the cranberries, urging second helpings where the first were hardly touched. He made complimentary and utterly absurd remarks about Aunt Catherine’s fine looks, joshed Uncle Frank about a horse trade he had recently made, and otherwise disported himself as the benignant and genial host. To my mother he was especially considerate, but could not at the last deny himself the pleasure of a subtle thrust which would reflect upon his own clever scheming.

“Well, ’Miry,” he said handsomely as the guests, replete with food and hospitable content, drove away in the dusk of blue-white snow and creeping night, “ain’t you glad now that I done something about Little Runt?”

“You better go feed him,” said my mother dryly, which he did. . . .

The other thing I have chosen to put in this packaging of Thanksgiving excerpts is from Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe. It is about his very young days, as Eugene Gant.

It tells of Christmas and Thanksgiving, true, but it is really a hymn to the yearlong feasting in the Gant household, when the mother Eliza with her smoking cookstove alchemy would create a kind of antidote to all the ragings and bickerings and silent hatreds of the family.

They were big people, and they ate like big people.

From Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe, 1900–1938

They fed stupendously. Eugene began to observe the food and the seasons. In the autumn, they barrelled huge frosty apples in the cellar. Gant bought whole hogs from the butcher, returning home early to salt them, wearing a long work-apron, and rolling his sleeves half up his lean hairy arms. Smoked bacons hung in the pantry, the great bins were full of flour, the dark recessed shelves groaned with preserved cherries, peaches, plums, quinces, apples, pears. All that he touched waxed in rich pungent life: his Spring gardens, wrought in the black wet earth below the fruit trees, flourished in huge crinkled lettuces that wrenched cleanly from the loamy soil with small black clots stuck to their crisp stocks; fat red radishes; heavy tomatoes. The rich plums lay bursted on the grass; his huge cherry trees oozed with heavy gum jewels; his apple trees bent with thick green clusters. The earth was spermy for him like a big woman.

Spring was full of cool dewy mornings, spurting winds, and storms of intoxicating blossoms, and in this enchantment Eugene first felt the mixed lonely ache and promise of the seasons.

In the morning they rose in a house pungent with breakfast cookery, and they sat at a smoking table loaded with brains and eggs, ham, hot biscuit, fried apples seething in their gummed syrups, honey, golden butter, fried steak, scalding coffee. Or there were stacked batter-cakes, rum-colored molasses, fragrant brown sausages, a bowl of wet cherries, plums, fat juicy bacon, jam. At the mid-day meal, they ate heavily: a huge hot roast of beef, fat buttered lima-beans, tender corn smoking on the cob, thick red slabs of sliced tomatoes, rough savory spinach, hot yellow cornbread, flaky biscuits, a deep-dish peach and apple cobbler spiced with cinnamon, tender cabbage, deep glass dishes piled with preserved fruits—cherries, pears, peaches. At night they might eat fried steak, hot squares of grits fried in egg and butter, pork-chops, fish, young fried chicken.

For the Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts four heavy turkeys were bought and fattened for weeks: Eugene fed them with cans of shelled corn several times a day, but he could not bear to be present at their executions, because by that time their cheerful excited gobbles made echoes in his heart. Eliza baked for weeks in advance: the whole energy of the family focussed upon the great ritual of the feast. A day or two before, the auxiliary dainties arrived in piled grocer’s boxes—the magic of strange foods and fruits was added to familiar fare: there were glossed sticky dates, cold rich figs, cramped belly to belly in small boxes, dusty raisins, mixed nuts—the almond, pecan, the meaty Brazil nut, the walnut, sacks of assorted candies, piles of yellow Florida oranges, tangerines, sharp, acrid, nostalgic odors.

Seated before a roast or a fowl, Gant began a heavy clangor on his steel and carving knife, distributing thereafter Gargantuan portions to each plate. Eugene feasted from a high chair by his father’s side, filled his distending belly until it was drum-tight, and was permitted to stop eating by his watchful sire only when his stomach was impregnable to the heavy prod of Gant’s big finger.

“There’s a soft place there,” he would roar, and he would cover the scoured plate of his infant son with another heavy slab of beef. That their machinery withstood this hammer-handed treatment was a tribute to their vitality and Eliza’s cookery.

America in the Colonial period was a strange mixture of European sophistication and primitive backwoods simplicity, gastronomically as well as in other social ways.

Gentlemen lived perhaps more graciously than they ever have since, on such breathtakingly beautiful estates as Monticello and Mount Vernon, with most of the amenities and few of the inconveniences (political, at least) of a comparable existence in England or France. There were slaves, black mostly, not really thought of as human beings, and the townspeople lived much as they would in the older countries, in fatness or filth according to their incomes and their natural proclivities.

A decent existence was much easier even for the very poor “whites” than it had ever been in Europe, mainly because the new country was so generous. Game roamed within gunshot in the fields and forests, and flew overhead in great convenient flocks. Wild fruits and vegetables lay everywhere for the picking, and almost all the cultivated seeds flourished with a new enthusiasm in the fresh soil. The sea was full of fish, sporting everywhere along the boundless Atlantic coast. And ships sailed in and out of the fine harbors, laden with delicacies from abroad, and rum and wine and spices.

Parties in Boston and in Williamsburg and everywhere between were very gay; and although some of the “Rules for Behavior” set down by young gentlemen like George Washington indicate a certain crudity of table manners in such things as belching, spitting, and picking of the teeth, there was a real graciousness of living then, for almost everyone.

It shows in the architecture, and in the portraits and furnishings that have lasted; in the recipes written by great hostesses; in unimportant jingles like the following one, composed sometime late in the eighteenth century to amuse and instruct the future matrons of New England:

Anonymous, 18th Century

A Recipe for all Young Ladies that are going to be Married.

To Make a Sack-Posset

From famed Barbadoes on the Western Main

Fetch sugar half a pound; fetch Sack from Spain

A pint; and from the Eastern Indian Coast

Nutmeg, the glory of our Northern toast;

O’er flaming coals together let them heat

Till the all-conquering Sack dissolves the sweet,

O’er such another fire set eggs, twice ten

Newborn from crowing cock and speckled hen;

Stir them with steady hand, and conscience pricking

To see the untimely fate of twenty chicken.

From shining shelf take down your brazen skillet,

A quart of milk from gentle cow will fill it;

When boiled and cooked put milk and Sack to egg,

Unite them firmly like the triple league.

Then, covered close, together let them dwell

Till Miss sings twice, “You must not kiss and tell!”

Each lad and lass snatch up their murdering spoon,

And fall on fiercely like a starved dragoon.

One of the accidents of fate that made life much more exciting than it might have been for the Colonial Americans was the presence of hundreds of refugees from restless Europe. Some of them became stylish dancing-masters and wig-curlers and even cooks and colonels. Others taught French or Italian or German. Most of them, naturally, were courageous men, and many of them were charming, to boot.

One of the most delightful, to my way of thinking, must have been Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, temporarily “studying” in America until his political reputation cooled off in France and he could go back to live quietly and work on his great Physiology of Taste.

Much of the best of that inimitable book concerns his days in this country: he seemed to look back on them with an especial delicacy and pleasure, which I always share with him in the rereading.

This anecdote is called “An Exploit of the Professor”:

From The Physiology of Taste by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 1755–1826

While I was in Hartford, in Connecticut, I had the good luck to kill a wild turkey. This deed deserves to go down in history, and I shall recount it all the more eagerly since I myself am its hero.

A worthy old landowner (AMERICAN FARMER) had invited me to come hunt on his property; he lived in the backwoods of the State (BACK GROUNDS), promised me partridges, grey squirrels, and wild turkeys (WILD COCKS), and gave me the privilege of bringing with me one or two of my chosen friends.

As a result, one fine day of October 1794 we set out, Monsieur King and I, mounted on two hired nags, with the hope of arriving by nightfall at Monsieur Bulow’s farm, situated five whole ungodly leagues from Hartford.

M. King was a hunter of an extraordinary kind: he loved the sport passionately, but when he had killed any game he looked on himself as a murderer, and delivered himself of sensitive moral speculations and elegies on the final passing of his victims, which of course did not in the least keep him from starting the hunt all over again.

Although our road was hardly more than a track, we arrived without accident, and were received with that kind of cordial and wordless hospitality which expresses itself by its actions, which is to say that in a very few minutes all of us had been looked after, refreshed, and lodged—men, horses, and dogs according to their particular needs.

We spent some two hours in looking over the farm and its dependencies. I could describe all of that if I wished to, but I much prefer picturing to the reader M. Bulow’s four fine daughters (BUXUM LASSES), for whom our visit was a great event.

Their ages ranged from sixteen to twenty; they were radiant with freshness and good health, and there was about all of them such simplicity, such graceful naturalness, that their most ordinary actions endowed them with a thousand charms.

Shortly after we returned from our walk we sat down around a plentifully laden table: a handsome piece of CORN’D BEEF, A STEW’D goose, and a magnificent leg of mutton, then root-vegetables of all kinds (PLENTY), and at the two ends of the table two enormous jugs of an excellent cider, of which I could not drink enough.

When we had proved to our host that we were genuine hunters, at least in our appetite, he began to talk of the real purpose of our visit: he described to the best of his ability the places where we would find our game, the landmarks which we must watch for to guide us safely back again, and above all the farms where we could find refreshment.

During this conversation the ladies had prepared some excellent tea, of which we drank several cups; then they showed us to a room with two beds in it, where the day’s exercise and the good food soon sent us off into a delicious sleep.

The next morning we set out for the hunt a little late, and soon coming to the edge of the clearings made by M. Bulow’s workmen, I found myself for the first time in my life in virgin forest, where the sound of the axe had never been heard.

I wandered through it with delight, observing the benefits and the ravages of time, which both creates and destroys, and I amused myself by following every period in the life of an oak tree, from the moment it emerges two-leaved from the earth until that one when nothing is left of it but a long black smudge which is its heart’s dust.

M. King chided me for my wandering attention, and we took up the hunt more seriously. First of all we killed some of those pretty little grey partridges which are so plump and so tender. Then we knocked down six or seven grey squirrels, highly thought of in that country; and finally our lucky start led us into the midst of a flock of wild turkeys.

