Those who go into the country looking for summer board in farm-houses
know perfectly well that a table where the butter is always fresh, the
tea and coffee of the best kinds and well made, and the meats properly
kept, dressed, and served, is the one table of a hundred, the fabulous
enchanted island. It seems impossible to get the idea into the minds
of many people that what is called common food, carefully prepared,
becomes, in virtue of that very care and attention, a delicacy,
superseding the necessity of artificially compounded dainties. To
begin, then, with the very foundation of a good table:
--_Bread:_ What ought it to be?
It should be light, sweet, and tender. This matter of lightness is the
distinctive line between savage and civilized bread. The savage mixes
simple flour and water into balls of paste, which he throws into boiling
water, and which come out solid, glutinous masses, of which his common
saying is, "Man eat dis, he no die," which a facetious traveler who
was obliged to subsist on it interpreted to mean, "Dis no kill you,
nothing will." In short, it requires the stomach of a wild animal or
of a savage to digest this primitive form of bread, and of course more
or less attention in all civilized modes of bread-making is given to
producing lightness.
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