“I’ll take Flo out ta milking; she’s the making of a good ’un,” and then he took a long audible suck from the edge of his cup.
“Take ’er, will you? Then you’ll pay her wages,” retorted Mrs. Nadin.
The farmer did not trouble to reply.
Friday, Flo had been warned, was baking day. She thought of her mother’s modest baking and wondered why it should be worth naming a day for it. But as soon as the morning porridge was done out she was taken to the end of the yard away from the road into a small outhouse which she had never gone into before. The wash-boiler, she recognized at once, but alongside was what looked somewhat like a child’s wash-boiler. There was the same raised fire-hole beneath, but the brickwork instead of being square, made a round funnel three feet high; and instead of there being a boiler inside, all she found was a flat iron plate a foot below the open top.
She lit a fire beneath the plate without being able to guess what its use was. She was told to make a big fire, which would go together into a good redness. When she got back to the kitchen Mrs. Nadin had her sleeves up and was standing on a wooden stool nearly hidden from her waist up in a tremendous wide-mouthed earthenware crock, which she called a “panchion”. She mixed energetically and was too busy to nag anybody. All that she appeared to have in the panchion was oatmeal to which she kept adding a little milk and more water till it mixed into a thinnish paste.
“That’s the stuff to put guts into you,” she said, stepping down.
It wasn’t clear to Flo whether she referred to the exercise of mixing, or to eating the oatmeal. She told Flo to carry the panchion, and Flo got hold, but could scarcely move it. Mrs. Nadin laughed and told her to fetch one of the boys. Clem was just pouring milk into the sieve outside the shippon and seemed glad enough to leave his bucket. Flo waited to see what happened. Mrs. Nadin dipped up a big spoonful of the mixture and dropped it on the hot plate where it quickly spread thinly and evenly. After a very short time she adroitly turned it over with a flat wooden shovel, like a butter pat twelve inches across. When a moment or two later she lifted it out of the open top of the “oven” it was a flat cake a quarter of an inch thick and twelve inches or more in diameter.
“If you’ve never had ’em hot off a griddle, you’ve missed summat good,” announced Mrs. Nadin. “Fetch a dinner plate.”
She dropped the next one like a pancake on the plate and told Flo to spread it with honey. The oaty flavour and the rich brown honey, which was from heather, were new to Flo, and she thought that she had never tasted anything nicer. On getting back to the wash-house she was surprised to see how the stack of oat-cakes was growing. When eventually Mrs. Nadin finished it was nearly two feet high.
“Are we going to eat all those?” asked Flo.
“All be gone by Tuesday, dunna worry,” said Mrs. Nadin.
After breakfast she began another baking, which to Flo was equally surprising. The panchion was nearly filled with flour into which lard was rubbed. Flo had never seen this done, and she stared fascinated, but she was sent to the attic, where she was tantalized by warm, sweetened smells that seemed to arrive in waves. When at last she went into the kitchen again the table was covered with pastries, some ready for the oven, some already crisped and browned. There were four dinner-plate pies, six dinner-plate jam tarts decorated with criss-crossed strips; and, to Flo most surprising of all, a pasty which covered the bread board and looked as if it would scarcely fit into the oven. Mrs. Nadin balanced the oven shelf on the fender and carefully shovelled the pasty on to it and in it went.
“Whatever’s in it?” asked Flo, unable to keep quiet.
“Currants an’ raisins . . . dunna you like them?” asked Mrs. Nadin, wiping back a finger of hair, leaving a flour smear over her left eye.
“My!” exclaimed Flo. “But do we eat all this?”
“Be gone by Tuesday. Appetites like wolves, they ’ave. If you gave ’em dry bread an’ water, they’d starve theirsel’s; but give ’em summat as’ll tickle their fancy an’ they gutses themsel’s till they welly bust.”
Flo got only the gist of this, but she was afraid to ask more because obviously the stooping and heat were curdling Mrs, Nadin’s temper. Last thing before dinner she mixed another panchion of flour, punching and kneading it, and left it with a white cloth over on the fender. Immediately the meal was done she told Flo to go with Dot and clean out “the cabin”. “An’ dunna be making friends wi’ the spiders; kill ’em,” she ordered briskly.