They arose, one after another, in quick noisy flight, screaming loudly. M. King fired first, and ran ahead: the others were by now out of range; then the laziest of them rose from the earth not ten paces from me; I fired at it through a break in the woods, and it fell, stone dead.

Only a hunter will understand the bliss such a lucky shot gave me. I picked up the superb winged creature, and stood admiring it from every angle for a good quarter-hour, when I heard M. King cry out for help; I ran to him, and found that he was only calling me to aid him in the search for a turkey which he declared he had killed, but which had nonetheless completely disappeared.

I put my dog on the scent, but he led us into thickets so dense and thorny that a serpent could not have gone through them, and we were forced to give up, which threw my companion into a temper which lasted until we returned to the farm.

The rest of our hunt is hardly worth describing. On the way back, we lost ourselves in the boundless woods, and were in great danger of having to spend the night in them, had it not been for the silvery voices of the young Bulows and the deep bass of their father, who had been kind enough to come in search of us, and who helped lead us out of the forest.

The four sisters had put on their full battle dress; freshly laundered frocks, new sashes, pretty hats and neatly shining shoes told that they had gone to some expense for our benefits; and as for me, I was willing enough to be my most agreeable to the one of these young ladies who took my arm with as much a proprietary air as any wife.

When we got back to the farm we found supper ready for us; but, before starting to eat, we sat down for a few minutes before a lively blazing fire which had been lighted, even though the weather would not have seemed to call for it. We found it very comforting indeed, and were refreshed by it almost magically.

This custom doubtless came from the Indians, who always have a fire burning in their wigwams. Perhaps it is also a custom given to us by Saint Francis of Sales, who once said that a fire is good twelve months of the year. (Non liquet.)

We ate as if we were starved; a generous bowl of punch helped us to finish off the evening, and a discussion in which our host talked much more freely than the day before held us late into the night.

We talked of the War of Independence, in which M. Bulow had served as a ranking officer; of M. de La Fayette, steadily greater in the minds of the Americans, who always spoke of him familiarly by his title (THE MARQUIS); of agriculture, which during that period was enriching the United States, and finally of my own dear France, which I loved much more since I had been forced to leave it.

From time to time, as an interlude in our conversation, M. Bulow would say to his oldest daughter: “Mariah! Give us a song.” And she sang to us without more urging, and with a charming shyness, the national air YANKEE DUDDE, and the lament of Queen Mary and the one of Major Andrew, both of them very popular in this country. Mariah had taken a few lessons, and there in the backwoods was thought to be something of an artist; but her singing was praiseworthy mainly because of the quality of her voice, which was at once sweet, fresh, and unaffected.

The next day we left, in spite of the friendliest protests, for even in America I had certain duties to perform. While the horses were being saddled, M. Bulow, having drawn me to one side, spoke in the following profoundly interesting way:

“You see in me, my dear sir, a happy man, if such there be on earth: everything around you and all that you have so far observed is a product of what I own. These stockings I wear were knitted by my daughters; my shoes and my clothes come from my own sheep; they help also, with my gardens and barnyards, to furnish me with simple nourishing food; and what makes our government so admirable is that here in Connecticut there are thousands of farmers just as happy as I am, and whose doors, like mine, are never bolted.

“Taxes here are almost nothing; and as long as they are paid we can sleep in peace. Congress does everything in its power to help our newborn industry; agents come from every direction to buy up whatever we have to sell; and I have cash on hand for a long time, for I have just sold for twenty- four dollars a barrel the wheat I usually get eight for.

“All this is the result of the liberty which we have fought for and founded on good laws. I am master in my own house, and you will not be astonished to know that we never hear the sound of the drum here, nor, except for the fourth of July, the glorious anniversary of our independence, do we ever see soldiers, or uniforms, or bayonets.”

During the whole of our trip homeward I was plunged in profound thought. It may be believed that I was pondering the parting speech of M. Bulow, but I had something quite different on my mind: I was considering how best I should cook my turkey, and I was not without some worries, for I feared that in Hartford I might not find all the ingredients I would need—and I was determined to raise a worthy monument to the spoils of my skill.

I inflict on myself a painful sacrifice in leaving out the details of the elaborate preparations I made for the fitting and distinguished way I planned to entertain my American dinner guests. It is enough to say that the partridge wings were served en papillote, and the grey squirrels simmered in Madeira.

As for the turkey, which was our only roast, it was charming to look at, flattering to the sense of smell, and delicious to the taste. And as the last morsel of it disappeared, there arose from the whole table the words: “VERY GOOD! EXCEEDINGLY GOOD! OH! DEAR SIR, WHAT A GLORIOUS BIT!”

Hungry men think of everything in their lives, from their sweethearts to their religious principles, in terms of food. One of the most amusing proofs of this fact in American literature is Washington Irving’s description of the lanky scarecrow Ichabod Crane and how he felt about Katrina Van Tassel and her succulent possessions. She would have appealed to any man, of course, but to one as chronically lean and starved as the schoolteacher she was irresistible:

From The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving, 1783–1859

Among the musical disciples who assembled one evening in each week to receive . . . instructions in psalmody, was Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and only child of a substantial Dutch farmer. She was a blooming lass of fresh eighteen; plump as a partridge; ripe and melting and rosy-cheeked as one of her father’s peaches, and universally famed, not merely for her beauty, but her vast expectations. She was, withal, a little of a coquette, as might be perceived even in her dress, which was a mixture of ancient and modern fashions, as most suited to set off her charms. She wore the ornaments of pure yellow gold, which her great-great-grandmother had brought over from Saardam; the tempting stomacher of the olden time; and withal a provokingly short petticoat, to display the prettiest foot and ankle in the country round.

Ichabod Crane had a soft and foolish heart towards the sex, and it is not to be wondered at that so tempting a morsel soon found favour in his eyes, more especially after he had visited her in her paternal mansion. Old Baltus Van Tassel was a perfect picture of a thriving, contented, liberal-hearted farmer. He seldom, it is true, sent either his eyes or his thoughts beyond the boundaries of his own farm; but within those, everything was snug, happy, and well-conditioned. He was satisfied with his wealth, but not proud of it; and piqued himself upon the hearty abundance, rather than the style in which he lived. His stronghold was situated on the banks of the Hudson, in one of those green, sheltered, fertile nooks, in which the Dutch farmers are so fond of nestling. A great elm-tree spread its broad branches over it, at the foot of which bubbled up a spring of the softest and sweetest water, in a little well formed of a barrel, and then stole sparkling away through the grass to a neighbouring brook that bubbled along among alders and dwarf willows. Hard by the farm-house was a vast barn that might have served for a church, every window and crevice of which seemed bursting forth with the treasures of the farm; the flail was busily resounding within it from morning to night; swallows and martins skimmed twittering about the eaves; and rows of pigeons, some with one eye turned up, as if watching the weather, some with their heads under their wings, or buried in their bosoms, and others swelling, and cooing, and bowing about their dames, were enjoying the sunshine on the roof. Sleek unwieldy porkers were grunting in the repose and abundance of their pens, whence sallied forth now and then troops of suckling pigs, as if to snuff the air. A stately squadron of snowy geese were riding in an adjoining pond, convoying whole fleets of ducks; regiments of turkeys were gobbling through the farm-yard, and guinea-fowls fretting about it, like ill-tempered housewives, with their peevish, discontented cry. Before the barn door strutted the gallant cock, that pattern of a husband, a warrior, and a fine gentleman, clapping his burnished wings, and crowing in the pride and gladness of his heart—sometimes tearing up the earth with his feet, and then generously calling his ever-hungry family of wives and children to enjoy the rich morsel which he had discovered.

The pedagogue’s mouth watered as he looked upon this sumptuous promise of luxurious winter fare. In his devouring mind’s eye he pictured to himself every roasting-pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie, and tucked in with a coverlet of crust; the geese were swimming in their own gravy; and the ducks pairing cosily in dishes, like snug married couples, with a decent competency of onion sauce. In the porkers he saw carved out the future sleek side of bacon and juicy relishing ham; not a turkey but he beheld daintily trussed-up, with its gizzard under its wing, and, peradventure, a necklace of savoury sausages; and even bright chanticleer himself lay sprawling on his back in a side-dish, with uplifted claws, as if craving that quarter which his chivalrous spirit disdained to ask while living.

As the enraptured Ichabod fancied all this, and as he rolled his great green eyes over the fat meadow-lands, the rich fields of wheat, of rye, of buckwheat, and Indian corn, and the orchards burthened with ruddy fruit, which surrounded the warm tenement of Van Tassel, his heart yearned after the damsel who was to inherit these domains, and his imagination expanded with the idea, how they might be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and shingle palaces in the wilderness. Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children, mounted on the top of a waggon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath; and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Lord knows where.

When he entered the house, the conquest of his heart was complete. It was one of those spacious farmhouses, with high-ridged, but lowly-sloping roofs, built in the style handed down from the first Dutch settlers; the low projecting eaves forming a piazza along the front, capable of being closed up in bad weather. Under this were hung flails, harness, various utensils of husbandry, and nets for fishing in the neighbouring river. Benches were built along the sides for summer use; and a great spinning-wheel at one end, and a churn at the other, showed the various uses to which this important porch might be devoted. From this piazza the wondering Ichabod entered the hall, which formed the centre of the mansion and the place of usual residence. Here rows of resplendent pewter, ranged on a long dresser, dazzled his eyes. In one corner stood a huge bag of wool ready to be spun; in another, a quantity of linsey-woolsey just from the loom; ears of Indian corn, and strings of dried apples and peaches, hung in gay festoons along the wall, mingled with the gaud of red peppers; and a door left ajar gave him a peep into the best parlour, where the claw-footed chairs and dark mahogany tables shone like mirrors; andirons, with their accompanying shovel and tongs, glistened from their covert of asparagus tops; mock oranges and conch-shells decorated the mantel-piece; strings of various coloured birds’ eggs were suspended above it; a great ostrich egg was hung from the centre of the room, and a corner-cupboard, knowingly left open, displayed immense treasures of old silver and well-mended china.

