We owe a lot to our red brother. From him we derived a knowledge of the values and attractions of the succulent clam, and he didn't cook a clam so that it tasted like O'Somebody's Heels of New Rubber either. From the Indian we got the original idea of the shore dinner and the barbecue, the planked shad and the hoecake. By following in his footsteps we learned about succotash and hominy. He conferred upon us the inestimable boon of his maize--hence corn bread, corn fritters, fried corn and roasting ears; also his pumpkin and his sweet potato--hence the pumpkin pie of the North and its blood brother of the South, the sweet-potato pie. From the Indian we got the tomato--let some agriculturist correct me if I err--though the oldest inhabitant can still remember when we called it a love apple and regarded it as poisonous. From him we inherited the crook-neck squash and the okra gumbo and the rattlesnake watermelon and the wild goose plum, and many another delectable thing. So, out of all this and from all this our ancestors evolved cults of cookery which, though they differed perhaps as between themselves, were all purely American and all absolutely unapproachable. France lent a strain to New Orleans cooking and Spain did the same for California. Scrapple was Pennsylvania's, terrapin was Maryland's, the baked bean was Massachusetts', and along with a few other things spoon-bread ranked as Kentucky's fairest product. Indiana had dishes of which Texas wotted not, nor kilowatted either, this being before the day of electrical cooking contrivances. Virginia, mother of presidents and of natural-born cooks, could give and take cookery notions from Vermont. Likewise, this condition developed the greatest collection of cooks, white and black alike, that the world has ever seen. They were inspired cooks, needing no notes, no printed score to guide them. They could burn up all the cook-books that ever were printed and still cook. They cooked by ear.