The Birmingham age-herald., 1908-08-02

was advertising turkey dinners lol so cents. When you get young turkey with
 cranberry sauce mashed potatoes, ceie- ry, bread butter, coffee and mince pie
 for the sum of 25 cents, you can figure that something was wrong with the tur- keys"
 Are the sandwich and coffee stands as bad as the restaurants?" queried the reporter
 "As a general rule, they are not. But most of them are bad enough The table on which the meat Is cut up for sand
 wiches is frequently black with flies in the summer time. Of course, you have
 seen the counter man clean the knife he uses to cut bread by wiping 1t on his trousers? Another thing that Is not un- common in the little places is the use of l the human handkerchief Many of the men who work in the kitchens of these | little lunchrooms scorn handkerchiefs.
 They clear their nostrils by using the in- | dex finger of either hand Then they
 calmly continue to handle the sand- | wiches.
 Handling Bread.
 And you must remember that bread ! is handled by more dirty hands than | any other article of food. The driver,
 who has had his hands all over sweaty |, horses and foul harness, is continually 1 counting the loaves. He passes them to
 
 hands on his trousers before handling
 the bread. Whatever slices are left over i from an order are piled by hand on the i next order. The first guest has undoubt- !! edly handled some of these slices. When ' it gets too stale to be handled as fresh i bread, 1t is taken back to the kitchen, [ man-handied some more and served up
 as toast. It continues to be toast until it has outlived its usefulness and is then
 made into bread pudding. In a few n- stances. the remnants of bread pudding 1 rejected by the guests are mashed up l and served second time as some vari-. | ety of jelly pudding. When you figure 1t
 out. you will realize that bread and the
 dishes made from bread are as dirty as l anything you could pick from the list 1 'Of course the bread is not handled
 as much in the sandwich counters as in
 the restaurants; and the little places use { more rolls than loayes But rolls can ! pick up whole lot of dirt Moreover. 1 roiis are often more exposed than any other form of bread. You have seen ] wagons with long baskets fastened un-
 ger the body between the wheels. Those paskets always contain rolls and natur- ! ally if there are any disease germs in 1 the dust along the street, not to mention ] the usual filth found in the streets in the early morning, 1t Is bound to be stirred | up by the passing of the wagon, and
 some of 1t is certainly going to settle on
 the rolls swinging in an open-worlk bas- ket only a couple of feet above tha street. 'i'0
 Threw Away the Coffee. Coffee is generally clean and is mad. rom a good grade of bean. But in tba summer have seen men leaning over the boilers with the perspiratio from their 1oreheads dropping into the coffee. I was
 With the volunteers down in Florida. dur Ing the summer of 1898, In charge of mess. l had a big, fat colored man Tor my cook. One day while a whole punch of the men were lined up waiting Tor dinner they saw the precipitation from the cooks face dripping into the boiler They raised howl and made me throw away ten gallons of coffee and at a time when supplies were running low I pre- tended to be just as much shocked as the men, and cursed the cook from to Iz- gard. But I had to smile to myself, for l knew that most of those men had gone against coffee seasoned that way, not once, but dozens of times.
 ''The pies in little lunchrooms are not so bad In summer it Is true. the flies drill on the surface of the pies. and some of them get their feet caught in the cus- tard and other soft filling and have to bs rescued. And it is not a rare thing to find rust on the bottom of pies taken from the plates that have seen long service But as a general proposition, the pies are cleaner and handled much less than the bread and meat found in sandwiches | '1 forgot to tell you something about coffee If you take 1t black you are pretty safe. But if you want milk in it. you are running some more chances. Tho men in lunch rooms are supposed to clean out the milk cans every night Usually 1 they do; sometimes they don't But even when they are cleaned out every night you will find things that are likely to turn you against milk. The spigot Is one of the weak spots in the system That should be carefully cleaned out not less than once day I have taken out spigot and found 1t almost choked with milk that has soured and turned green
 it was so putrid. And I would drop dead with surprise if failed to find bits of hair and dirt in the entrance to the spgot."
 Horrible Conditions in One Kitchen.
 Are the kitchens as bad as the author ities claim?'
 Some of them are worse. There is one place not very far from here which has not yet been visited. That place the limit. The smells that come up from the kitchen sickening And if you studied the geography of that kitchen you
 
 hasn't raided it. They have filthy toilet
 In there that is situated just between the bread box and the fish box. If l told you some of the horrible things I have seen pulled off in that kitchen you wouldn't believe. And if you did believe the story, you wouldn't print it in The Post. "I suppose you imagine that eggs are pretty safe But you're wrong. If you order soft boiled or poached eggs, you wln But when you go up against scram- bled eggs or onlettes, you are taking long chances. Bad eggs are as useful as good ones. If they are not too far gone they make the om,ettes and scramble nicely When they get past that stage they are used to make puddlngs or are worked In with other dishes that require eggs In their compcstion AS a matter of fact, eggs are safe investments. They are never thrown away in a restaurant.
 You know that oysters and fish are likely to poison people if they are not fresh. And I think I could turn you f against deviled crabs if you saw them fixed up in some places. When the crab
 is taken out there Is a soft slime left in the she'll Tn some restaurants the cook carefully cleans out the she'll But not in all I have seen cooks mix up the | crab meat and jab 1t into the shell on top of that slime Of course, there's noth- ing really insanitary about that, but If you saw the trick turned you would prob ably lose your liking for deviled craps Down in an oyster house I saw one of the openers fishing out oysters from barrels poly 6ad