THE MAN WHO COOKS.

Evening Star, Issue 3499, 11 May 1874, Page 3

THE MAN WHO COOKS.

Eyery old Califerpiap, haying in ‘*’49” baked bis own bread and. boiled, his beans, deems himself a good family cp >k. He main-tajns-even a greater conceit than this; he deeme him ß6 !} a cook superior to any woman in the world, when he chooses to concentrate his mind on culinary affairs. On such a man, when duly married, there breaks out once or twice a year a culinary mania. He must cook; be will cook: ' He watches the opportunity his wife has prolonged her afternoon Visit a little longer than usual. He invades the kitchen. He kindles a fire in the stove. Before kindling that fire he leaves open every door in the house, from cellar to garret. He tump the damper wrong. The stove smokes the wrong way. He draws water in the wrong bucket to fill the tea kettle. | fiese things are terrible to mention, but they ge in California. He throws and .? th . er vegetable parings in the cleanest pail he can find. Whenever he ' W u at T r he * GUche3 be leaves a • muss. He leaves knives, forks, and spoons all over tfie house; also, dish-rags: J>f these in his pocket. He

ceases to be a rational |or accountable being. An old male California cook, married, and in hia wife’s kitchen, is not a well spring of pleasure. He brings all the frying-pans he can find into use. He sets their sooty bottoms on the clean pine table He contemplates nuking tea. He reflects as to the quantity he used in the mines for a “making.” I*e cinnot recollect exactly. He crams several hatfuls into the teapot. He will have enough, any way. No one who drinks thereof sleeps that night. Nervous. He essays io make biscuit. He wonders how much saleratus they used in the mines to get a good rise on. He uses enough. He kneads his dough, and wandering vacantly about the house, leaves t>aces of flour at every step, it is in the parlor, on the doorknobs, on the bannisters. He can cook. He says he can cook better than any woman in the world if he “ was only a-mimi to give his mind to it.” This conceit is never to be taken out of him. It is peculiar to all old Californians; for he made bread in the mines. It was good bread, too-good to kill. They say two “pardners’’ who “"cabined” with him died of heavy-bread indigestion. He was given twenty-four hours to leave that camp. Now we see him ravishing his wife s kitchen. He has burnt up all the choice newspapers lying about, which the folks wanted to read. He is using tablebutter to cook with, and seta the cookingbutter on the table. 'Things fall into that dough—buttons, matches, and bits of coal. In the midst of all this culinary riot, chaos smoke, grease, soot, rags, and flour, the wife home.. She open the hall door, and is oppressed by the cloud of smoke, bhe knows then that the culinary lit is on her husband. She steps into the kitchen. There he stands, red-heated, flustered, caught in the act, with a big spoon in one hand, a tormentor in the other, a spot of black on his nose. The fryuig-yan is full of hot, smoking lard. It sizzles and sputters all over him, aa he stands there with back to the stove, and all over; everything for .many feet around. There comes from the oven door a suspicious smell of. smoke : his biscuit are burning. All sorts of things in pots are boiling over. Slje rushes to his a.sistaqce. Both «btn their fingers. He has misf, *“1 the stove covers, and cannot find them. One 13 discovered, a fortnight afterwards, up stairs under the bed. How did it get there ? He says he didn’t know he was carrying it up at the time. Absent minded. He was looking for a clean towel at the time. His wife, in despair, goes to her room, and cries, and thinks of her happy girlhood days, bne does not come down to supper. No one eats mu§h that evening." He has the whole table to lumseit. He hasn’t much appetite, either He gets up every half minute for some forgotten article-for the salt, for a cup, for. a saucer. When he has entirely finished, he finds the potatoes forgotten ; they are still on the stove boiling—boil ng piecemeal, boiling furiously, like the driving of Jehu, the son of JNimshi,. who drove ■rap.dly. Next day his wife comes down stairs and hj res a woman to clean up. Things get settled in about a week. It is his only fault. He sticks to it that he can cook better than any woman in the world, if he chooses “to give his mind to it.” She says the mania never broke out in him until they had been two years mamed. Twice a year it rages, and the kitchen sm -kes. All California husbands have a touch of this disease. It was contracted in the mines in the flush dayaof 49.