The Plainfield boys always had the
name of being smart, and I guess Lute Baker was just
about the smartest boy the old town ever turned out.
Well, he came by it naturally; Judge Baker was known
all over western Massachusetts as the sage of Plainfield,
and Lute’s mother-she was a Kellogg
before the judge married her-she had more
faculty than a dozen of your girls nowadays, and her
cooking was talked about everywhere-never
was another woman, as folks said, could cook like
Miss Baker. The boys-Lute’s
friends-used to hang around the back porch
of noonings just to get some of her doughnuts; she
was always considerate and liberal to growing boys.
May be Lute would n’t have been so popular
if it had n’t been for those doughnuts, and may
be he would n’t have been so smart if it had
n’t been for all the good things his mother
fed into him. Always did believe there was piety
and wisdom in New England victuals.
Lute went to Amherst College and did
well; was valedictorian; then he taught school a winter,
for Judge Baker said that nobody could amount to much
in the world unless he taught school a spell.
Lute was set on being a lawyer, and so presently
he went down to Springfield and read and studied in
Judge Morris’ office, and Judge Morris wrote
a letter home to the Bakers once testifying to Lute’s
“probity” and “acumen”-things
that are never heard tell of except high up in the
legal profession.
How Lute came to get the western fever
I can’t say, but get it he did, and one winter
he up and piked off to Chicago, and there he hung out
his shingle and joined a literary social and proceeded
to get rich and famous. The next spring Judge
Baker fell off the woodshed while he was shingling
it, and it jarred him so he kind of drooped and pined
round a spell and then one day up and died.
Lute had to come back home and settle up the estate.
When he went west again he took a
wife with him-Emma Cowles that was (everybody
called her Em for short), pretty as a picture and as
likely a girl as there was in the township.
Lute had always had a hankering for Em, and Em thought
there never was another such a young fellow as Lute;
she understood him perfectly, having sung in the choir
with him two years. The young couple went west
well provided.
Lute and Em went to housekeeping in
Chicago. Em wanted to do her own work, but Lute
would n’t hear to it; so they hired a German
girl that was just over from the vineyards of the
Rhine country.
“Lute,” says Em, “Hulda
does n’t know much about cooking.”
“So I see,” says Lute,
feelingly. “She’s green as grass;
you’ll have to teach her.”
Hulda could swing a hoe and wield
a spade deftly, but of the cuisine she knew somewhat
less than nothing. Em had lots of patience and
pluck, but she found teaching Hulda how to cook a precious
hard job. Lute was amiable enough at first; used
to laugh it off with a cordial bet that by and by
Em would make a famous cook of the obtuse but willing
immigrant. This moral backing buoyed Em up considerable,
until one evening in an unguarded moment Lute expressed
a pining for some doughnuts “like those mother
makes,” and that casual remark made Em unhappy.
But next evening when Lute came home there were doughnuts
on the table-beautiful, big, plethoric
doughnuts that fairly reeked with the homely, delicious
sentiment of New England. Lute ate one.
Em felt hurt.
“I guess it’s because
I ’ve eaten so much else,” explained
Lute, “but somehow or other they don’t
taste like mother’s.”
Next day Em fed the rest of the doughnuts
to a poor man who came and said he was starving.
“Thank you, marm,” said he, with his heart
full of gratitude and his mouth full of doughnuts;
“I ha’ n’t had anything as good
as this since I left Connecticut twenty years ago.”
That little subtlety consoled Em,
but still she found it hard to bear up under her apparent
inability to do her duty by Lute’s critical
palate. Once when Lute brought Col. Hi Thomas
home to dinner they had chicken pie. The colonel
praised it and passed his plate a third time.
“Oh, but you ought to eat some
of mother’s chicken pie,” said Lute.
“Mother never puts an under crust in her chicken
pies, and that makes ’em juicier.”
Same way when they had fried pork
and potatoes; Lute could not understand why the flesh
of the wallowing, carnivorous western hog should n’t
be as white and firm and sweet as the meat of the swill-fed
Yankee pig. And why were the Hubbard squashes
so tasteless and why was maple syrup so very different?
Yes, amid all his professional duties Lute found
time to note and remark upon this and other similar
things, and of course Em was-by implication,
at least-held responsible for them all.
And Em did try so hard, so very hard,
to correct the evils and to answer the hypercritical
demands of Lute’s foolishly petted and spoiled
appetite. She warred valorously with butchers,
grocers, and hucksters; she sent down east to Mother
Baker for all the famous family recipes; she wrestled
in speech and in practice with that awful Hulda; she
experimented long and patiently; she blistered her
pretty face and burned her little hands over that
kitchen range-yes, a slow, constant martyrdom
that conscientious wife willingly endured for years
in her enthusiastic determination to do her duty by
Lute. Doughnuts, chicken-pies, boiled dinners,
layer-cakes, soda biscuits, flapjacks, fish balls,
baked beans, squash pies, corned-beef hash, dried-apple
sauce, currant wine, succotash, brown bread-how
valorously Em toiled over them, only to be rewarded
with some cruel reminder of how “mother”
used to do these things! It was terrible; a tedious
martyrdom.
