Mrs. Haslam said that I was to serve him only vegetables and grains. I told her that the vegetables on her table were cooked with bacon or lard and so were the grains. She shrugged her shoulders and told me to use only lard from now on, as the new boarder would see the bacon pieces. If he never had lard before, how will he know what it tastes like, she reasoned. I followed her orders, and it turned out that he had grown up eating, as we all had, lard. After relishing what had been served to him for the first week or so, he ate a forkful of succotash one night and loudly complained to Mrs. Haslam, in front of her other boarders, that she hadn’t respected his wishes or his faith. She told him, her head bobbing up and down, that he was in the wrong boardinghouse and in the wrong city. “Cincinnati is Porkopolis, sir!” she declared, her voice shaking. That was the first time, since I’d started working there, that I’d seen Miss Caroline smile.

Mrs. Haslam refused to rent rooms to Michiganders for years after that, and the Michigan rule came into being. Later, when I told this story to Pat, he began calling her “Mrs. Porkopolis,” before settling upon his other name for her.

The point of this story, Miss? I thought it was plain.

The point was that for two years, Pat, the boarder, had eaten my cooking and found it not to his liking. Now Pat, the husband, was set on improving what came out of my kitchen.

First, he declared that my hot water cornbread was fine for breakfast, but not for supper.

“You want biscuits instead?” I asked him.

Biscuits weren’t fine either, he replied. For breakfast, yes, but for the supper table, the only proper bread is a yeasted one, Mattie.

I’d never heard of such a thing. I ignored the yeast rule for as long as I could. Pat took to buying round loaves of bread with a hard crust—he told me that their bakers were from Germany—and adding them to our supper table to make his point.

“Your husband didn’t grow up in Kentucky or in Ohio, so why do you want to cook for him as if he had?” Charlotte asked, when I’d gone over to Cleneay Brothers to ask for her advice. “You’re being stubborn, Alethea. Bread, like anything else, is a matter of taste, and everyone has a right to their own tastes,” she said.

Charlotte was with child, but she wasn’t showing yet, so Mr. Cleneay thought it was still respectable to have her helping behind the counter. Some women, when they were in the family way, spoke plainly and only with an ear for the truth. Charlotte was one of them.