Author: Kaila

I am a amateur genealogist from Canada who is interested in exploring my ancestry from Manitoba and beyond. I will use this blog to document genealogical finds in newspapers and other sources as well as other interesting tidbits surrounding my family and others from the surrounding area.

Some Old Southern Dishes (continued)

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This is the final article in April of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on April 25, 1909, and is a continuation of the previous article on Southern recipes. I particularly like the mention of how peacocks were raised more to be eaten than for decoration!

Transcribed from the Sunday edition of the The Buffalo Sunday Morning News.

Some Old Southern Dishes (continued)

I SPOKE last week of the prominence given to pork—fresh and corned and smoked—by the Southern cooks of ye olden time. Next to this staple stood poultry of all kinds. The reason for the extensive use of these two kinds of flesh-food is obvious, when we recall that there were no country markets in the South in the middle of the last century. Nor could what we style vaguely “butcher’s meat” be brought outside of the cities. Consequently, it was esteemed a luxury.

I well recollect that on the occasion of my first dinner part in my married home, which was in a country village, I sent 80 miles to Richmond to get a nice roast of beef to set forth the feast well and honorably. Poultry was a surfeit. Turkeys were raised upon every plantation, as were ducks, geese, chicken and pigeons, not to mention the guinea fowls, now sold at delicacies by fashionable market men and at exorbitant prices. Peacocks were likewise reared for eating, more than for ornament. A young peacock was tender and luscious, and often served at table in summer when turkey and geese were out of fashion.

“Ram, Lamb, Sheep and Mutton.”

Chickens never “Went out” from Christmas to Christmas. They were fabulously cheap. The negroes raised them in and about their own quarters, and were allowed to peddle them and eggs in the neighborhood on Saturday nights. They brought them into the village at all seasons, and in all weathers, on that, their holiday night.

I bought as many as I wanted for 25 cents a piece; eggs for 10 cents a dozen, and full-grown turkeys at 75 cents for gobblers, 50 cents for hens.

Amid all this abundance we longed for the flesh-pots of the shambles—veal, lamb and beef. The contemptuous summary of boarding-school fare familiar to every boy and girl, “ram, lamb, sheep and mutton,” would have been meaningless to us. When a sheep, a lamb, a calf or beef was slaughtered upon a plantation, portions were freely distributed as neighborly gifts within an area of ten miles, as we, the donor’s descendants, would send choice fruit and flowers. Otherwise it would have been impossible to get rid of it before it spoiled in a climate where the contents of the icehouse seldom lasted later than the middle of July, and it was not unusual for the winter to be so “open” that the icehouses were filled with snow, or perhaps went empty for the year.

The Oily Possum.

I digress slightly at this point to enter a housewifely protest, upon the authority of one who was born and brought up in the old South, against the prevalent belief, now raging into an absurd fad, that “possum” was ever a favorite dish with the whites of a former generation. In my own experience it appeared but once upon any table at which the “white folks” sat down to eat. That was when I, a petted child of ten, strolled into the kitchen in quest of chance tidbits, espied a possum cooked for the servants’ dinner and begged what I called “a ham” of the unctuous animal for myself. This I bore in triumph to the dining room upon a china dish from my doll’s tea set, and placed by my plate. The shout of derision from brothers and sisters and the fine disdain of my mother’s face fixed the scene in my memory. To this day I feel the mental and physical nausea that filled my small being as my father said quietly: “If you are going to eat that, my child, you must take it out upon the back porch.”

Where the dogs were fed! I eyed the greasy, rank, steaming and streaming morsel with loathing appreciation of the fact that it was part of an unclean beast. Nothing I ever heard or saw in Southern homes tended to alter the impression. The creature was no more the white man’s food than a muskrat would have been. The negroes caught and caged them for their private delectation, fattening them upon offal, such as the entrails of poultry, which the possum devoured by night. The flesh was pulpy, oily and redolent of the odor peculiar to the nocturnal prowler when alive. That I should live to see the day when it would bear a distinguished part in civic banquets held in honor of the chief magistrate-elect would have been an impossible imagination.

It is a curious characteristic of the lower classes in every country that they especially gloat upon fats and sweets. With the “colored people” of those bygone days (we were never allowed to call them “negroes”), the taste went with a barbaric love of bright colors and highly emotional religion. I do not pretend to explain the peculiarity. I state it as a fact and an idiosyncrasy in dismissing the unsavory “possum.”

Fried Chicken.

Fried chicken stook high and constantly upon the Southern housemother’s bill-of-fare.

