Also, if you need any information as to how to run a cooking-school, I will enclose it with the next package.

Since the war, scores of Japanese women are wild to learn foreign cooking.  On inquiry as to the reason of such enthusiasm, we found it was because their husbands, while away from home, had acquired a taste for Occidental dainties.  Now their wives want to know all about them so they can set up opposition in their homes to the many tea-houses which offer European food as an extra attraction.  And depend upon it, if the women start to learn, they stick to it till there is nothing more to know on the subject.

I was to furnish the knowledge and the ladies the necessary utensils, but I guess I forgot to mention everything we might need.

The first thing we tried was biscuit.  All went well until the time came for baking.  I asked for a pan.  A pan?  What kind of a pan?  Would a wash pan do?  No, if it was all the same I would rather have a flat pan with a rim.  Certainly!  Here it was with a rim and a handle!  A shiny dust-pan greeted my eyes.  Well, there was not very much difference in the taste of the biscuit.

The prize accomplishment so far has been pies.  Our skill has not only brought us fame, but the city is in the throes of a pie epidemic.  A few days ago when the old Prince of the Ken came to visit his Hiroshima home, the cooking-ladies, after a few days’ consultation, decided that in no better way could royalty be welcomed than by sending him a lemon pie.  They sent two creamy affairs elaborately decorated with meringued Fujis.  They were the hit of the season.  The old gentleman wrote a poem about them saying he ate one and was keeping the other to take back to his country home when he returned a month hence.  Then he sent us all a present.

We have had only one catastrophe.  In a moment of reckless adventure my pupils tried a pound cake without a recipe.  A pound cake can be nothing else but what it says.  That meant a pound of everything and Japanese soda is doubly strong.  That was a week ago and we have not been able to stay in the room since.

Good-by!  The tailless pink cat and the purple fish with the pale blue eyes are for the kiddies.

I am inclosing an original recipe sent in by Miss Turtle Swamp of Clear Water Village: 

  Cake.

1 cup of Desecrated coconut 5 cup flowers 1 small spoon and barmilla [vanilla] 3 eggs skinned and whipped 1 cup sugar Stir and pat in pan to cook.

HIROSHIMA, December, 1911.

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