As Ichabod jogged slowly on his way, his eye, ever open to every symptom of culinary abundance, ranged with delight over the treasures of jolly autumn. On all sides he beheld vast stores of apples; some hanging in oppressive opulence on the trees; some gathered into baskets and barrels for the market; others heaped up in rich piles for the cider-press. Further on he beheld great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise of cakes and hasty-pudding; and the yellow pumpkins lying beneath them, turning up their fair round bellies to the sun, and giving ample prospects of the most luxurious of pies; and anon he passed the fragrant buckwheat fields, breathing the odour of the bee-hive, and as he beheld them, soft anticipations stole over his mind of dainty slapjacks, well buttered, and garnished with honey or treacle, by the delicate little dimpled hand of Katrina Van Tassel. . . .

Fain would I pause to dwell upon the world of charms that burst upon the enraptured gaze of my hero, as he entered the state parlour of Van Tassel’s mansion. Not those of the bevy of buxom lasses, with their luxurious display of red and white; but the ample charms of a genuine Dutch country tea-table in the sumptuous time of autumn. Such heaped-up platters of cakes of various and almost indescribable kinds, known only to experienced Dutch housewives! There was the doughty dough-nut, the tenderer oly koek, and the crisp and crumbling kruller; sweet-cakes and short-cakes, ginger-cakes and honey-cakes, and the whole family of cakes. And then there were apple-pies and peach-pies and pumpkin-pies; besides slices of ham and smoked beef; and, moreover, delectable dishes of preserved plums, and peaches, and pears, and quinces; not to mention broiled shad and roasted chickens; together with bowls of milk and cream, all mingled higgledy-piggledy, pretty much as I have enumerated them, with the motherly teapot sending up its clouds of vapour from the midst—Heaven bless the mark! I want breath and time to discuss this banquet as it deserves, and am too eager to get on with my story. Happily, Ichabod Crane was not in so great a hurry as his historian, but did ample justice to every dainty.

He was a kind and thankful creature, whose heart dilated in proportion as his skin was filled with good cheer; and whose spirits rose with eating as some men’s do with drink. He could not help, too, rolling his large eyes round him as he ate, and chuckling with the possibility that he might one day be lord of all this scene of almost unimaginable luxury and splendour. Then he thought, how soon he’d turn his back upon the old school-house, snap his fingers in the face of Hans Van Ripper, and every other niggardly patron, and kick any itinerant pedagogue out of doors that should dare to call him comrade!

The first half of the nineteenth century found a new type of visitor in America: the observer of our table-manners and church-morals rather than the grateful partaker of our political and religious freedoms. European refugees gave way to a flood of writers, some of them very good ones, and most of them from England.

Mrs. Trollope really blazed the path, in 1832, and set our society buzzing with rage at her candid picture of it in Domestic Manners of the Americans. She wrote well, as the mother of Anthony would be expected to do, and her book is amusing to read now, but it is easy to see why its bluntly critical attitude enraged the people who had been hospitable and kind to her on her energetic tour.

Another writer, and this time one more widely known and much beloved, hurt the proud feelings of the Americans with his book of Notes; Charles Dickens, who came to this country in 1842, and set down with a regrettably supercilious tone what he saw and thought of our obvious crudities as well as our irrefutable graces.

The Notes are still by Dickens, however, and thus are good reading in spite of their sour overtones. (And when you consider the difficulties of travel then, you cannot see how even the strongest and most insensitive of men could survive a trip unruffled, if at all.)

This cutting is typical, about a steamboat ride on the Messenger from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati.

From American Notes by Charles Dickens, 1812–1870

. . . There is one long narrow cabin, the whole length of the boat; from which the state-rooms open, on both sides. A small portion of it at the stern is partitioned off for the ladies: and the bar is at the opposite extreme. There is a long table down the centre, and at either end a stove. The washing apparatus is forward, on the deck. It is a little better than on board the canal boat, but not much. In all modes of travelling, the American customs, with reference to the means of personal cleanliness and wholesome ablution, are extremely negligent and filthy; and I strongly incline to the belief that a considerable amount of illness is referable to this cause.

We are to be on board the Messenger three days; arriving at Cincinnati (barring accidents) on Monday morning. There are three meals a day. Breakfast at seven, dinner at half-past twelve, supper about six. At each, there are a great many small dishes and plates upon the table, with very little in them; so that although there is every appearance of a mighty “spread,” there is seldom really more than a joint: except for those who fancy slices of beet-root, shreds of dried beef, complicated entanglements of yellow pickle; maize, Indian corn, apple-sauce, and pumpkin.

Some people fancy all these little dainties together (and sweet preserves beside), by way of relish to their roast pig. They are generally those dyspeptic ladies and gentlemen who eat unheard-of quantities of hot corn bread (almost as good for the digestion as a kneaded pin-cushion), for breakfast, and for supper. Those who do not observe this custom, and who help themselves several times instead, usually suck their knives and forks meditatively, until they have decided what to take next: then pull them out of their mouths: put them in the dish; help themselves; and fall to work again. At dinner, there is nothing to drink upon the table, but great jugs full of cold water. Nobody says anything, at any meal, to anybody. All the passengers are very dismal, and seem to have tremendous secrets weighing on their minds. There is no conversation, no laughter, no cheerfulness, no sociality, except in spitting; and that is done in silent fellowship round the stove, when the meal is over. Every man sits down, dull and languid; swallows his fare as if breakfasts, dinners, and suppers, were necessities of nature never to be coupled with recreation or enjoyment; and having bolted his food in a gloomy silence, bolts himself, in the same state. But for these animal observances, you might suppose the whole male portion of the company to be the melancholy ghosts of departed bookkeepers, who had fallen dead at the desk: such is their weary air of business and calculation. Undertakers on duty would be sprightly beside them; and a collation of funeral-baked meats, in comparison with these meals, would be a sparkling festivity.

The Peterkin Papers are as American as apple pie . . . or baked beans and brown bread . . . or whatever it is that to each of us means something that can be savored in no other country than this one.

As a book they are even funnier to grown-up people than to the children who first giggled helplessly at the incredible blunders of Elizabeth Eliza Peterkin and her family, and shrieked with a familiar but unchanging relief when the Lady from Philadelphia settled one affair after another with her obnoxiously right suggestions. They are fantasy, really, but the naive language of their telling, and the forthrightness of their nonsense, make them Alice in Wonderland, the universal child-person.

Here, then, is one of the Papers, about “The Lady Who Put Salt in Her Coffee”:

From The Peterkin Papers by Lucretia P. Hale, 1820–1900

This was Mrs. Peterkin. It was a mistake. She had poured out a delicious cup of coffee, and, just as she was helping herself to cream, she found she had put in salt instead of sugar! It tasted bad. What should she do? Of course she couldn’t drink the coffee; so she called in the family, for she was sitting at a late breakfast all alone. The family came in; they all tasted, and looked, and wondered what should be done, and all sat down to think.

At last Agamemnon, who had been to college, said, “Why don’t we go over and ask the advice of the chemist?” (For the chemist lived over the way, and was a very wise man.)

Mrs. Peterkin said, “Yes,” and Mr. Peterkin said, “Very well,” and all the children said they would go too. So the little boys put on their india- rubber boots, and over they went.

Now the chemist was just trying to find out something which should turn everything it touched into gold; and he had a large glass bottle into which he put all kinds of gold and silver, and many other valuable things, and melted them all up over the fire, till he had almost found what he wanted. He could turn things into almost gold. But just now he had used up all the gold that he had round the house, and gold was high. He had used up his wife’s gold thimble and his great-grandfather’s gold-bowed spectacles; and he had melted up the gold head of his great-great-grandfather’s cane; and, just as the Peterkin family came in, he was down on his knees before his wife, asking her to let him have her wedding ring to melt up with all the rest, because this time he knew he should succeed, and should be able to turn everything into gold; and then she could have a new wedding ring of diamonds, all set in emeralds and rubies and topazes, and all the furniture could be turned into the finest of gold.

Now his wife was just consenting when the Peterkin family burst in. You can imagine how mad the chemist was! He came near throwing his crucible—that was the name of his melting-pot—at their heads. But he didn’t. He listened as calmly as he could to the story of how Mrs. Peterkin had put salt in her coffee.

At first he said he couldn’t do anything about it; but when Agamemnon said they would pay in gold if he would only go, he packed up his bottles in a leather case, and went back with them all.

First he looked at the coffee, and then stirred it. Then he put in a little chlorate of potassium, and the family tried it all round; but it tasted no better. Then he stirred in a little bichlorate of magnesia. But Mrs. Peterkin didn’t like that. Then he added some tartaric acid and some hypersulphate of lime. But no; it was no better. “I have it!” exclaimed the chemist—“a little ammonia is just the thing!” No, it wasn’t the thing at all.

Then he tried, each in turn, some oxalic, cyanic, acetic, phosphoric, chloric, hyperchloric, sulphuric, boracic, silicic, nitric, formic, nitrous nitric, and carbonic acids. Mrs. Peterkin tasted each, and said the flavor was pleasant, but not precisely that of coffee. So then he tried a little calcium, aluminum, barium, and strontium, a little clear bitumen, and a half of a third of a sixteenth of a grain of arsenic. This gave rather a pretty color; but still Mrs. Peterkin ungratefully said it tasted of anything but coffee. The chemist was not discouraged. He put in a little belladonna and atropine, some granulated hydrogen, some potash, and a very little antimony, finishing off with a little pure carbon. But still Mrs. Peterkin was not satisfied.

The chemist said that all he had done ought to have taken out the salt. The theory remained the same, although the experiment had failed. Perhaps a little starch would have some effect. If not, that was all the time he could give. He should like to be paid, and go. They were all much obliged to him, and willing to give him $1.37½ in gold. Gold was now 2.693 3/4, so Mr. Peterkin found in the newspaper. This gave Agamemnon a pretty little sum. He sat himself down to do it. But there was the coffee! All sat and thought awhile, till Elizabeth Eliza said, “Why don’t we go to the herb-woman?” Elizabeth Eliza was the only daughter. She was named after her two aunts—Elizabeth, from the sister of her father; Eliza, from her mother’s sister. Now, the herb-woman was an old woman who came round to sell herbs, and knew a great deal. They all shouted with joy at the idea of asking her, and Solomon John and the younger children agreed to go and find her too. The herb-woman lived down at the very end of the street; so the boys put on their india-rubber boots again, and they set off. It was a long walk through the village, but they came at last to the herb-woman’s house, at the foot of a high hill. They went through her little garden. Here she had marigolds and hollyhocks, and old maids and tall sunflowers, and all kinds of sweet-smelling herbs, so that the air was full of tansy-tea and elder-blow. Over the porch grew a hop-vine, and a brandy-cherry tree shaded the door, and a luxuriant cranberry-vine flung its delicious fruit across the window. They went into a small parlor, which smelt very spicy. All around hung little bags full of catnip, and peppermint, and all kinds of herbs; and dried stalks hung from the ceiling; and on the shelves were jars of rhubarb, senna, manna, and the like.

