Note 10 — Chapter Five

I think we had the most beautiful kitchen in the world in the House on Sycamore Street. Old Trina used to tell us how the Welsh love their kitchens. Normandy is filled with quaint, curtained, shining kitchens after every woman’s heart. The kitchen plays no mean part as the social center in the entire history of civilization. To the Dutch and the Danes, it is still literally the nucleus of the home.

Our kitchen was that. Father originally built a house of one room. A kitchen-living-bedroom. It ran, of course, the width and length of the building. A long, low room, with oak rafters and an open fireplace with a spit. Later, when the original room was surrounded and surmounted by more rooms, the enormous fireplace was fashioned into a bricked-in range. And what a range! It had a hot breath that warmed through the fine thick walls. It could roar with a draught the like of which I have never seen since. In winter, even after the house had grown to proportions sufficient to comfortably house a family of five youngsters, that range attracted us like a great flame all the little moths. We toasted corn over its red caves. Baked yams and marshmallows in its fierce oven. Dried our snow-clogged clothing before its Sahara breath. Usually, there was a baby lamb or an ailing calf or a cat with a leg in a splint in a chip basket beside this astonishingly maternal stove.

It was a more beautiful kitchen than Washington Irving’s. It had mullioned windows that opened outward. In summer, they were grown over with columbine, that had to be kept clipped in order to allow opening them. There were two long white-pine tables in our kitchen, big enough to seat eight. On a bench, beside one, was a wooden bucket, with a dipper gourd, filled with the coolest cistern-water in the county. A second bucket was filled with well-water. Softer, for cooking. How well I recall the festoons of peppers. The hearth-broom made out of the left wing of a rooster. The great crocks of the various greases my mother rendered from goose and hen and parts of the hog. There was a wooden box in one of the window-sills stocked with twists of newspaper. Firelighters. A rifle, sans barrel, and with a broken cock, said to have belonged to Daniel Beinville, hung over the door.

My mother’s pleasant mania for starched ruffles asserted itself everywhere. Along the shelves of the safe. Along the muslin curtains in the sweet old mullioned windows. We used to tease her about these ruffles. Yes, there was a God Bless Our Home sampler over the cupboard door, and a small white ruffle along the shelf that bore it. And a clock, mahogany, with a nosegay painted on its glass door. This clock may be seen in the American Institute in Baltimore. Every Schuyler of us has reason to remember this kitchen with affection.