Page:The Valley of Adventure (1926).pdf/14

 the day to the broad doors of the hospice, from which none departed unfed. Here Magdalena Lozano, cook extraordinary to the mission fathers and all who put feet beneath their plenteous table, reigned in dignity, with hams and bacon hanging on the joists which crossed the deep chamber midway between floor and roof, the unctuous condensations of countless dinners caked black and thick upon her walls.

There was no chimney to Magdalena's grill, where meats were roasted and broiled above the living coals, and vast cauldrons hung on giant cranes to boil and mingle their savory contents. It was not the fashion of the Franciscan padres who built their thick-walled missions in Alta California to trifle with such vain comforts as chimneys in kitchens. An arch thrown against the kitchen wall to confine the coals, and perhaps shunt the smoke out over the cook's head, diffuse and spread it better among the hams and bacon hung to cure and keep in the weevil-discouraging atmosphere, was all a right-minded cook, duly grounded in the faith, could require. So it had been in Spain for a thousand years; so it was in Mexico, whence the padres marched to the conquest of souls in Alta California. It was enough. The baking was done outdoors, in the great cave of an oven that looked like a cistern standing above ground.

The kitchen in itself was a chimney, some thirty feet high from tiled floor to the eaves of tiled roof, and was not so smoky and stifling as one might