Literary Feast  ·  Read the passage. Cook the meal.
A bill of fare

The Prairie Wife

by Arthur Stringer

THE PRAIRIE WIFEARTHUR STRINGER
Our binding, not the publisher's

“Olie has a wire-fenced square where he grew beets and carrots and onions and turnips, and the biggest potatoes I ever saw. These will be pitted before the heavy frosts come. We get our butter and lard by the pail, and our flour by the sack, but getting things in quantities sometimes has its drawbacks. When I examined the oatmeal box I found it had weavels in it, and promptly threw all that meal away. Dinky-Dunk, coming in from the corral, viewed the pile with round-eyed amazement. "It's got _worms_ in it!" I cried out to him. He took up a handful of it, and stared at it with tragic sorrow. "Why, I ate weavels all last winter," he reprovingly remarked. Dinky-Dunk, with his Scotch strain, loves his porridge. So we'll have to get a hundred-weight, guaranteed strictly uninhabited, when we team into Buckhorn.”

From a cookbook of 1660

A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.

1660  ·  May
To butter Onions

Being peeled, put them into boiling liquor, and when they are boil'd, drain them in a cullender, and butter them whole with some boil'd currans, butter, sugar, and beaten cinamon, serve them on fine sippets, scrape on sugar, and run them over with beaten butter.

Sources: The passage is from Arthur Stringer, The Prairie Wife, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from May, The accomplisht cook of 1660, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — plum cloth, grapes stamp.

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