Cooking for profit

^ Why, it is a real relief to see the boiling hot suds and lye water dash around and deluge tables, walls, shelves, stove and floor once more, after all these years endurance of that vile, slimy, push-the-dirt-in-the-corners-and-leave-it-there way of mopping the horrible painted, grained and varnished kitchens of the present idiotic fashion. What! let the spiders build webs over the range and stay there the year around because the painted walls are too good to have hot suds thrown upon them? Now, I hope that housekeeper from the Great Frying Pan Valley will stay away while I scald something. This is my water cure, and my old Mike and Slim Jim and Reddy know it is a good one. I want to scald the winter and spring mouldiness, the bugs and roaches, _ flies, mud-daubers, daddy-longlegs, spiders, centipedes, mice, toads, snails and things, and there will be no reserved seats for spectators for a while. One afternoon, not long since, I went to show an old second of mine who is pastry cook at the Bende Beer House at Bingen-on-the-Bayou, how to make the Kaaterskill flannel rolls, sometimes called German puffs, that are just now the fashion, and while there had a chance to try the efficacy of boiling water. That house, too, has a painted and varnished kitchen with everything as inconveniently placed as all the modern improvements could possibly be, and altogether too nice for cleanliness. There are patent doors with patent springs to shut them up quick to keep the fresh air out; patent windows with nickelplated fastenings and blinds and screens and shutters to keep the foul air in. The meat block is at the other end of the table distant from the broiler; the pastry room is two rooms distant from the oven ; the kitchen floor is covered with oilcloth and a girl slimes it over with a mop at eleven every morning, and the cockroach population of that fine house is over a hundred millions (estimated). Seeing an odd million or so of the abominable insects roosting in a bunch under a low shelf near the range I could not resist the temptation to sling a two-quart and go back to their old haunts. It is all egregious folly making kitchens too good to stand boiling water. At some hotels that have been rebuilt two or three times and thereby cured of the first follies and made right at last. They have stone floors in the kitchens even when up stairs, and tile drains where the water may flow free. The old and natural style of kitchen had massive oaken beams and rafters, solid oaken tablets and walls or wainscot that could be scrubbed. Every time I chop the fins and head off a fish, or strike a broiling chicken with the side of the cleaver to flatten it for the gridiron a spray of animal juices flies and strikes somewhere. It may be scarcely visible at one time yet it coats over the walls alter a whlie. On the river we dipper of hot boiling water. Brought call the dividing walls bulkheads and we them all down at one shot. But, as if that i " " ' ----- was not enough, from some painted and i grained little cuddy hole underneath a lot of mice skipped out,for the hot water had fallen into a breeding place that had been undisturbed perhaps since the house was built. It being none of my funeral I left the place before the cook came home. Swash, Zip!