“‘Um,’ says she again, like a baby with a full stomach.
“‘Oh, Miss Belle,’ piped up Annie, ‘how do you make ’em?’
“That was the chance I had been waiting for.
“‘Would you like to know?’ I asked, and to a chorus of ‘Sure,’ ‘’Deed we would,’ ‘Oh, yes,’ I put the recipe on the board, and it wasn’t two days before those girls brought in as good corn muffins as I ever tasted. Little Annie is a good cook—never saw a better—and before the week was out she says to me:
“‘Miss Belle, ma’s mad with you.’
“‘What all’s the matter?’ I asked.
“‘She says since you taught us to make those corn muffins she’ll be eaten out of house and home. The first night I made ’em pa ate eleven. He hasn’t slackened off a bit since. He must have ’em every day.’
“That made the going pretty easy,” Miss Belle went on. “The muffins were mighty good, they were new, and, by comparison, the white biscuits didn’t have a show. It wasn’t long before I had the whole neighborhood making corn muffins, graham wafers, black bread, graham bread and whole-wheat bread. They sure did catch on to the idea quickly. Every Monday I put a recipe on the board. These women knew how to cook the fancy things. It was the plain, simple, wholesome things that they needed to know about, so my recipes were always for them. During the week each of the children cooks the thing and brings it to me, and the one who gets the best result puts a recipe on the board Friday.
“You see, after I once got started it wasn’t hard to follow up any line I liked. By the time I was putting a recipe a week on the board the mothers got naturally interested and would come to school to ask about this recipe and that. They wouldn’t take any advice, you understand, not they! They knew all about cooking, so they thought, but they were mighty proud of the things their daughters did, particularly when they took the prizes at the county fair. Besides that, it made a whole lot of difference at home, because the things they made helped out a lot and tasted mighty good on the table.”
Miss Belle’s next move was against the cake—soggy, sticky stuff, full of butter, that was very generally eaten by all of the families that could afford it. Expensive and fearfully indigestible it made up, together with bread, almost the entire contents of most lunch baskets.