I have a neat talent in matters pertaining to nourishment.  This has met with professional recognition.  I have often furnished recipes for cook-books.  Here are some designs for pies and things, which I recently prepared for a friend’s projected cook-book, but as I forgot to furnish diagrams and perspectives, they had to be left out, of course.

RECIPE FOR AN ASH-CAKE

Take a lot of water and add to it a lot of coarse Indian-meal and about a quarter of a lot of salt.  Mix well together, knead into the form of a “pone,” and let the pone stand awhile—­not on its edge, but the other way.  Rake away a place among the embers, lay it there, and cover it an inch deep with hot ashes.  When it is done, remove it; blow off all the ashes but one layer; butter that one and eat.

N.B.—­No household should ever be without this talisman.  It has been noticed that tramps never return for another ash-cake.

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RECIPE FOR NEW ENGLISH PIE

To make this excellent breakfast dish, proceed as follows:  Take a sufficiency of water and a sufficiency of flour, and construct a bullet-proof dough.  Work this into the form of a disk, with the edges turned up some three-fourths of an inch.  Toughen and kiln-dry in a couple days in a mild but unvarying temperature.  Construct a cover for this redoubt in the same way and of the same material.  Fill with stewed dried apples; aggravate with cloves, lemon-peel, and slabs of citron; add two portions of New Orleans sugars, then solder on the lid and set in a safe place till it petrifies.  Serve cold at breakfast and invite your enemy.

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RECIPE FOR GERMAN COFFEE

Take a barrel of water and bring it to a boil; rub a chicory berry against a coffee berry, then convey the former into the water.  Continue the boiling and evaporation until the intensity of the flavor and aroma of the coffee and chicory has been diminished to a proper degree; then set aside to cool.  Now unharness the remains of a once cow from the plow, insert them in a hydraulic press, and when you shall have acquired a teaspoon of that pale-blue juice which a German superstition regards as milk, modify the malignity of its strength in a bucket of tepid water and ring up the breakfast.  Mix the beverage in a cold cup, partake with moderation, and keep a wet rag around your head to guard against over-excitement.

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TO CARVE FOWLS IN THE GERMAN FASHION

Use a club, and avoid the joints.

CHAPTER L [Titian Bad and Titian Good]