“Like Irving, Kennedy went back to the old home, but that old home was Virginia and not England; and there he found still lingering on the great plantations charmingly romantic anachronisms that had disappeared elsewhere--a spontaneous romanticism of temperament that gave color and zest to the daily routine. The aloofness of plantation life had bred in the Virginia gentry a piquant individuality, a distinction as of old morocco or calfskin. Philly Wart, the shrewdly humorous fox-hunting lawyer; old Mr. Tracy of The Brakes, “turning a little sour with age” and resembling “that waterish, gravelly soil that you see sometimes around a spring, where nothing grows but sheep-sorrel,” who cherishes a hereditary boundary dispute, pursuing his hypothetical rights through all the law courts and discovering, when the matter has been amicably settled by arbitration, that much of the zest has gone out of his life; the heroine Bel Tracy, a frank wholesome girl with a dash of Di Vernon in her romantic affectations that lead her to play at hawking: such figures fit as naturally into the background as the pampered house servants, the horseback riding, the constant visiting, the abundant dinners. Especially the dinners, when the neighborhood is invited in. The table spread with opulent hospitality and careless profusion--the baked ham at one end and the saddle of roast mutton at the other, with fried chicken, oysters, crabs, sweet potatoes, jellies, custards--a prodigal feast that only outdoor stomachs could manage, and all by way of preliminary to the dusty wine-bottles and easy stories that hold the men long after the ladies have withdrawn. Surely the romance of Old Virginia, preserved in these light-hearted discursive pages, is worth remembering by later generations who have forgotten how to live so genially.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
meat and bones by pounding; cover them with cold water, heat them slowly in a steam-tight kettle, and simmer them to a pulp; then strain through a sieve or cloth, season to taste, and return to the fire without the cover, to simmer until the liquid is reduced one half, skimming off all fat. Cool to form a jelly. If you have no steam-tight kettle, put a cloth between the lid and any kettle, and the purpose will be served. 250. =Chicken Broth.=--Dress a chicken or fowl, cut it in joints, put them in a chopping bowl, and chop them into small pieces, using flesh, bones, and skin. To every pound of the chicken thus prepared put one pint of cold water and one level teaspoonful of salt; if pepper is desired it should be either enough cayenne to lie on the point of a small pen-knife blade, or a half saltspoonful of ground _white_ pepper.
Sources: The passage is from Vernon Louis Parrington, Main currents in American thought : $b An interpretation of American l, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Corson, The Cooking Manual of Practical Directions for Economical of 1877, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — burgundy cloth, oyster stamp.