“In the kitchen while dawn faded, Ellen was slicing bacon with a long knife whetted to a narrow blade. She had brought the molded slab in from the smokehouse. Peeled potatoes were boiling in a pot, a pan of biscuits rose and browned in the oven. She started bacon frying in a spider and measured coffee out of a jar unscrewed from the grinder on the wall. She spooned it into water bubbling in a chipped tall pot. Frankie laid out plates, plum preserves, buttermilk, ketchup, a stone jar of butter. Both girls wore sleeveless petticoats, white stockings and church shoes. Later they would get into the new dresses. “Ellie, did you notice if that camel swallowed like a horse or chewed a cud?””
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
Rub off the skins, wash the potatoes well and wipe them dry; put them with three ounces of good butter, for a small dish, and with four ounces or more for a large one, into a well-tinned stewpan or Keep them well shaken or tossed, that they may be equally done, and throw in some salt when they begin to stew. This is a good mode of dressing them when they are very young and watery.
Sources: The passage is from Helga Sandburg, The wheel of earth, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Acton, Modern cookery for private families of 1845, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — plum cloth, boar stamp.