Cut a pound of fat salt pork into small piece and fry until the grease is extracted, but not until to browns. Strain out the pork and set the frying pan with the fat in it on the fire. Have ready a young “broiler” which has been soaked for half an hour in salted water, then dried between two towels, seasoned with pepper and dredged with flour. Fry these pieces of chicken in the hot fat until brown on both sides. Turn twice. Take up the chicken, rain free of fat and set aside to keep hot in a covered dish over hot water. Pour into the gravy left in the frying pan a cup of rich milk (half cream, if you can get it ) into which you have stirred a pinch of baking soda; as it heats, stir in a tablespoonful of butter roiled in one of flour; cook to thickening, stirring all the time, add a tablespoonful of minced parsley, cook for one minute longer and pour over the dished chicken.

This is the genuine ancient and honorable recipe for “Virginia Fried Chicken with Cream Gravy,” popular upon hotel and restaurant menus as “Maryland Fried Chicken,” a palpable misnomer. The dish is delicious under either name.

The cream gravy is sometimes omitted and the chicken, prepared as above directed, is served up dry, with bunches of parsley dropped upon it and garnished with slices of fried bacon.

Chicken Batter Pudding.

Cut up a fat fowl as for fricassee, severing every joint; season well with salt and pepper and a tablespoonful of butter for each chicken, adding a teaspoonful of onion juice when the fowl is half done. Stew very slowly in just enough water to keep them from scorching before the juices of the fowl begin to make their own gravy. When tender, strain off the gravy and keep it hot.

Lay the pieces of chicken in a deep bakedish, arranging neatly in layers; thicken the gravy with browned flour and minced parsley and pour over the chicken.

Have the batter ready, but do not make it too long before the chicken is in the dish. Sift a pint of flour with a teaspoonful of cream of tartar, half as much soda and a saltspoonful of salt. Beat two eggs very light, yolks and whites together, stir into a large coffee cupful of milk, add two tablespoonfuls of melted butter; make a hole in the middle of the sifted flour and mix quickly to a rather stiff batter.

Pour this upon the hot chicken and gravy, and make in a steady, yet brisk, oven. The batter fills the interstices of the meat and absorbs the gravy in cooking.

If you have plenty of gravy, add to what is left the minced liver of the fowl, a dash of onion juice and chopped parsley, and send around with the pudding in a boat.

The left-over of fricasseed chicken may be utilized in this way, and most satisfactorily to the eaters thereof. I often do this, filling up the dish, with stewed fresh mushrooms, which I have never before known to be so plentiful and cheap as they are just now.

Smothered Chicken.

Split a pair of broilers—or tender fullgrown fowls—down the back, as for broiling. Lay them flat in the dripping pan, skin side up, and cover the pan with another of the same size, if you have not a covered roaster. (I hope you have!) Set in a hot oven, and at the end of five minutes baste with melted butter. Turn the chicken in half an hour, having basted them twice meanwhile with the butter. In ten minutes more they should be ready for the dredging. Sift heated flour over them on both sides, and wash once more with butter. Brown the flour. Test the joints with a fork, and if they are tender and no red juice flows out, take them up. Keep hot in a heated dish set over boiling water; thicken the gravy in the pan with browned flour, adding boiling water if there is not enough liquid; boil up once and pour into a gravy boat.

If the chickens be very large, gash each joint before putting down to cook. The “smothering” consists in keeping the fowls closely covered while in the oven, and imparts a pleasant flavor to the meat, besides retaining all the juices far better than in broiling.

Barbequed Chicken.

Broil the chickens in the usual way, and when they are dished pour over them this sauce:

Met two tablespoonfuls of butter in a saucepan, add the same quantity of vinegar, a teaspoonful of made mustard, a teaspoonful of sugar, a saltspoonful of salt and half as much pepper. Heat to a boil, mixing with a very little hot water should the ingredients not blend well, and pour over the chickens. Cover and leave over boiling water for five minutes before serving.

A most appetizing dish, and particularly welcome in the spring.

Barbecued “Old Hare.”

We call them “Rabbits” in the Northern and Middle States, in Virginia they were “old hares,” from their birth to their appearance upon the breakfast table as “barbecued.” They were usually steamed tender, then broiled and treated just as I have described the process of barbequing chicken. Barbequed ham was also in frequent request as a breakfast dish.

Transparent Pudding.

We called it a “pudding.” In reality it was a pie, being invariably baked in an open crust of fine pastry. It was often baked in small pastry shells. Then it was “transparent puddings.” It—or they—were ever delicious and were reckoned by unhappy dyspeptics as indigestible. Popular they were, and they will always be.

Cream half a pound of butter light, beat into the creamy mixture the yolks of six eggs, the juice of a lemon (strained), the grated rind of a lemon, a grated nutmeg and half a glass of good French brandy. Beat for three minutes—hard! and whip in the whites of six eggs.

