little luxury--rather we lived amid a spare abundance, eating
up what had no market--I recall clearly times when you could hardly give
away fresh eggs, or frying-size chickens, other times when eggs fetched
five cents for two dozen--provided the seller would "take it in trade."
Chickens then, broiling size, were forty to fifty cents the dozen--with
often an extra one thrown in for good measure. For then chicken cholera
had not been invented--at least not down in the Tennessee blue grass
country. Neither had hog cholera--nor railroads. All three fell upon us
a very little before the era of the Civil War. Steamboats ran almost
half the year, but the flat boat traffic had been taken away by the
peopling prairies, which could raise so much more corn, derivatively so
many more hogs, to the man's work. Money came through wheat and
tobacco--not lavishly, yet enough for our needs. All this is set forth
in hope of explaining in some measure, the cookery I have tried to write
down faithfully--with so much of everything in hand, stinting would have
been sinful.

There was barbecue, and again there were barbecues. The viand is said to
get its name from the French phrase _a barbe d' ecu_, from tail to head,
signifying that the carcass was cooked whole. The derivation may be an
early example of making the punishment fit the crime. As to that I do
not know. What I do know is that lambs, pigs, and kids, when barbecued,
are split in half along the backbone. The animals, butchered at sundown,
and cooled of animal heat, after washing down well, are laid upon clean,
split sticks of green wood over a trench two feet deep, and a little
wider, and as long as need be, in which green wood has previously been
burned to coals. There the meat stays twelve hours--from midnight to
noon next day, usually. It is basted steadily with salt water, applied
with a clean mop, and turned over once only. Live coals are added as
needed from the log fire kept burning a little way off. All this sounds
simple, dead-easy. Try it--it is really an art. The plantation barbecuer
was a person of consequence--moreover, few plantations could show a
master of the art. Such an one could give himself lordly airs--the loan
of him was an act of special friendship--profitable always to the
personage lent. Then as now there were free barbecuers, mostly
white--but somehow their handiwork lacked a little of perfection. For
one thing, they never found out the exact secret of "dipne