A teaspoonful of lard worked in with the flour improves the taste, but the bread will not keep forever, as it would without the lard. If lard is used, you may as well make a good imitation of Maryland biscuit while you are about it. Lay the dough out on a board and beat it lustily with a paddle until it becomes elastic, then bake.

Dough Gods

" Take 2/3 cupful of flour, 1 small teaspoonful of baking powder, 1/4 teaspoonful of salt, and a slice of fat bacon minced fine as possible. Mix thoroughly in your bread-pan and add water slowly, stirring and working till you have a tairly stiff dough. Flour the loaf, top and bottom, flour your hands and pat the dough out into a couple of big cakes about half an inch thick. Bake in the ashes, or in the frying-pan. . . . This is the old way of baking with bacon instead of rendered grease or lard, used by men who carried nothing they could do without, and whose only food staples were flour, bacon, baking-powder, and salt." (Ediuard Cave).

Corn Bread

Plain corn bread, without flour, milk, or egg, is hard to make eatable without a Dutch oven to bake it in. Even so, it is generally spoiled by being baked too fast and not long enough to be done inside.

Corn Pone

1 quart meal,

1 teaspoonful salt,

1 pint warm (but not scalding) water (1 1/2 pints for old meal).

Stir together until light. Bake to a nice brown all around (about forty-five minutes), and let it sweat fifteen minutes longer in the closed oven, removed from the fire. Yellow meal generally requires more water than white. Freshly ground meal is much better than old.

Corn Dodgers

Same as above, but mix to a stiff dough, and form into cylindrical dodgers four or five inches long and 1 1/2 inches diameter, by rolling between the hands. Have frying-pan very hot, grease it a little, and put dodgers on as you roll them out. As soon as they have browned, put them in oven and bake thoroughly.

Ash Cake

Same kind of dough. Form it into balls as big as hen's eggs, roll in dry flour, lay in hot ashes, and cover completely with them.

Johnny-Cake

" Mix at home, before starting, 1 quart of yellow, granulated corn meal, 1 pint of white flour, 1/2 cup of sugar, 1 teaspoonful of salt, 4 teaspoonfuls of baking-powder. In camp it should be mixed in the pan to make a fairly heavy batter and allowed to stand for a few minutes before frying so that it becomes light and puffy. It should then be dropped by spoonfuls, without further stirring, into the hot, greased pan, and not turned until the top has begun to set. The bacon grease takes the place of butter.

" If less water is used, the entire mixture may be put in the frying-pan at once, baked from the bottom up over coals until the top has set, and then turned. It makes delicious johnny-cake. Try rolling the trout in a little of the dry mixture." (Warwick S. Carpenter).

Corn Bread (Superior)

1 pint corn meal,

1 pint flour,

3 tablespoonfuls sugar,

2 heaped tablespoonfuls butter,

3 teaspoonfuls baking powder, r teaspoonful salt,

2 eggs, i pint (or more) milk.

Rub butter and sugar together. Add the beaten eggs; then the milk. Sift the salt and baking powder into the meal and flour. Pour the liquid over the dry ingredients, beating well. Pour batter into well-greased pan, and bake thirty to forty minutes in moderately hot oven. Can also be made into muffins.

Corn Batter Bread

1 pint corn meal,

2 pints milk (or water), 2 eggs.

1 teaspoonful salt.

Beat the eggs light; add the salt; then the meal and milk, gradually, until well blended. Bake about thirty minutes. This is the standard breakfast bread of the South, easily made, and (if the meal is freshly ground) delicious. A little boiled rice, or hominy grits, may be substituted for cart of the meal.

Snow Bread

After a fall of light, feathery snow, superior corn bread may be made by stirring together 1 quart corn meal, 1/2 teaspoonful soda, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 tablespoonful lard.

Then, in a cool place where the snow will not melt, stir into above one quart light snow. Bake about forty minutes in rather hot oven. Snow, for some unknown reason, has the same effect on bread as eggs have, two tablespoonfuls of snow equaling one egg. It can also be used in making batter for pancakes, or puddings, the batter being made rather thick, and the snow mixed with each cake just before putting in the pan.

Substitute For Baking Soda

Take the white of wood ashes, same quantity as you would use of soda, and mix dry with the flour. It makes bread rise the same as soda, and you can't tell the difference. The best ashes are those of hickory, dogwood, sugar maple, and corncobs; but the ashes of beech, ash, buckeye, balsam poplar, and yellow poplar are also good.

"Gritted Bread"

When green corn has just passed from the tucket, or soft and milky stage, and has become too hard for boiling, but is still too soft for grinding into meal, make a " gritter," as follows: Take a piece of tin about 7 x 14 inches (unsolder a lard pail by heating, and flatten the sides) ; punch holes through it, close together, with a large nail; bend the sheet into a half cylinder, rough side Dut, like a horseradish grater; nail the edges to a board somewhat longer and wider than the tin. Then, holding the ear of corn pointing lengthwise from you, grate it into a vessel held between the knees.

The meal thus formed will need no water, but can be mixed in its own milk. Salt it, and bake quickly. The flavor of " gritted bread " is a blend of hot pone and roasting ears — delectable! Hard corn can be grated by first soaking the ears over night.

Pancakes. Plain Flapjacks

1 quart flour,

1 teaspoonful salt,

2 teaspoonfuls sugar, or 4 of molasses, 2 level tablespoonfuls baking powder.

Rub in, dry, two heaped tablespoonfuls grease. If you have no grease, do without. Make a smooth batter with cold milk (best) or water — thin enough to pour from a spoon, but not too thin, or it will take all day to bake enough for the party. Stir well, to smooth out lumps. Set frying-pan level over thin bed of coals, get it quite hot, and grease with a piece of pork in split end of stick. Pan must be hot enough to make batter sizzle as it touches, and it should be polished. Pour from end of a big spoon successively enough batter to fill pan writhin one-half inch of rim. When cake is full of bubbles and edges have stiffened, shuffle pan to make sure that cake is free below and stiff enough to flip. Then hold pan slanting in front of and away from you, go through preliminary motion of flapping once or twice to get the swing, then flip boldly so cake will turn a somersault in the air, and catch it upside down. Beginners generally lack the nerve to toss high enough. Grease pan anew and stir batter every time before pouring. This is the " universal pancake " that " Nessmuk " derided. Much better and wholesomer are: