AUNT DINAH'S KITCHEN

BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE


Like a certain class of modern philosophers, Dinah perfectly scorned
logic and reason in every shape, and always took refuge in intuitive
certainty; and here she was perfectly impregnable. No possible amount of
talent, or authority, or explanation could ever make her believe that
any other way was better than her own, or that the course she had
pursued in the smallest matter could be in the least modified. This had
been a conceded point with her old mistress, Marie's mother; and "Miss
Marie," as Dinah always called her young mistress, even after her
marriage, found it easier to submit than contend; and so Dinah had ruled
supreme. This was the easier, in that she was perfect mistress of that
diplomatic art which unites the utmost subservience of manner with the
utmost inflexibility as to measure.

Dinah was the mistress of the whole art and mystery of excuse-making, in
all its branches. Indeed, it was an axiom with her that the cook can do
no wrong, and a cook in a Southern kitchen finds abundance of heads and
shoulders on which to lay off every sin and frailty, so as to maintain
her own immaculateness entire. If any part of the dinner was a failure,
there were fifty indisputably good reasons for it, and it was the fault,
undeniably, of fifty other people, whom Dinah berated with unsparing
zeal.

But it was very seldom that there was any failure in Dinah's last
results. Though her mode of doing everything was peculiarly meandering