But there was no little old woman. She had gone up into the woods to get some more wild herbs, so they all thought they would follow her— Elizabeth Eliza, Solomon John, and the little boys. They had to climb up over high rocks, and in among huckleberry-bushes and blackberry-vines. But the little boys had their india-rubber boots. At last they discovered the little old woman. They knew her by her hat. It was steeple-crowned, without any vane. They saw her digging with her trowel round a sassafras bush. They told her their story—how their mother had put salt in her coffee, and how the chemist had made it worse instead of better, and how their mother couldn’t drink it, and wouldn’t she come and see what she could do? And she said she would, and took up her little old apron, with pockets all round, all filled with everlasting and pennyroyal, and went back to her house.

There she stopped, and stuffed her huge pockets with some of all the kinds of herbs. She took some tansy and peppermint, and caraway-seed and dill, spearmint and cloves, pennyroyal and sweet marjoram, basil and rosemary, wild thyme and some of the other time—such as you have in clocks—sappermint and oppermint, catnip, valerian, and hop; indeed, there isn’t a kind of herb you can think of that the little old woman didn’t have done up in her little paper bags, that had all been dried in her little Dutch oven. She packed these all up, and then went back with the children, taking her stick.

Meanwhile Mrs. Peterkin was getting quite impatient for her coffee.

As soon as the little old woman came she had it set over the fire, and began to stir in the different herbs. First she put in a little hop for the bitter. Mrs. Peterkin said it tasted like hop-tea, and not at all like coffee. Then she tried a little flagroot and snakeroot, then some spruce gum, and some caraway and some dill, some rue and rosemary, some sweet marjoram and sour, some oppermint and sappermint, a little spearmint and peppermint, some wild thyme, and some of the other tame time, some tansy and basil, and catnip and valerian, and sassafras, ginger, and pennyroyal. The children tasted after each mixture, but made up dreadful faces. Mrs. Peterkin tasted, and did the same. The more the old woman stirred, and the more she put in, the worse it all seemed to taste.

So the old woman shook her head, and muttered a few words, and said she must go. She believed the coffee was bewitched. She bundled up her packets of herbs, and took her trowel, and her basket, and her stick, and went back to her root of sassafras, that she had left half in the air and half out. And all she would take for pay was five cents in currency.

Then the family were in despair, and all sat and thought a great while. It was growing late in the day, and Mrs. Peterkin hadn’t had her cup of coffee. At last Elizabeth Eliza said, “They say that the Lady from Philadelphia, who is staying in town, is very wise. Suppose I go and ask her what is best to be done.” To this they all agreed, it was a great thought, and off Elizabeth Eliza went.

She told the Lady from Philadelphia the whole story—how her mother had put salt in the coffee; how the chemist had been called in; how he tried everything but could make it no better; and how they went for the little old herb-woman, and how she had tried in vain, for her mother couldn’t drink the coffee. The Lady from Philadelphia listened very attentively, and then said, “Why doesn’t your mother make a fresh cup of coffee?” Elizabeth Eliza started with surprise. Solomon John shouted with joy; so did Agamemnon, who had just finished his sum; so did the little boys, who had followed on. “Why didn’t we think of that?” said Elizabeth Eliza; and they all went back to their mother, and she had her cup of coffee.

It is hard for people who have passed the age of, say, fifty to remember with any charity the hunger of their own puberty and adolescence, the days when they winced and whitened at the prospect of waiting politely a few more hours for food, when their guts howled for meat-bread-candy-fruit-cheese-milkmilkmilk-old wilted toast-ANYTHING IN THE WORLD TO EAT. . . .

The anger and exasperation that older people feel, when they discover soon after the advent of two or three youths, or even one, that the cupboards are bare, stripped, devastated, is not based on stinginess or stupidity. It is, very simply, that they have forgotten how to eat much at a time. Their own needs for nourishment have dwindled. They have with the years acquired a discretion, a cautious distaste for surfeit, painful as well as unintelligible to young and healthy humans. They are out of the habit of stuffing.

It might perhaps be a good thing, at least for social relations between uncles and nephews, parents and their prep-school hostages, if older people deliberately cultivated an unshared but planned generosity at table. They need eat no more themselves, but they should not gauge others’ hunger by their lack of it.

And perhaps, now and then, they should read some such story as “The Great Pancake Record.”. . .

From The Prodigious Hickey by Owen Johnson, 1878–1952

With each succeeding week Hungry Smeed comprehended more fully the enormity of his offense in doing nothing and weighing one hundred and six pounds. He saw the new boys arrive, pass through the fire of chastening, give respectable weights and go forth to the gridiron to be whipped into shape by Turkey and the Butcher, who played on the school eleven. Smeed humbly and thankfully went down each afternoon to the practice, carrying the sweaters and shin-guards, like the grateful little beast of burden that he was. He watched his juniors, Spider and Red Dog, rolling in the mud or flung gloriously under an avalanche of bodies; but then, they weighed over one hundred and thirty, while he was still at one hundred and six—a dead loss! The fever of the house loyalty invaded him; he even came to look with resentment on the Faculty and to repeat secretly to himself that they never would have unloaded him on the Dickinson if they hadn’t been willing to stoop to any methods to prevent the House again securing the championship.

The fact that the Dickinson, in an extraordinary manner, finally won by the closest of margins, consoled Smeed but a little while. There were no more sweaters to carry, or pails of barley water to fetch, or guard to be mounted on the old rail fence, to make certain that the spies from the Davis and Kennedy did not surprise the secret plays which Hickey and Slugger Jones had craftily evolved.

With the long winter months he felt more keenly his obscurity and the hopelessness of ever leaving a mark on the great desert of school life that would bring honor to the Dickinson. He resented even the lack of the mild hazing the other boys received—he was too insignificant to be so honored. He was only a dead loss, good for nothing but to squeeze through his recitations, to sleep enormously, and to eat like a glutton with a hunger that could never be satisfied, little suspecting the future that lay in this famine of his stomach.

For it was written in the inscrutable fates that Hungry Smeed should leave a name that would go down imperishably to decades of schoolboys, when Dibbles’ touchdown against Princeton and Kafer’s home run should be only tinkling sounds. So it happened, and the agent of this divine destiny was Hickey.

It so happened that examinations being still in the threatening distance, Hickey’s fertile brain was unoccupied with methods of facilitating his scholarly progress by homely inventions that allowed formulas and dates to be concealed in the palm and disappear obligingly up the sleeve on the approach of the Natural Enemy. Moreover, Hickey and Hickey’s friends were in straitened circumstances, with all credit gone at the jigger-shop, and the appetite for jiggers in an acute stage of deprivation.

In this keenly sensitive, famished state of his imagination, Hickey suddenly became aware of a fact fraught with possibilities. Hungry Smeed had an appetite distinguished and remarkable even in that company of aching voids.

No sooner had this pregnant idea become his property than Hickey confided his hopes to Doc Macnooder, his chum and partner in plans that were dark and mysterious. Macnooder saw in a flash the glorious and lucrative possibilities. A very short series of tests sufficed to convince the twain that in little Smeed they had a phenomenon who needed only to be properly developed to pass into history.

Accordingly, on a certain muddy morning in March, Hickey and Doc Macnooder, with Smeed in tow, stole into the jigger-shop at an hour in defiance of regulations and fraught with delightful risks of detection.

Al, the watch-dog of the jigger, was tilted back, near a farther window, the parted tow hair falling doglike over his eyes, absorbed in the reading of Spenser’s Faerie Queen, an abnormal taste which made him absolutely incomprehensible to the boyish mind. At the sound of the stolen entrance, Al put down the volume and started mechanically to rise. Then, recognizing his visitors, he returned to his chair, saying wearily:

“Nothing doing, Hickey.”

“Guess again,” said Hickey, cheerily. “We’re not asking you to hang us up this time, Al.”

“You haven’t got any money,” said Al, the recorder of allowances; “not unless you stole it.”

“Al, we don’t come to take your hard-earned money, but to do you good,” put in Macnooder impudently. “We’re bringing you a little sporting proposition.”

“Have you come to pay up that account of yours?” said Al. “If not, run along, you Macnooder; don’t waste my time, with your wildcat schemes.”

“Al, this is a sporting proposition,” took up Hickey.

“Has he any money?” said Al, who suddenly remembered that Smeed was not yet under suspicion.

“See here, Al,” said Macnooder, “we’ll back Smeed to eat the jiggers against you—for the crowd!”

“Where’s your money?”

“Here,” said Hickey; “this goes up if we lose.” He produced a gold watch of Smeed’s, and was about to tender it when he withdrew it with a sudden caution. “On the condition, if we win I get it back and you won’t hold it up against my account.”

“All right. Let’s see it.”

The watch was given to Al, who looked it over, grunted in approval, and then looked at little Smeed.

“Now, Al,” said Macnooder softly, “give us a gambling chance; he’s only a runt.”

Al considered, and Al was wise. The proposition came often and he never lost. A jigger is unlike any other ice cream; it is dipped from the creamy tin by a cone-shaped scoop called a jigger, which gives it an unusual and peculiar flavor. Since those days the original jigger has been contaminated and made ridiculous by offensive alliances with upstart syrups, meringues and macaroons with absurd titles; but then the boy went to the simple jigger as the sturdy Roman went to the cold waters of the Tiber. A double jigger fills a large soda glass when ten cents has been laid on the counter, and two such glasses quench all desire in the normal appetite.

“If he can eat twelve double jiggers,” Al said slowly, “I’ll set them up and the jiggers for youse. Otherwise, I’ll hold the watch.”

At this there was a protest from the backers of the champion, with the result that the limit was reduced to ten.