Sometimes we reserved the whites of three eggs in the general mixing, and when the pies (or puddings) were “Set” in the baking, spread the meringue of the whipped whites, beaten up with three tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar and a little lemon juice, over the hot pies while in the oven. Then they were shut up again in the oven to brown the meringue slightly.

The pastry shells in which the transparent mixture was baked were the best the old-fashioned housemother could make. The puddings were eaten cold, by which time the puff-paste was almost translucent.

Yet the martyrs to a love of “good eating” were fewer then than now! Dyspeptics were few and far between, and the form of the unpleasant visitation diagnosed by twentieth century doctors as “nervous dyspepsia” was utterly unknown.

Marion Harland

OTHER ARTICLES ALSO PUBLISHED…
Family Meals for a Week
The Housemothers’ Exchange

Some Old Southern Dishes

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This is the third article in April of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on April 18, 1909, and is an article on Southern cooking, specifically cooking the hog.

Transcribed from the Sunday edition of the The Buffalo Sunday Morning News.

Some Old Southern Dishes

I HAVE heard that you are a Virginian by birth. So was my grandmother, who used to entertain us by the hour with tales of the ‘way people lived then,’ and especially what royal ‘tables they set.’ That was her phrased. ‘He sets a good table,’ was her idea of hospitality, and ‘She does not set a good table,’ her way of condemning a poor housekeeper. I learned from her to hold a high opinion of the old school of housewives. Their families must have fared sumptuously every day, if half of what she said was true. If we have poultry once a week I consider that John and the boys have no right to complain of their table fare. Grandmother talked of mountains of fried chicken every other day, and the turkey that graced the foot of the table as regularly as Sunday came around, as long as the bird of plenty was in season, as matters of course.

“Her tales made our mouths water. Now, won’t you give up one of the days devoted to your cozy chats in the Exchange page to descriptions of some of the dishes we have heard so much of that we are disposed to look down upon our daily menus as less than mediocre? Did the tables groan literally, as well as figuratively, under the loads of good things, or does distance magnify, while it lends enchantment to the dear old lady’s views.”

“Miriam S.D. (Utica, N.Y.)”

As to the groan of the stout mahogany under which our forefather stretched their legs with great content, we must bear in mind that the said tables were spread before the introduction of what one of the markers of the big fortunes that swell the tax bills of our land called in my hearing the other day, “a dinnay ah lah Roose.” We set fewer dishes upon the board with each course as we advance in the minor refinements of civilization. Our grandmothers held that a table was ill-furnished that did not have a roast or boiled joint, or round, or fowl at each end, and a double line of side dishes making close connections with these. Down the center of the cloth were ranged pickles, jellies and relishes, meeting about the tall silver caster in the middle of the table. There was no room for flowers and mere decorations.

Abundant Sweets.

I recall, as an illustration if this prodigality, and what we would ban as unseemly and deappetizing crowding of dishes, that I had the curiosity, as a girl of 14, who had been trained to keep silence while her elders talked, to count the dishes brought in for dessert after the load of meats and vegetables was removed to make way for the next course. There were 20 kinds of sweets, including two varieties of ice cream, three pies, two puddings and two kinds of jelly. Preserves, cakes, great and small, and fruits made up the count. This was at a quiet dinner party at which two families from adjoining plantations, and nobody else, were present.

In your grandmother’s list of Southern dishes I assume that ham and other parts of the inevitable pig had a conspicuous place. Large herds of these were raised on every plantation, numbering hundreds to each owner. Yet they were insufficient to supply the demand in town and country. Immense droves were brought into the States of Maryland and Virginia from Kentucky and Ohio and slaughtered yearly to fill smokehouses and meat cellars. Therefore, in my enumeration of what went to make up the “good living” eulogized by your venerable and truthful relative, bacon and its congeners must take the lead. No dinner was round and perfect whole that did not have a boiled or baked ham or shoulder at the top or bottom of the board.

Steamed Ham.

Soak in cold water for 12 hours after it has been well washed with warm water and a stuff brush. Then steam over boiling water for at least 25 minutes to the pound, keeping the water at a fierce boil all the time.

Skin when cold and dab with dots of black pepper.

Baked and Glazed Ham.

Scrub hard to get off all the rusty and smoke-dried crust. Then soak for 12 hours. Change the water for lukewarm and soak all day in this changing four times for warmer water. The last water should be hot enough to soften the skin, allowing you to pull it off carefully, not to tear it. Trim off the rusty, ragged portions on the underside of the skinned ham; lay it, thus prepared, in a dish and wash with a cloth dipped in a mixture of a half a cup of vinegar, a glass of sherry or Madeira, a teaspoonful of made mustard, a tablespoonful of brown sugar, stirred together. Repeat the washing hourly all day; cover the ham to keep in the flavor of the sauce and leave it thus all night. Next day wash hourly four times. Finally, lay the ham in a dripping pan, pour a cupful of hot water about it to prevent burning, and cover while it bakes slowly. Add to a fresh supply of the mixture I have indicated a cupful of boiling water, and get this where it will keep hot, basting freely with it (every 10 minutes) until the liquor flows from the ham into the dripping pan. Then haste with that.

