Note 19 — Chapter Ten

... funny, but something our town was never to understand about Henriette was the disparity between her own rather mediocre cookery and her ability to instruct others in domestic science, after she had taken work along those lines at Northwestern University. I myself used patiently to hold forth the example of Miss Lee, our town’s music-teacher, who could teach our youngsters to play a Chopin Etude to the note, but was never heard to perform herself. It didn’t help, though. In the mind of Centralia, there was something irreconcilable in the paradox of Henriette as a domestic-science teacher and Henriette’s own rather dismal culinary efforts. Henriette’s brown raisin-bread, for instance, was atrocious. So soggy! Her recipe for making it, on the other hand, won my raisin-bread first-mention at every food-show I entered a batch.