“As soon as people were all talking I would slip out to the dining room, where the table, with all the extension leaves in, was covered with the best gilt-edged plates on which the supper would be served and sent into the parlor after I had gone to bed, about nine or even later. I knew there would be escalloped oysters, with thin slices of cold tongue, and some bright quince or currant jelly trembling on one side, and on the other a delicious light buttered roll. After that would come the big cups of coffee and little frosted pound cakes that had taken hours and hours to make the day before. In these mid-seventies salads had not become the fashion — they came later on with other modern innovations.”
Martha Dickinson Bianchi, The Recollections of a Country Girl, unpublished typescript, p. 61, Brown University Library, Martha Dickinson Bianchi Papers.
