Such as Mother Used to Make

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

As I have grown old in years and in pessimism, there has Strengthened in my heart a belief that I must have been, in my youth, a very credulous person. The glamour that hangs about the past makes it a kind of Arcadia and Utopia and Millennium rolled into one ; and the flavors that linger on the palate of memory are those of nectar and ambrosia, — food for the gods, yet tasted by me in the flesh.

I like to fancy that other lives have these fine flavors extending back into the years, linking past and present together. We grow used to them in time. We think of them as illusions. And we sadly admit that viands such as these could never have been baked on sea or land. They are the stuff that dreams are made of — and ideals and illusions. Peas, for instance, such as mother used to cook, bursting globules of sweetness, could never have existed in actuality. They had the taste of all outdoors in them and youth and courage and immortality, with just a hint of young and succulent young pork. Does one come upon such peas nowadays ? Are the greenish, brownish, skin-cased balls that are set before us from time to time, bearing the tired flavor of years in their hearts, are these peas ? Or what have they to do with the peas of memory ?

And the saddest thing about them is, not that they are peas, but that they are symbols. Youth has vanished and with it the fine, careless joys of eating. Some such conviction, I fancy, comes to most of us, — through peas or through gingerbread or mince pie or doughnuts or sausage or apple dumplings. Some such memory makes pessimists of us all, and we sigh, not for the viands of old, but for the vanished spirit within that made them worth while.

Believe it not, oh my brothers of the flesh. The things that mother used to make are still in the world. Far in the recesses of life you shall find them. And the name of the magic charm is pork. Fresh young pork, — home-raised pork, — clean and fat and sweet. Pork that permeates and flavors, with no indigestion in its bones and no sorrows in its train. Verily there is more poetry in pigs than Homer extracted from their white and rosy hides, — or even Charles Lamb. Oh, for some modern bard to sing the glories of the vanishing homemade pig! For where he exists joy is. Succotash, — do you know it ? Not the cold, hard, lumpy mixture, one part corn and the other part bean, — but succotash, the real thing, such as our Puritan ancestors knew and loved, — bean flavored with corn, corn melting to bean, and all alive and palpitating to the gentle influences of pork.

Talk not to me of stock-yards or of herds or butter or cottolene or oleomargarine or other just-as-goods. I would go far this morning to meet a respectable, a worthy piece of home - raised pork. It is not the things that mother used to make that are passing away, but the things she used to make them with, the things that were raised on the farm, — and all that they stand for, — the things that we must come back to in spirit and in truth and in actuality if we would taste again the true flavor, not the flavor of pork alone, but the flavor of life itself.