THE MAN WHO COOKS

Grey River Argus, Volume XV, Issue 1820, 5 June 1874, Page 4

THE MAN WHO COOKS

Every old Californian, having in " '49" baked his own bread and boiled his beans, deems himself a good family cook. He maintains even a greater conceit than this ; he deemß himself 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 i J or twice a year a culinary mania. He must cook; he will cook. He watches theopportunity when bis 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 opdn every door in the house, from cellar to garret. He turns the damper wrong, : He draws, water in the wrong bucket to fill, the tea-kettle. These things are terrible to mention, but they are often done in California. He throws potato and other vegetable parings in the cleanest pail he can find. Whenever he walks and whatever he touches he leaves a "muss." He leaves knives, forks, and spoons all over the house ; also, dish-rags ; he puts one of these in his . pocket. He ceases to be a rational or accountable being. An old male ,Californian cook, married, and in his 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 contemplated making tea. He reflects as to the quantity he osed in the mines for a " making." He cannot recollect exactly.

He crams several fistfuls into the teapot. He will have enough any way. No one who drinks thereof sleeps that night. Nervous. He essays to make buscuit. He wonders how much saleratus they used in the mines to get a good rise on. He uses enough. Be kneads his dough, and wandering vacantly about the house, leaves traces of flour at every step. It is in the parlor, on the door-knobs, on the bannisters. He can cook. He says he can cook better than any woman in the world if he " has only a- mind 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 " pardnera " who " combined" with him died of heavybread digestion. He was given twentyfour hours to leave that camp. Now wa 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 table-butter to cook with, and sets the cooking- butter 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 comes home. She opens the hall door, and is oppressed by the cloud of smoke. She knows then that the culinary fit 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 frying-pan is full of hot, smoking lard. It sizzles and sputters all over him, as he stands thsre with back to the stove, and all over everything for many feet around. There cornea from the oven door a auspicious smell of smoke ; his biscuits are burning. AH sorts of things in pots are boiling over. She rushes to his assistance. Both burn their fingers. He has mislaid half the stove covers, and cannot find them. One is 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. She does not come down to supper. No one eats much that evening. He has the whole table to himself. 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— boiling piecemeal, boiling furiously, like the driving of Jehu, the son of Nimshi, who drove rapidly, Next, day his wife comes down stairs and hires a woman to clear 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 married. Twice a year it rages, and the kitch n smokes. 411 California husbands have a touch of this disease. It was contracted in the mines in the flush days of '49.