“Is it a go?” Al said, turning to Smeed, who had waited modestly in the background.

“Sure,” he answered, with calm certainty.

“You’ve got nerve, you have,” said Al, with a scornful smile, scooping up the first jiggers and shoving the glass to him. “Ten doubles is the record in these parts, young fellow!”

Then little Smeed, methodically, and without apparent pain, ate the ten doubles.

Conover’s was not in the catalogue that anxious parents study, but then catalogues are like epitaphs in a cemetery. Next to the jiggershop, Conover’s was quite the most important institution in the school. In a little white Colonial Cottage, Conover, veteran of the late war, and Mrs. Conover, still in active service, supplied pancakes and maple syrup on a cash basis, two dollars credit to second-year boys in good repute. Conover’s, too, had its traditions. Twenty-six pancakes, large and thick, in one continuous sitting, was the record, five years old, standing to the credit of Guzzler Wilkins, which succeeding classes had attacked in vain. Wily Conover, to stimulate such profitable tests, had solemnly pledged himself to the delivery of free pancakes to all comers during that day on which any boy, at one continuous sitting, unaided, should succeed in swallowing the awful number of thirty-two. Conover was not considered a prodigal.

This deed of heroic accomplishment and public benefaction was the true goal of Hickey’s planning. The test of the jigger-shop was but a preliminary trying out. With medical caution, Doc Macnooder refused to permit Smeed to go beyond the ten doubles, holding very wisely that the jigger record could wait for a further day. The amazed Al was sworn to secrecy.

It was Wednesday, and the following Saturday was decided upon for the supreme test at Conover’s. Smeed at once was subjected to a graduated system of starvation. Thursday he was hungry, but Friday he was so ravenous that a watch was instituted on all his movements.

The next morning the Dickinson House, let into the secret, accompanied Smeed to Conover’s. If there was even a possibility of free pancakes, the House intended to be satisfied before the deluge broke.

Great was the astonishment at Conover’s at the arrival of the procession.

“Mr. Conover,” said Hickey, in the quality of manager, “we’re going after that pancake record.”

“Mr. Wilkins’ record?” said Conover, seeking vainly the champion in the crowd.

“No—after that record of yours,” answered Hickey. “Thirty-two pancakes—we’re here to get free pancakes today—that’s what we’re here for.”

“So, boys, so,” said Conover, smiling pleasantly; “and you want to begin now?”

“Right off the bat.”

“Well, where is he?”

Little Smeed, famished to the point of tears, was thrust forward. Conover, who was expecting something on the lines of a buffalo, smiled confidently.

“So, boys, so,” he said, leading the way with alacrity. “I guess we’re ready, too.”

“Thirty-two pancakes, Conover—and we get ’em free!”

“That’s right,” answered Conover, secure in his know ledge of boyish capacity. “If that little boy there can eat thirty-two I’ll make them all day free to the school. That’s what I said, and what I say goes—and that’s what I say now.”

Hickey and Doc Macnooder whispered the last instructions in Smeed’s ear.

“Cut out the syrup.”

“Loosen your belt.”

“Eat slowly.”

In a low room, with the white rafters impending over his head, beside a basement window flanked with geraniums, little Smeed sat down to battle for the honor of the Dickinson and the record of the school. Directly under his eyes, carved on the wooden table, a name challenged him, standing out of the numerous initials—Guzzler Wilkins.

“I’ll keep count,” said Hickey. “Macnooder and Turkey, watch the pancakes.”

“Regulation size, Conover,” cried that cautious Red Dog; “no doubling now. All fair and above board.”

“All right, Hickey, all right,” said Conover, leering wickedly from the door; “if that little grasshopper can do it, you get the cakes.”

“Now, Hungry,” said Turkey, clapping Smeed on the shoulder. “Here is where you get your chance. Remember, Kid, old sport, it’s for the Dickinson.”

Smeed heard in ecstasy; it was just the way Turkey talked to the eleven on the eve of a match. He nodded his head with a grim little shake and smiled nervously at the thirty-odd Dickinsonians who formed around him a pit of expectant and hungry boyhood from the floor to the ceiling.

“All ready!” sang out Turkey, from the doorway.

“Six pancakes!”

“Six it is,” replied Hickey, chalking up a monster 6 on the slate that swung from the rafters. The pancakes placed before the ravenous Smeed vanished like snow-flakes on a July lawn.

A cheer went up, mingled with cries of caution.

“Not so fast.”

“Take your time.”

“Don’t let them be too hot.”

“Not too hot, Hickey!”

Macnooder was instructed to watch carefully over the temperature as well as the dimensions.

“Ready again,” came the cry.

“Ready—how many?”

“Six more.”

“Six it is,” said Mickey, adding a second figure to the score. “Six and six are twelve.”

The second batch went the way of the first.

“Why, that boy is starving,” said Conover, opening his eyes.

“Sure he is,” said Hickey. “He’s eating ’way back in last week—he hasn’t had a thing for ten days.”

“Six more,” cried Macnooder.

“Six it is,” answered Hickey. “Six and twelve is eighteen.”

“Eat them one at a time, Hungry.”

“No, let him alone.”

“He knows best.”

“Not too fast, Hungry, not too fast.”

“Eighteen for Hungry, eighteen. Hurrah!”

“Thirty-two is a long ways to go,” said Conover, gazing apprehensively at the little David who had come so impudently into his domain; “fourteen pancakes is an awful lot.”

“Shut up, Conover.”

“No trying to influence him there.”

“Don’t listen to him, Hungry.”

“He’s only trying to get you nervous.”

“Fourteen more, Hungry—fourteen more.”

“Ready again,” sang out Macnooder.

“Ready here.”

“Three pancakes.”

“Three it is,” responded Hickey. “Eighteen and three is twenty-one.”

But a storm of protest arose.

“Here, that’s not fair!”

“I say, Hickey, don’t let them do that.”

“I say, Hickey, it’s twice as hard that way.”

“Oh, goon.”

“Sure it is.”

“Of course it is.”

“Don’t you know that you can’t drink a glass of beer if you take it with a teaspoon?”

“That’s right, Red Dog’s right! Six at a time.”

“Six at a time!”

A hurried consultation was now held and the reasoning approved. Macnooder was charged with the responsibility of seeing to the number as well as the temperature and dimensions.

Meanwhile Smeed had eaten the pancakes.

“Coming again!”

“All ready here.”

“Six pancakes!”

“Six,” said Hickey; “twenty-one and six is twenty-seven.”

“That’ll beat Guzzler Wilkins.”

“So it will.”

“Five more makes thirty-two.”

“Easy, Hungry, easy.”

“Hungry’s done it; he’s done it.”

“Twenty-seven and the record!”

“Hurrah!”

At this point Smeed looked about anxiously.

“It’s pretty dry,” he said, speaking for the first time.

Instantly there was a panic. Smeed was reaching his limit—a groan went up.

“Oh, Hungry.”

“Only five more.”

“Give him some water.”

“Water, you loon; do you want to end him?”

“Why?”

“Water’ll swell up the pancakes, crazy.”

“No water, no water.”

Hickey approached his man with anxiety.

“What is it, Hungry? Anything wrong?” he said tenderly.

“No, only it’s a little dry,” said Smeed, unmoved. “I’m all right, but I’d like just a drop of syrup now.”

The syrup was discussed, approved and voted.

“You’re sure you’re all right,” said Hickey.

“Oh, yes.”

Conover, in the last ditch, said carefully:

“I don’t want no fits around here.”

A cry of protest greeted him.

“Well, son, that boy can’t stand much more. That’s just like the Guzzler. He was taken short and we had to work over him for an hour.”

“Conover, shut up!”

“Conover, you’re beaten.”

“Conover, that’s an old game.”

“Get out.”

“Shut up.”

“Fair play.”

“Fair play! Fair play!”

A new interruption came from the kitchen. Macnooder claimed that Mrs. Conover was doubling the size of the cakes. The dish was brought. There was no doubt about it. The cakes were swollen. Pandemonium broke loose. Conover capitulated, the cakes were rejected.

“Don’t be feazed by that,” said Hickey, warningly to Smeed.

“I’m not,” said Smeed.

“All ready,” came Macnooder’s cry.

“Ready here.”

“Six pancakes!”

“Regulation size?”

“Regulation.”

“Six it is,” said Hickey, at the slate. “Six and twenty-seven is thirty-three.”

“Wait a moment,” sang out the Butcher. “He has only to eat thirty-two.”

“That’s so—take one off.”

“Give him five—five only.”

“If Hungry says he can eat six,” said Hickey, firmly, glancing at his protégé, “he can. We’re out for big things. Can you do it, Hungry?”

And Smeed, fired with the heroism of the moment, answered in disdainful simplicity:

“Sure!”

A cheer that brought two Davis House boys running in greeted the disappearance of the thirty-third. Then everything was forgotten in the amazement of the deed.

“Please, I’d like to go on,” said Smeed.

“Oh, Hungry, can you do it?”

“Really?”

“You’re goin’ on?”

“Holy cats!”

“How’ll you take them?” said Hickey, anxiously.

“I’ll try another six,” said Smeed, thoughtfully, “and then we’ll see.”

Conover, vanquished and convinced, no longer sought to intimidate him with horrid suggestions.

“Mr. Smeed,” he said, giving him his hand in admiration, “you go ahead; you make a great record.”

“Six more,” cried Macnooder.

“Six it is,” said Hickey, in an awed voice; “six and thirty-three makes thirty-nine!”

Mrs. Conover and Macnooder, no longer antagonists, came in from the kitchen to watch the great spectacle. Little Smeed alone, calm and unconscious, with the light of a great ambition on his forehead, ate steadily, without vacillation.

“Gee, what a stride!”

“By Jiminy, where does he put it?” said Conover, staring helplessly.

“Holy cats!”

“Thirty-nine—thirty-nine pancakes—gee!!!”

“Hungry,” said Hickey, entreatingly, “do you think you could eat another—make it an even forty?”

“Three more,” said Smeed, pounding the table with a new authority. This time no voice rose in remonstrance. The clouds had rolled away. They were in the presence of a master.

“Pancakes coming.”

“Bring them in!”

“Three more.”

