The house was a double log one, with a spacious floor (roofed in) connecting it with the kitchen.

In the summer the table was set in the middle of that shady and breezy floor, and the sumptuous meals--well, it makes me cry to think of them.

Fried chicken, roast pig, wild and tame turkeys, ducks and geese; venison just killed; squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, partridges, prairie-chickens; biscuits, hot batter cakes, hot buckwheat cakes, hot "wheat bread," hot rolls, hot corn pone; fresh corn boiled on the ear, succotash, butter-beans, string-beans, tomatoes, pease, Irish potatoes, sweet-potatoes; buttermilk, sweet milk, "clabber"; watermelons, musk-melons, cantaloups--all fresh from the garden--apple pie, peach pie, pumpkin pie, apple dumplings, peach cobbler--I can't remember the rest.

The way that the things were cooked was perhaps the main splendor--particularly a certain few of the dishes.

For instance, the corn bread, the hot biscuits and wheat bread, and the fried chicken.
These things have never been properly cooked in the North--in fact, no one there is able to learn the art, so far as my experience goes.