Modern Pasteboard Box,
cheap wooden pie-plates, and paper napkins. Wrap your sandwiches in a damp linen napkin and with an outside wrapper of confectioners’ paraffine paper and pack them, and everything else you can, in pasteboard boxes. Salads and similar foods may be carried in wide-mouthed glass jars; mayonnaise dressing, sliced cucumbers and tomatoes in the same manner.
Pack the Ground Coffee,
with an egg rolled in paper, in the coffee-pot. Make the egg into a bundle large enough to fit on top the coffee, with no room to roll or jolt about. The butter or other grease, left after the feast, may be melted and poured into the small paper or wooden boxes; a wick of twisted paper or rag, thoroughly soaked with the grease, will make a lamp. Name the lamps, set them afloat, and the light which goes out last is supposed to be your truest admirer.
The Rhode Island Clam-Bake,
the Pennsylvania Pond-Stew, the Virginia Soup, and the Kentucky Burgoo, are about the jolliest forms of picnics known in this country.
Resting in the laps of the high hills and mountains of Pennsylvania are many small lakes. Here the picnickers spend the forenoon capturing what edible aquatic creatures their skill can procure, all of which are put into the stew-pan along with vegetables, thus making a sort of fresh-water chowder of the most appetizing nature.
Burgoo.
In Virginia and Kentucky it was an old-time custom for the gentlemen to spend the forenoon hunting and fishing, and the slaves in the afternoon cooked the game and fish in great iron pots, hung over blazing wood fires, thus making a most savory dish for the ladies who joined the party toward evening. This is the origin of the Virginia Soup and the Kentucky Burgoo.