“Three it is,” said Hickey, faintly. “Thirty-nine and three makes forty- two—forty-two. Gee!”

In profound silence the three pancakes passed regularly from the plate down the throat of little Smeed. Forty-two pancakes!

“Three more,” said Smeed.

Doc Macnooder rushed in hysterically.

“Hungry, go the limit—the limit! If anything happens I’ll bleed you.”

“Shut up, Doc!”

“Get out, you wild man.”

Macnooder was sent ignominiously back into the kitchen, with the curses of the Dickinson, and Smeed assured of their unfaltering protection.

“Three more,” came the cry from the chastened Macnooder.

“Three it is,” said Hickey. “Forty-two and three makes—forty-five.”

“Holy cats!”

Still little Smeed, without appreciable abatement of hunger, continued to eat. A sense of impending calamity and alarm began to spread. Forty- five pancakes, and still eating! It might turn into a tragedy.

“Say, bub—say, now,” said Hickey, gazing anxiously down into the pointed face, “you’ve done enough—don’t get rash.”

“I’ll stop when it’s time,” said Smeed; “bring ’em on now, one at a time.”

“Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine!”

Suddenly, at the moment when they expected him to go on forever, little Smeed stopped, gazed at his plate, then at the fiftieth pancake, and said:

“That’s all.”

Forty-nine pancakes! Then, and only then, did they return to a realization of what had happened. They cheered Smeed, they sang his praises, they cheered again, and then, pounding the table, they cried, in a mighty chorus:

“We want pancakes!”

“Bring us pancakes!”

“Pancakes, pancakes, we want pancakes!”

Twenty minutes later, Red Dog and the Egghead, fed to bursting, rolled out of Conover’s, spreading the uproarious news.

“Free pancakes! Free pancakes!”

The nearest houses, the Davis and the Rouse, heard and came with a rush.

Red Dog and the Egghead staggered down into the village and over to the circle of houses, throwing out their arms like returning bacchanalians.

“Free pancakes!”

“Hungry Smeed’s broken the record!”

“Pancakes at Conover’s—free pancakes!”

The word jumped from house to house, the campus was emptied in a trice. The road became choked with the hungry stream that struggled, fought, laughed and shouted as it stormed to Conover’s.

“Free pancakes! Free pancakes!”

“Hurrah for Smeed!”

“Hurrah for Hungry Smeed!!”

There have always been more miracles about hunger and its solace than any other of the human needs. Jesus of Nazareth knew that good wine from water and a plenitude of fishes and fine bread could succor the starved soul as well as any promise of immortality . . . and older gods, too, made pitchers give endlessly of their sweet liquor and cakes never shrink upon their plates.

Tortilla Flat, by John Steinbeck, and then “No Trouble at All,” from Hotel Bemelmans, by Ludwig himself, are proofs that the gods are still on hand, no matter how minor.

From Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck, 1902–1968

Señora Teresina Cortez and her eight children and her ancient mother lived in a pleasant cottage on the edge of the deep gulch that defines the southern frontier of Tortilla Flat. Teresina was a good figure of a mature woman, nearing thirty. Her mother, that ancient, dried, toothless one, relict of a past generation, was nearly fifty. It was long since any one had remembered that her name was Angelica.

During the week work was ready to this vieja’s hand, for it was her duty to feed, punish, cajole, dress and bed down seven of the eight children. Teresina was busy with the eighth, and with making certain preparations for the ninth.

On Sunday, however, the vieja, clad in black satin more ancient even than she, hatted in a grim and durable affair of black straw, on which were fastened two true cherries of enameled plaster, threw duty to the wind and went firmly to church, where she sat as motionless as the saints in their niches. Once a month, in the afternoon, she went to confession. It would be interesting to know what sins she confessed, and where she found the time to commit them, for in Teresina’s house there were creepers, crawlers, stumblers, shriekers, cat-killers, fallers-out-of-trees; and each one of these charges could be trusted to be ravenous every two hours.

Is it any wonder that the vieja had a remote soul and nerves of steel? Any other kind would have gone screaming out of her body like little skyrockets.

Teresina was a mildly puzzled woman, as far as her mind was concerned. Her body was one of those perfect retorts for the distillation of children. The first baby, conceived when she was fourteen, had been a shock to her; such a shock, that she delivered it in the ball park at night, wrapped it in newspaper and left it for the night watchman to find. This is a secret. Even now Teresina might get into trouble if it were known.

When she was sixteen, Mr. Alfred Cortez married her and gave her his name and the two foundations of her family, Alfredo and Ernie. Mr. Cortez gave her that name gladly. He was only using it temporarily anyway. His name, before he came to Monterey and after he left, was Guggliemo. He went away after Ernie was born. Perhaps he foresaw that being married to Teresina was not going to be a quiet life.

The regularity with which she became a mother always astonished Teresina. It occurred sometimes that she could not remember who the father of the impending baby was; and occasionally she almost grew convinced that no lover was necessary. In the time when she had been under quarantine as a diphtheria carrier she conceived just the same. However, when a question became too complicated for her mind to unravel, she usually laid that problem in the arms of the Mother of Jesus who, she knew, had more knowledge of, interest in and time for such things than she.

Teresina went often to confession. She was the despair of Father Ramon. Indeed he had seen that while her knees, her hands and her lips did penance for an old sin, her modest and provocative eyes, flashing under drawn lashes, laid the foundations for a new one.

During the time I have been telling this, Teresina’s ninth child was born, and for the moment she was unengaged. The vieja received another charge; Alfredo entered his third year in the first grade, Ernie his second, and Panchito went to school for the first time.

At about this time in California it became the stylish thing for school nurses to visit the classes and to catechize the children on intimate details of their home life. In the first grade, Alfredo was called to the principal’s office, for it was thought that he looked thin.

The visiting nurse, trained in child psychology, said kindly, “Freddie, do you get enough to eat?”

“Sure,” said Alfredo.

“Well, now. Tell me what you have for breakfast.”

“Tortillas and beans,” said Alfredo.

The nurse nodded her head dismally to the principal. “What do you have when you go home for lunch?”

“I don’t go home.”

“Don’t you eat at noon?”

“Sure. I bring some beans wrapped up in a tortilla.”

Actual alarm showed in the nurse’s eyes, but she controlled herself. “At night what do you have to eat?”

“Tortillas and beans.”

Her psychology deserted her. “Do you mean to stand there and tell me you eat nothing but tortillas and beans?”

Alfredo was astonished. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “what more do you want?”

In due course the school doctor listened to the nurse’s horrified report. One day he drove up to Teresina’s house to look into the matter. As he walked through the yard the creepers, the crawlers and the stumblers were shrieking one terrible symphony. The doctor stood in the open kitchen door. With his own eyes he saw the vieja go to the stove, dip a great spoon into a kettle and sow the floor with boiled beans. Instantly the noise ceased. Creepers, crawlers and stumblers went to work with silent industry, moving from bean to bean, pausing only to eat them. The vieja went back to her chair for a few moments of peace. Under the bed, under the chairs, under the stove the children crawled with the intentness of little bugs. The doctor stayed two hours, for his scientific interest was piqued. He went away shaking his head.

He shook his head incredulously while he made his report. “I gave them every test I know of,” he said, “teeth, skin, blood, skeleton, eyes, co-ordination. Gentlemen, they are living on what constitutes a slow poison, and they have from birth. Gentlemen, I tell you I have never seen healthier children in my life!” His emotion overcame him. “The little beasts,” he cried. “I never saw such teeth in my life. I never saw such teeth!”

You will wonder how Teresina procured food for her family. When the bean threshers have passed, you will see, where they have stopped, big piles of bean chaff. If you will spread a blanket on the ground, and, on a windy afternoon, toss the chaff in the air over the blanket, you will understand that the threshers are not infallible. For an afternoon of work you may collect twenty or more pounds of beans.

In the autumn the vieja and those children who could walk went into the fields and winnowed the chaff. The landowners did not mind, for she did no harm. It was a bad year when the vieja did not collect three or four hundred pounds of beans.

When you have four hundred pounds of beans in the house, you need have no fear of starvation. Other things, delicacies such as sugar, tomatoes, peppers, coffee, fish or meat may come sometimes miraculously, through the intercession of the Virgin, sometimes through industry or cleverness; but your beans are there, and you are safe. Beans are a roof over your stomach. Beans are a warm cloak against economic cold.

Only one thing could threaten the lives and happiness of the family of the Señora Teresina Cortez; that was a failure of the bean crop.

When the beans are ripe, the little bushes are pulled and gathered into piles, to dry crisp for the threshers. Then is the time to pray that the rain may hold off. When the little piles of beans lie in lines, yellow against the dark fields, you will see the farmers watching the sky, scowling with dread at every cloud that sails over; for if a rain comes, the bean piles must be turned over to dry again. And if more rain falls before they are dry, they must be turned again. If a third shower falls, mildew and rot set in, and the crop is lost.

When the beans were drying, it was the vieja’s custom to burn a candle to the Virgin.

In the year of which I speak, the beans were piled and the candle had been burned. At Teresina’s house, the gunny sacks were laid out in readiness.

The threshing machines were oiled and cleaned.

A shower fell.

Extra hands rushed to the fields and turned the sodden hummocks of beans. The vieja burned another candle.

More rain fell.

Then the vieja bought two candles with a little gold piece she had kept for many years. The field hands turned over the beans to the sun again; and then came a downpour of cold streaking rain. Not a bean was harvested in all Monterey County. The soggy lumps were turned under by the plows.

Oh, then distress entered the house of Señora Teresina Cortez. The staff of life was broken; the little roof destroyed. Gone was that eternal verity, beans. At night the children cried with terror at the approaching starvation. They were not told, but they knew. The vieja sat in church, as always, but her lips drew back in a sneer when she looked at the Virgin. “You took my candles,” she thought. “Ohee, yes. Greedy you are for candles. Oh, thoughtless one.” And sullenly she transferred her allegiance to Santa Clara. She told Santa Clara of the injustice that had been done. She permitted herself a little malicious thought at the Virgin birth. “You know, sometimes Teresina can’t remember either,” she told Santa Clara viciously.

