Cooking for profit

The caustic conv^entrated lye we buy in cans has to be used in moderation ; the steam from it alone caused a painful ulceration of the breathing apparatus of a lot of us fellows once where we threw it around too carelessly. The old-fashioned ash-hopper lye is doubtless as danger- ous if boiled down strong. It was at the Uncoraphagre House, out in the Rath- skeller Range of mountains, SUm Jim Dalton was' my second then. He was the most cleanly boy I ever knew. He had just quit the Quaintuple House at Turtle Key, because he could get noth- ing but sea wattr there to scrub with, and ii would not make a lather. I doubt whether he would have taken the key as a gift, or a whole bunch of keys in Grouper Inlet if they were_ without soft water to make soap suds with. But he could never be a good cook for he seemed to be devoid of the senses of taste and smell. A thing might be burning up on top of the range for an hour before ever he would find it out, and then he was in- dolent. If he scrubbed the lloor until it was as white as a table-cloth it seemed to be only that he might have the luxury of rolling down to sleep upon it without soiling his while shirt, and after draining the steam chest diV he often forgot or neglected to fill it again, and the result was that the pipes which take the water down into the fire-backs ofien went dry and bur..t a goodway up, and that makes one of the worst of smells and taints the vegetables that are steamed over the steam chest for days afterwards. Another thing, there was no ice, and the water the pared potatoes were kept in would hardly stay sweet over night. We have to keep potatoes and other vegetables after they have been pared ready for breakfast covered with water, otherwise they turn black and^ wilt in a short time, but it is necassary if any are left over to put them in fresh water and let them be the next to be used. This Slim would not always do, and the pota- toes at the bottom of the keg acquired a bad smell. We had a lot of awful par- ticular people in that house, and one day after those bad potatoes had been steam- ed over that badly burned steam chest some of them made a grand kick and the proprietor who did not know what was the matter any more than a child, got clear off his head about the reputation of his house. I promised there should be no more cause for complaint and Slim turned over a new leaf with his potatoes ; threw away the wooden keg and got two stone jars and kept them scalded out. But we did not know what to do with the steam chest. The foul smell was caused by the starchy sediment that drips from steaming vegetables going down into the pipes and burning there when the pipes get dry. I suppose the only way to clean them was to take them off, but that we could not do. Slim thought concentrated lye was good for everything and put a can in the steam chest and let it dissolve. The burnt stuff" was not the right sort for lye to act upon, but it seemed to eat away by degrees, so we kept it up for days and weeks, drawing the lye water to scrub with and putting in fresh every morning and living in the steam from the boiling lye until it had nearly put the whole of us, seven in all who worked in the kitchen, past working at all, our lungs seemed all on fire and we had not the least idea