Don’t be afraid of undertaking “fancy dishes.” Sally forth bravely into the region of delicate and difficult dainties, when you are considering family bills of fare, and you will not be dismayed when called to get up a handsome “company” entertainment. “Grandmother’s way” may suit Mesdames Dull and Bigott, but you, being accustomed to use your reasoning powers, should remember that our estimable maternal progenitors knew as little of locomotives and magnetic telegraphs as of canned fruits and gelatine.
And, entre nous, I for one, and my John for two, are getting so tired of the inevitable pie! He read aloud to me the other day, with great gusto, a clever editorial from the Tribune, showing with much ingenuity and force, that the weakness for pie was a national vice. I wish I had room here to reprint it. Whenever I have been compelled since to eat a triangle of “family pie-crust,” my usually excellent digestion has played me false.
“Pie and soda-water! That is a woman’s idea of a comfortable luncheon on a hot day in the city,” said a gentleman to me. “At a bit of rare, tender steak, and a mealy potato they would turn up their fastidious noses. Such gross food is only fit for a man.”
The school-girl, rising from a barely-tasted breakfast during which she has been saying over to herself the chronological table, or French verb, learned the night before,—“doesn’t care to take any luncheon with her to-day. Certainly, no bread-and-butter—and sandwiches are hateful! If you insist, mamma, just give me a piece of pie—mince-pie, if you have it, with a slice of fruitcake and a little cheese. I may feel hungry enough at noon to nibble at them.”
Papa, running in at eleven o’clock, to announce that he has had a business telegram which obliges him to take the next train to Boston or Chicago, “has not time to think of food, unless you can give me a bit of pie to eat while you are packing my valise.” He jumps from the cars at five P.M. to snatch another “bit of pie” from a station-restaurant, and swallows still a third, at midnight, bought from an itinerant vender of such comestibles, who swings himself on board when the “through Express” halts for wood and water. If his sick headache is not overpowering, he is adequate to the consumption of still a fourth leathery triangle when another stop is made at six A.M.
Pie is the pièce de résistance in rural desserts, at luncheon and at tea, and the mighty army mustered to meet the attacks of pic-nics and water-parties in the course of the year is enough to drive a dyspeptic to suicide, when he reads the sum total of the rough computation.
“I always calculate to bake a dozen of a Saturday,” says the farmer’s helpmate, resigned to cheerfulness in the narrative. “In haying and harvesting I make as many as thirty and forty every week. Nothing pleases our folks so much when they come in hot and tired, as a bit of pie—it don’t make much difference what kind—apple, berry, squash, or damson—so long as it is pie!”
This is not exaggeration, and the same mania for the destructive sweet is as prevalent among the working-classes of the city. It is useless to preach to artisans and laborers of the indigestible qualities of such pastry as is made by their wives at home, and bought at cheap bakeries; to represent that baked apples, and in the season, ripe, fresh fruits of all kinds are more nutritious, and even cheaper, when the prices of flour, sugar, and “shortening” are reckoned up, to say nothing of the time spent in rolling out, basting and baking the tough skinned, and often sour-hearted favorites.
Jellies are scorned as “having no substance into them;” blanc-mange is emphatically “flummery,” and whipped cream I have heard described scornfully as “sweetened nothing.”
Do not understand my strictures upon pie-olatry to mean indiscriminate condemnation of pastry. A really fine mince-pie is a toothsome delicacy, and the like quality of pumpkin-pie a luscious treat. Christmas would hardly be Christmas without the one, and I would have the other grace every Thanksgiving feast until the end of time. But surely there is an “out of season,” as well as “in.”