Lute-mind you-Lute
was not wilfully cruel; no, he was simply and irremediably
a heedless idiot of a man, just as every married man
is, for a spell, at least. But it broke Em’s
heart, all the same.
Lute’s mother came to visit
them when their first child was born, and she lifted
a great deal of trouble off the patient wife.
Old Miss Baker always liked Em; had told the minister
three years ago that she knew Em would make Lute a
good Christian wife. They named the boy Moses,
after the old judge who was dead, and old Miss Baker
said he should have his gran’pa’s watch
when he got to be twenty-one.
Old Miss Baker always stuck by Em;
may be she remembered how the old judge had talked
once on a time about his mother’s cooking.
For all married men are, as I have said, idiotically
cruel about that sort of thing. Yes, old Miss
Baker braced Em up wonderful; brought a lot of dried
catnip out west with her for the baby; taught Em how
to make salt-rising bread; told her all about stewing
things and broiling things and roasting things; showed
her how to tell the real Yankee codfish from the counterfeit-oh,
she just did Em lots of good, did old Miss Baker!
The rewards of virtue may be slow
in coming, but they are sure to come. Em’s
three boys-the three bouncing boys that
came to Em and Lute-those three boys waxed
fat and grew up boisterous, blatant appreciators of
their mother’s cooking. The way those boys
did eat mother’s doughnuts! And mother’s
pies-wow! Other boys-the
neighbors’ boys-came round regularly
in troops, battalions, armies, and like a consuming
fire licked up the wholesome viands which Em’s
skill and liberality provided for her own boys’
enthusiastic playmates. And all those boys-there
must have been millions of ’em-were
living, breathing, vociferous testimonials to the
unapproachable excellence of Em’s cooking.
Lute got into politics, and they elected
him to the legislature. After the campaign,
needing rest, he took it into his head to run down
east to see his mother; he had not been back home
for eight years. He took little Moses with him.
They were gone about three weeks. Gran’ma
Baker had made great preparations for them; had cooked
up enough pies to last all winter, and four plump,
beheaded, well-plucked, yellow-legged pullets hung
stiff and solemn-like in the chill pantry off the
kitchen, awaiting the last succulent scene of all.
Lute and the little boy got there
late of an evening. The dear old lady was so
glad to see them; the love that beamed from her kindly
eyes well nigh melted the glass in her silver-bowed
specks. The table was spread in the dining-room;
the sheet-iron stove sighed till it seemed like to
crack with the heat of that hardwood fire.
“Why, Lute, you ain’t
eatin’ enough to keep a fly alive,” remonstrated
old Miss Baker, when her son declined a second doughnut;
“and what ails the child?” she continued;
“ha’ n’t he got no appetite?
Why, when you wuz his age, Lute, seemed as if I could
n’t cook doughnuts fast enough for you!”
Lute explained that both he and his
little boy had eaten pretty heartily on the train
that day. But all the time of their visit there
poor old Gran’ma Baker wondered and worried because
they did n’t eat enough-seemed to
her as if western folks had n’t the right kind
of appetite. Even the plump pullets, served
in a style that had made Miss Baker famed throughout
those discriminating parts-even those pullets
failed to awaken the expected and proper enthusiasm
in the visitors.
Home again in Chicago, Lute drew his
chair up to the table with an eloquent sigh of relief.
As for little Moses, he clamored his delight.
“Chicken pie!” he cried,
gleefully; and then he added a soulful “wow!”
as his eager eyes fell upon a plateful of hot, exuberant,
voluptuous doughnuts.
“Yes, we are both glad to get back,” said
Lute.
“But I am afraid,” suggested
Em, timidly, “that gran’ma’s cooking
has spoiled you.”
Little Moses (bless him) howled an
indignant, a wrathful remonstrance. “Gran’ma
can’t cook worth a cent!” said he.
Em expected Lute to be dreadfully
shocked, but he was n’t.
“I would n’t let her know
it for all the world,” remarked Lute, confidentially,
“but mother has lost her grip on cooking.
At any rate, her cooking is n’t what it used
to be; it has changed.”
Then Em came bravely to the rescue.
“No, Lute,” says she, and she meant it,
“your mother’s cooking has n’t changed,
but you have. The man has grown away
from the boy, and the tastes, the ways, and the delights
of boyhood have no longer any fascination for the man.”
“May be you ’re right,”
said Lute. “At any rate, I ’m free
to say that your cooking beats the world.”
Good for Lute! Virtue triumphs
and my true story ends. But first an explanation
to concinnate my narrative.
I should never have known this true
story if Lute himself had n’t told it to me
at the last dinner of the Sons of New England-told
it to me right before Em, that dear, patient little
martyred wife of his. And I knew by the love
light in Em’s eyes that she was glad that she
had endured that martyrdom for Lute’s sake.