Outdoor Kitchens

Looking at pictures of remnants, and various reconstructions, of these outdoor kitchens, has occupied me for days. Laborious is a word I come away with. Hauling, fetching, lifting and cooking. Rude trestle tables on a covered back porch for the slaves, grits and buttermilk, then breakfast for 'the family', then preparing the huge mid-day meal. Reading recipes often becomes a sociological study. One thing I noticed was that salted pig fat was almost always mentioned. Also, that there was always a bread oven, off to the side of the firebox, and you had to turn the pan around, half-way through the hour it took to cook a loaf. Some of these kitchens, in early photographs, 1870 - 1880, are marvels of efficiency. I've cooked with a wood-fired stove for twenty years, and even mid-winter it can be a warm affair. I broke a personal rule and paid more than two dollars for an artichoke ($2.19) but it was perfect, medium-large, green and tight. I had stood and stared at them for so long that the attractive produce woman had come over and asked me if I was ok. I explained my problem and she said she'd never eaten one. I told her how to steam them, with four forks in a pan, and how to eat one, with browned butter and a total disregard for spatter. Back home the long way around so I could wash the undercarriage at the ford. Feeling out of alignment is often just mud in the wheel wells. So much water the flood plain near town is a vast inland sea. The Scioto is backed up coming into the Ohio and the Ohio is backed up flowing into the Mississippi. I heard on the radio that the levees are failing somewhere. I don't know where, exactly, because I've been experimenting with playing the news on the radio so low that the language sounds vaguely Russian. I can only pick out the occasional verb. Another game I play with the radio, is to fill a pause with the next word, and I'm correct a shocking number of times. Reading B's poems again today, so fecund and rich, his line breaks are almost commas and they drive the narrative flow. More rain, thunder, I'd better go. Hole up and read in the dark with my headlamp. Just another passing fancy. I would have finished Thoreau's journals in one winter if I hadn't stopped to read 20 volumes of Patrick O' Brian.