[Illustration: _Grace before Meat_]

"Let me cook the dinners of a nation, and I shall not care who makes its
laws." Women, if they did but know it, might well thus paraphrase a
famous saying. Proper dinners mean so much--good blood, good health,
good judgment, good conduct. The fact makes tragic a truth too little
regarded; namely, that while bad cooking can ruin the very best of raw
foodstuffs, all the arts of all the cooks in the world can do no more
than palliate things stale, flat and unprofitable. To buy such things is
waste, instead of economy. Food must satisfy the palate else it will
never truly satisfy the stomach. An unsatisfied stomach, or one
overworked by having to wrestle with food which has bulk out of all
proportion to flavor, too often makes its vengeful protest in dyspepsia.
It is said underdone mutton cost Napoleon the battle of Leipsic, and
eventually his crown. I wonder, now and then, if the prevalence of
divorce has any connection with the decline of home cooking?

A far cry, and heretical, do you say, gentle reader? Not so far after
all--these be sociologic days. I am but leading up to the theory with
facts behind it, that it was through being the best fed people in the
world, we of the South Country were able to put up the best fight in
history, and after the ravages and ruin of civil war, come again to our
own. We might have been utterly crushed but for our proud and pampered
stomachs, which in turn gave the bone, brain and brawn for the conquests
of peace. So here's to our Mammys--God bless them! God rest them! This
imperfect chronicle of the nurture wherewith they fed us is inscribed
with love to their memory.

Almost my earliest memory is of Mammy's kitchen. Permission to loiter
there was a Reward of Merit--a sort of domestic Victoria Cross. If, when
company came to spend the day, I made my manners prettily, I might see
all the delightful hurley-burley of dinner-cooking. My seat was the
biscuit block, a section of tree-trunk at least three feet across, and
waist-high. Mammy set me upon it, but first covered it with her clean
apron--it was almost the only use she ever made of the apron. The block
stood well out of the way--next the meal barrel in the corner behind the
door, and hard by the Short Shelf, sacred to cake and piemaking, as the
Long Shelf beneath the window was given over to the three water
buckets--cedar with brass hoops always shining like gold--the piggin,
also of cedar,