It has been said that Jesus Maria Corcoran was a great-hearted man. He had also that gift some humanitarians possess of being inevitably drawn toward those spheres where his instinct was needed. How many times had he not come upon young ladies when they needed comforting. Toward any pain or sorrow he was irresistibly drawn. He had not been to Teresina’s house for many months. If there is no mystical attraction between pain and humanitarianism, how did it happen that he went there to call on the very day when the last of the old year’s beans were put in the pot?

He sat in Teresina’s kitchen, gently brushing children off his legs. And he looked at Teresina with polite and pained eyes while she told of the calamity. He watched, fascinated, when she turned the last bean sack inside out to show that not one single bean was left. He nodded sympathetically when she pointed out the children, so soon to be skeletons, so soon to die of starvation.

Then the vieja told bitterly how she had been tricked by the Virgin. But upon this point, Jesus Maria was not sympathetic.

“What do you know, old one?” he said sternly. “Maybe the Blessed Virgin had business some place else.”

“But four candles I burned,” the vieja insisted shrilly.

Jesus Maria regarded her coldly. “What are four candles to Her?” he said. “I have seen one church where She had hundreds. She is no miser of candles.”

But his mind burned with Teresina’s trouble. That evening he talked mightily and piteously to the friends at Danny’s house. Out of his great heart he drew a compelling oratory, a passionate plea for those little children who had no beans. And so telling was his speech that the fire in his heart ignited the hearts of his friends. They leaped up. Their eyes glowed.

“The children shall not starve,” they cried. “It shall be our trust!”

“We live in luxury,” Pilon said.

“We shall give of our substance,” Danny agreed. “And if they needed a house, they could live here.”

“Tomorrow we shall start,” Pablo exclaimed. “No more laziness! To work! There are things to be done!”

Jesus Maria felt the gratification of a leader with followers.

Theirs was no idle boast. Fish they collected. The vegetable patch of the Hotel Del Monte they raided. It was a glorious game. Theft robbed of the stigma of theft, crime altruistically committed—What is more gratifying?

The Pirate raised the price of kindlings to thirty cents and went to three new restaurants every morning. Big Joe stole Mrs. Palochico’s goat over and over again, and each time it went home.

Now food began to accumulate in the house of Teresina. Boxes of lettuce lay on her porch, spoiled mackerel filled the neighborhood with a strong odor. And still the flame of charity burned in the friends.

If you could see the complaint book at the Monterey Police Department, you would notice that during this time there was a minor crime wave in Monterey. The police car hurried from place to place. Here a chicken was taken, there a whole patch of pumpkins. Paladini Company reported the loss of two one-hundred-pound cases of abalone steaks.

Teresina’s house was growing crowded. The kitchen was stacked high with food. The back porch overflowed with vegetables. Odors like those of a packing house permeated Tortilla Flat. Breathlessly the friends dashed about at their larcenies, and long they talked and planned with Teresina.

At first Teresina was maddened with joy at so much food, and her head was turned by the compliment. After a week of it, she was not so sure. The baby was down with colic, Ernie had some kind of bowel trouble, Alfredo’s face was flushed. The creepers and crawlers cried all the time. Teresina was ashamed to tell the friends what she must tell them. It took her several days to get her courage up; and during that time there arrived fifty pounds of celery and a crate of cantaloupes. At last she had to tell them. The neighbors were beginning to look at her with lifted brows.

She asked all of Danny’s friends into her kitchen, and then she informed them of the trouble, modestly and carefully, that their feelings might not be hurt.

“Green things and fruit are not good for children,” she explained. “Milk is constipating to a baby after it is weaned.” She pointed to the flushed and irritable children. See, they were all sick. They were not getting the proper food.

“What is the proper food?” Pilon demanded.

“Beans,” she said. “There you have something to trust, something that will not go right through you.”

The friends went silently away. They pretended to themselves to be disheartened, but they knew that the first fire of their enthusiasm had been lacking for several days.

At Danny’s house they held a conference.

This must not be told in some circles, for the charge might be serious.

Long after midnight, four dark forms who shall be nameless, moved like shadows through the town. Four indistinct shapes crept up on the Western Warehouse Company platform. The watchman said, afterward, that he heard sounds, investigated and saw nothing. He could not say how the thing was done, how a lock was broken and the door forced. Only four men know that the watchman was sound asleep, and they will never tell on him.

A little later the four shadows left the warehouse, and now they were bent under tremendous loads. Pantings and snortings came from the shadows.

At three o’clock in the morning Teresina was awakened by hearing her back door open. “Who is there?” she cried.

There was no answer, but she heard four great thumps that shook the house. She lighted a candle and went to the kitchen in her bare feet. There, against the wall, stood four one-hundred-pound sacks of pink beans.

Teresina rushed in and awakened the vieja. “A miracle!” she cried. “Come look in the kitchen.”

The vieja regarded with shame the plump full sacks. “Oh, miserable dirty sinner am I,” she moaned. “Oh, Holy Mother, look with pity on an old fool. Every month thou shalt have a candle, as long as I live.”

At Danny’s house, four friends were lying happily in their blankets. What pillow can one have like a good conscience? They slept well into the afternoon, for their work was done.

And Teresina discovered, by a method she had found to be infallible, that she was going to have a baby. As she poured a quart of the new beans into the kettle, she wondered idly which one of Danny’s friends was responsible.

No Trouble at All by Ludwig Bemelmans, 1898–1962

The world is full of maîtres d’hôtel, many of whom are able, well-informed men. But only one in a hundred thousand is blessed with that rarest, most priceless of qualities so generously evident in Gabriel, the Maître of the Cocofinger Palace Hotel in New York.

We see this peculiar talent in the profile below, behind the ear, under “Detail and Executive Ability.” It is the faculty of “Anticipation,” an astral clairvoyance with which to sense catastrophe anywhere in the wide realm of his authority. Not only to feel it ahead, but to prepare for it, and minimize the effect thereof.

One more look at the graph and it is evident to anyone why, with such talents, Gabriel has come up, up, up, from the position of third piccolo at the humble Red Ox Tavern in Obergurgl, through the pantries and over the red carpets of Madame Sacher’s, the Negresco, Shepheard’s, the Meurice, Claridge’s, up to the golden doors of the restaurant of the hotel of hotels—the Cocofinger Palace in New York.

Gabriel smokes Dimitrinos, he has twenty dozen shirts, he thinks in French, his hats come from London, and both Noel Coward and Cole Porter have asked him who builds his faultless tail coats.

To his many subordinates, he speaks through his assistant, one Hector de Malherbes. Between the Maître and Malherbes is perfect, wordless understanding. Never were Gabriel’s great talents and the mute felicity of Malherbes more clearly demonstrated than on the night and day of February the twenty-fifth, 1937.

On that Thursday at three-fifteen in the afternoon, when the last luncheon guests had left, Gabriel leaned on his desk with its seven drawers, one for each day of the week, and nodded gently to Malherbes. Malherbes bent down to the drawer Jeudi—because it was Thursday—and took from it a salmon-colored folder with a sulphur label on which was written: “Birthday Party, February 25, 1937, Mrs. George Washington Kelly.”

Gabriel carried the folder up to his room. Malherbes bowed and left. In his room Gabriel took off the faultless tail coat which was rounded from much bowing, hung it up, sat on his bed, and carefully unfolded the bills that five-, ten-, and one-dollar patrons had pressed into his hand. He added them up and entered into a little crimson book: “February 25, Déjeuner, $56.” Then he took off his boots, leaned back into the pillows, stretched his toes in the sheer black Sulka silk socks, and opened the salmon-colored folder.

Madame George Washington Kelly was a very difficult and exacting client. The Italian waiters called her “bestia,” the French “canaille,” and the Germans “die alte Sau.” She had a desperate countenance, partly concealed by a veil; behind this her face shone the color of indigo. Her skin had the texture of volcanic rock seen from the air with dirty snow swept into the crevices.

She dressed with complete immunity to fashion, except for the Beaux Arts Ball. On the night of that elaborate affaire she had come with her friend, the “Spirit of the Midnight Sun,” and together they had engaged the rooms and made the preliminary plans for this birthday party, of which Malherbes had said to Monsieur Gabriel in sotto voce French, “It is not a birthday party—it is a centennial celebration.” Gabriel had stared him into silence.

After many more visits and consultations with architects, stage designers, and florists, Madame had decided to build at the end of the ballroom a replica of her Miami retreat, “O Sole Mio,” in its original noble dimensions. This was to be set among hibiscus, poinciana, and orange trees in bloom, surrounded by forty-three-foot royal palm trees and fronted by wide terraces. Cutting through the center of the room, from the terrace on the north to a magnificent flight of stairs on the south, ran the lagoon, filled with real water, and in this water was to float the genuine gondola which Mr. George Washington Kelly had brought as a souvenir from Venice and taken all the way to Miami. The stairs on the north end rose to a balcony; from there, a birthday cake was to be carried down, placed on the gondola, and rowed across to Sole Mio, where Mrs. Kelly’s own servants would bring it to her table to be cut.

The gondola was in Miami, also the royal palms, also the four white-haired servants, brothers named Morandus. The Fire Department had sent a captain to study the position of the hydrants and windows, to connect a pumping truck, and to fill the lagoon, which it was estimated would take fourteen hours.

To do all this properly, the complete entertaining facilities of the Cocofinger Palace Hotel had been rented for a week ahead of the party and a week following it, to clear away the debris. Mr. George Washington Kelly was many times a millionaire.

Since Monday of the first week, the Cocofinger Palace had been filled with drafts from open doors and windows, with tall ladders and empty smilax crates. Careless carpenters, careless stagehands, and careless plumbers and florists ruined the peace and the carpets of the hotel with hammering, riveting, and soldering together the two-hundred-foot tank that was to serve as the lagoon. Following on the heels of the plumbers came the painters, who painted the sides of the lagoon emerald green and put a pattern of underwater scenery on its bottom. An eminent artist from Coral Gables supervised this.

The menu for this party was dictated by Madame herself, without benefit of Gabriel’s advice. It was in the tradition of her entertainments and composed itself—at twenty dollars a cover for four hundred guests—of the following: Caviar aux blinis, borscht, homard Sole Mio, faisan Miami, puree de marrons, pommes soufflées, salade Georges et Marthe, bombe Washington, café.

