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Silver 8 New Year

Mrs. Boast had cooked the New Year's dinner.
"You can all crowd into my little place for once," she said.

Mrs. Boast sat by the stove and served the food from its hot top.

First, there was oyster soup.
In all her life Laura had never tasted anything so good as that sabory, fragrant,
sea-tasting hot milk, with golden dots of melted cream and black specks of pepper on its top,
and the little dark canned oysters at its bottom.

She sipped slowly, slowly from her spoon,
to keep that taste going over her tongue as long as she could.
And with this soup, there were little round oyster crackers.
The little oyster crackers were like doll-craclers,
and they tasted better because they were so light and small.

When the last drop of soup was gone,
and the last crackers divided and crunched,
there were hot biscuits with honey,
and dried-raspverry sauce.
And then a big dishpan full of tender salty popcorn,
that had been keeping hot on the back of the stove.

That was New Year's dinner.
It was light but filling.
There was something fashionable about it
because it was so odd and new, so different, and so daintily
served on Mrs. Boast's pretty dishes and brand-new tablecloth.

Afterward they sat talking in the little house,
with the soft air coming in and beyond the open door,
the brown prairie stretching far away and the soft blue sky curving down to meet it.

"I've never tasted finer honey, Mrs. Boast," said Pa.
"I'm glad you bought it out from Iowa."
"The oyster too," said Ma.
"I don't know when I've had such a treat as this dinner."
"It's a good beginning for 1880," Pa declared.
"The seventies haven't been so bad, but it looks like the eighties'll be better.
If this is a sample of a Dakota winter, we're all lucky we came west."

Wilder
by foodscene | 2009-12-30 15:22 | アメリカ


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