Cookies and hurly-burly

Cake-baking is an undertaking needing a certain amount of quiet and concentration. Cookies can be made in the middle of any hurly-burly that is going on. There is a game played on the lawn outside the kitchen at Appleyard Centre that is like deck tennis except that it is played with the lid of a tin biscuit can. This pastime, with its accompanying shrieks from the gentler sex and the occasional crash of broken glass, has often been the background for cooky-baking. So have the voices of croquet battlers and of those turning cartwheels, the crack of rifles aimed at tin cans, and the grunts that go with a form of wrestling known as pig-piling. Or, if the weather is rainy those who look forward to dividends of broken cookies crowd into the kitchen, joggle the elbow of the cook and keep her mind active with a peculiarly searching form of Twenty questions. Is is under these circumstances that Mrs. Appleyard turns out a batch of Oatmeal Lace Cookies.

Louise Andrews Kent, Mrs. Appleyard's Kitchen