For the one thousand five hundred additional guests for supper, she had chosen an equally unfortunate repast. This, at ten dollars a cover, consisted of velouté Marthe aux croûtons, poussin en cocotte Washington, nouilles polonaise, petits pois parisiennes, bombe Sole Mio aux fraises cardinal, gâteaux Georges, café.

Breakfast was to be served from four o’clock on, at two dollars and fifty cents a person. Provision was also made for eighty musicians’ suppers, suppers for chauffeurs, maids, the secretaries at the door, and the announcer and the detectives, at one dollar a person.

Cocktails were to be served during the reception: a fantastic violent drink of Madame’s own invention, named “High Diddle,” the most secret formula for which Madame fortunately gave to no one. Closely guarded, her trusty servants—the Morandi—were to mix this, bringing most of the ingredients themselves from Florida.

After Gabriel had read the papers thoroughly and made several notes, he rose, looked into the mirror, and took a loose smoking jacket from his closet. He slipped on a pair of white gloves and walked below. Malherbes was waiting for him. It was six o’clock.

Gabriel nodded, and his assistant followed him with a silver pencil and a morocco portfolio.

They walked through the kitchen, where the cooks fished red lobster out of steaming casseroles and chopped them in half. From there they went to the cellar; here, men broke open cases of Cordon Rouge 1921 and put them away in tubs. From here, they walked up to the ballroom proper. The tables, seating eight guests each, were set to the left and right of the lagoon. Sole Mio was finished, and on the lower terraces in front of it—as indicated on the plan—was the crescent-shaped table, facing the room. Here, Monsieur and Madame George Washington Kelly and their son George Washington Kelly, Jr., as well as their most intimate friends, would sit.

Two painters were busy pouring and stirring fifty gallons of turquoise ink into the lagoon, to give it the precise color of the waters around Miami. The Coral Gables artist had left with them a sample of that shade on a piece of water-color paper, and from time to time they compared this and then added more ink. Up on the balcony of Sole Mio, two electricians were focusing spotlights across the room, up to a magenta curtain on the other side.

From the street could be heard the “poooommmph, puuuuumph, poomph” of the Fire Department pumping-truck which filled the lagoon with water.

Gabriel, walking into the hall, saw the last of twenty royal palms—in tubs, with their leaves carefully bandaged—being carried upstairs, and below from the street appeared the neck of the Venetian gondola.

The great Maître nodded to Malherbes. Malherbes ran down to the door and told the men: “Watch out for the paint, you.” Later on, in the office, he made certain that a gondolier had been engaged. Yes, he had. He was to report at the ballroom in costume, with a knowledge of how to row the gondola and the ability to sing “O Sole Mio.”

Gabriel went to his room, lit a cigarette, and rested in his bath for half an hour. Then he dressed.

As on every evening, so now, he received the dinner guests of the hotel at the door of the restaurant.

Madame George Washington Kelly’s party over in the ballroom was in the able hands of his third assistant, Monsieur Rudi, a withered onetime stableboy of Prince Esterházy’s.

At regular intervals a courier crossed from the ballroom and whispered to Malherbes, “The guests are arriving.” Then again, “The cocktails are being passed.” After this, “The guests are entering the ballroom.” Then, “Madame George Washington Kelly is very pleased,” and on to “The guests are sitting down,” and “The soup is being served.” These bulletins were translated into French by Malherbes and whispered on to Gabriel, who nodded.

Dinner was almost over in the restaurant when Gabriel went into a little side room where, on a table behind a screen, a plain meal was prepared for him. It consisted of some cold pheasant cut from the bones, field salad with lemon dressing, and a plain compote of black cherries cooked without sugar. In ice under the table was his favorite wine, an elegant, slim bottle of Steinberger Kabinett, Preussische Staatsdomäne, 1921.

In the middle of the meal, before he had touched the great wine, Gabriel rose abruptly and quickly walked across the restaurant. Malherbes, who had eaten out in the second little room off the restaurant, swallowed quickly and followed him. Almost running, they crossed the entrance hall of the ballroom and went up the staircase, to the third palm.

Gabriel suddenly stopped there, and beside him, as always, stopped Hector de Malherbes. The dessert had just been served, the remnants of the bombe Washington were being carried from the room by the waiters, and, as set forth in the sheet of instructions, the lights were lowered.

Two heralds sounded the Aïda theme as a command to silence and attention.

The heavy magenta curtains sailed back, and high above the audience appeared the birthday cake. It was magnificent, of generous proportions and truly beautiful, the masterpiece of Brillat Bonafou, chef pâtissier of the Cocofinger Palace Hotel, twice the winner of the Médaille d’Or de la Société Culinaire de Paris, Founder and President of the Institut des Chefs Pâtissiers de France. In weeks of patient, sensitive, loving labor he had built a monument of sugar, tier upon tier, ten feet high, of raisin and almond cake. It was of classic simplicity, yet covered with innumerable ornaments that depicted scenes from a happy sporting life. Up and down the cake dozens of cherubim were busy carrying ribbons; these—Bordeaux and emerald—represented the racing colors of the G. W. K. stables.

But the most wonderful part of the wonderful cake was its top. There, complete in all details, stood a miniature replica of O Sole Mio, correct as to palms, orange trees, the lagoon, the gondola. Under the portico, an inch high, smiling, hand in hand, stood Monsieur and Madame George Washington Kelly: Madame with a bouquet of roses, Monsieur with his ever-present cigar, an Hoyo de Monterrey, at the end of which was a microscopic tuft of cotton. That was, however, not all. Over the miniature Sole Mio hovered a brace of doves. In their beaks, most artfully held, were electric wires, so arranged that flashing on and off they spelled first “George” and then “Martha,” “George” in Bordeaux, and “Martha” in emerald green. Five lady midgets, dressed as the Quintuplets, carried the cake downstairs in the light of the amber spotlights.

An Hawaiian orchestra played “Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday to You.” Everyone sang, and all eyes were moist.

The gondolier started to punt down the lagoon to receive the cake.

At that moment, with all eyes upon them, one of the Quintuplets, Yvonne, stepped on an olive pit, and turned her ankle. The cake trembled, swayed, and fell into the lagoon, taking the midgets with it. “Ffssss-hsss,” went the electric wires.

But where is Gabriel?

He stood under the royal palm and nodded quietly to Malherbes. Malherbes lifted one finger and looked up at the man with the spotlight.

The amber light left the lagoon and raced up the stairs. Out came the trumpeters again and sounded the Aïda theme, the curtain swung open once more, again the Hawaiians played “Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday to You.”

As if the last dreadful minutes had never been on the watches of this world, there appeared to the unbelieving eyes of Monsieur and Madame George Washington Kelly and their guests and friends—THE CAKE again, unharmed, made with equal devotion, again the work of Brillat Bonafou, identically perfect and complete, with the scenes of the happy life, the cherubim, cigar and smoke, lagoon and gondola, and the lights in the dove-beaks flashing on and off, “George” in Bordeaux and “Martha” in emerald green; the new cake was carried on the shoulders of a new set of Quintuplets.

The miserable first set of midgets swam to the shore of the lagoon, scrambled out, and tried to leave the ballroom in the shade of the tables.

Gabriel hissed “Imbéciles!” to Malherbes. Malherbes hissed “Imbéciles!” down to the wet midgets.

The new cake was rowed across, besung, carried to the table, cut, and served. Not until then did the great maître d’hôtel leave the protecting shadow of the royal palm. Now he walked quietly, unseen, to his room; for, in spite of possessing every talent, and, besides, the gift of “Anticipation,” Monsieur Gabriel was a very modest man.

There are several things from what Ernest Hemingway has written that I would like to put here, to end this section about America and this whole book about feasting with a writer who is American and who is good.

From all that he has said, though, about how human beings eat and drink and exist, I have chosen to print one morsel from For Whom the Bell Tolls. What the people in Spain ate and drank in their doomed vitality upon a hillside is a part of their being real.

From For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, 1899–1961

Now the morning was late May, the sky was high and clear and the wind blew warm on Robert Jordan’s shoulders. The snow was going fast and they were eating breakfast. There were two big sandwiches of meat and the goaty cheese apiece, and Robert Jordan had cut thick slices of onion with his clasp knife and put them on each side of the meat and cheese between the chunks of bread.

“You will have a breath that will carry through the forest to the fascists,” Agustín said, his own mouth full.

“Give me the wineskin and I will rinse the mouth,” Robert Jordan said, his mouth full of meat, cheese, onion and chewed bread.

He had never been hungrier and he filled his mouth with wine, faintly tarry-tasting from the leather bag, and swallowed. Then he took another big mouthful of wine, lifting the bag up to let the jet of wine spurt into the back of his mouth, the wineskin touching the needles of the blind of pine branches that covered the automatic rifle as he lifted his hand, his head leaning against the pine branches as he bent it back to let the wine run down.

“Dost thou want this other sandwich?” Agustín asked him, handing it toward him across the gun.

“No. Thank you. Eat it.”

“I cannot. I am not accustomed to eat in the morning.”

“You do not want it, truly?”

“Nay. Take it.”

Robert Jordan took it and laid it on his lap while he got the onion out of his side jacket pocket where the grenades were and opened his knife to slice it. He cut off a thin sliver of the surface that had dirtied in his pocket, then cut a thick slice. An outer segment fell and he picked it up and bent the circle together and put it into the sandwich.

“Eatest thou always onions for breakfast?” Agustín asked.

“When there are any.”

“Do all in thy country do this?”

“Nay,” Robert Jordan said. “It is looked on badly there.”

“I am glad,” Agustín said. “I had always considered America a civilized country.”

“What hast thou against the onion?”

“The odor. Nothing more. Otherwise it is like the rose.”

Robert Jordan grinned at him with his mouth full.

“Like the rose,” he said. “Mighty like the rose. A rose is a rose is an onion.”

“Thy onions are affecting thy brain,” Agustín said. “Take care.”

“An onion is an onion is an onion,” Robert Jordan said cheerily and, he thought, a stone is a stein is a rock is a boulder is a pebble.

“Rinse thy mouth with wine,” Augustín said. “Thou art very rare, Inglés. There is a great difference between thee and the last dynamiter who worked with us.”

“There is one great difference.”

“Tell it to me.”

“I am alive and he is dead,” Robert Jordan said.