Bake 25 minutes to the pound after the ham begins to exude juices. When a flesh fork pierces readily to the bone it is done. Remove to a large dish and cover with a paste half an inch thick made of cracker crumbs, milk and melted butter, with a beaten egg worked in at the last to bind the paste. Set in the oven to brown.

To make a sauce for this “royal” dish, strain and skim the gravy, add a glass of wine, a tablespoonful of catsup, the juice of a lemon and a dash of sugar. Boil up and send to the table in a boat.

The baked ham was eaten hot by our ancestors, carved in thin slices always. A “hunk” of bacon was a solecism. It was especially delicious when cold. Then the slices were of wafer-like thinness, curling like pink and white shavings over the carver.

Other by-products of the invaluable porker known to our forebears and lost to the denizens of northern climes, were chine and sparerib. They were as unlike the bony sections vended under those names in New Pork, Chicago and Philadelphia as a tender fillet of beef to a firstly shinbone.

A New York butcher to whom I made this plaint let me into part of the secret of the unlikeness:

“You see, ma’am, we in this part of the world aim to get all the meat off the sparerib and backbone, and don’t care what becomes of the rest. In Virginia they leave all the meat that can be left, without skimping some other piece—bacon sides, and the like.”

Another reason for the difference in the quality of the tidbits, and indeed, in the flavor of the “whole hog,” is that the Southern breed is fed upon corn in winter, and mast-fed all summer and autumn long. Moreover, to slaughter and put upon the market an animal that has passed the bloom of early maturity would be a barbarity to the eating public. A stringy, tough ham would be scorned by a beggar.

After this manner, then, did your granddame and mine prepare this choice viand for the delectation of those for whom they catered.

Roast Chine.

Score the skin on the ridge heavily. Put the chine down in the dripping pan with a half cup of hot water to keep it from sticking to the bottom. Cover with thick greased paper for the first half hour to retain the juices. Remove the paper at the end of that time and dredge the chine with flour. As soon as the grease shows through the flour, baste well with butter, and every ten minutes afterward plentifully with its own gravy. Season with salt and pepper and cook 20 minutes to the pound. Just before taking it up strew thickly with fine breadcrumbs, seasoned with powdered sage, pepper, salt and a small onion minced very fine. Cook five minutes after this crust goes on, basting it with butter. Dish the chine and keep hot while you skim the gravy of all the fat that will come off, putting it back over the fire, adding a half cupful of hot water, the juice of a lemon and enough browned flour to thicken the gravy. Boil up once, strain and pour over the mat. Serve tomato catsup with it.

This dish is nice when hot, and yet better when it is cold. My mother’s recipe from which the foregoing recipe is abridged, asserts that “the meat next the ribs is delicious when scraped off and made into sandwiches or laid upon buttered toast.”

To which I enjoin a fervid assent in memory of school day luncheons and picnics.

Roast Sparerib.

It is cooked just as chine is prepared for eating, only there is no dorsal strip of skin to be scored. It is as good hot as when cold, and there was seldom enough left for a left-over.

Time and space would fail me were I to attempt to speak of sausage, the savoriness of which one never knows in this degenerate day—real young pork sausage, with not an ambiguous ingredient in it; or of roast pig! Charles Lamb has been there before me. Or of pork steaks, chops and tenderloins; of pork potpie, as dear to every Englishman’s hear as the reminiscence is to the hoary-haired Virginian. They treat pork in Great Britain as our ancestors handled it, and value it accordingly.

Next week we shall talk of Southern poultry and sweets as our grandmothers cooked and our grandfathers ate them.

Marion Harland

OTHER ARTICLES ALSO PUBLISHED…
Family Meals for a Week
The Housemothers’ Exchange

How to Entertain the Gift of Flowers

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This is the second article in April of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on April 11, 1909, and is an article on how to take care of bouquets.

Transcribed from the Sunday edition of the The Buffalo Sunday Morning News.

How to Entertain the Gift of Flowers

THE title was laid before me for my choice or rejection. “How to Entertain Gifts of Flowers.” And as if whispered in my ear, a bit of rhyme I learned in the “merry merry May” of my own life:

Mine is the old belief.
That, midst your sweets and midst your bloom.
There’s a soul in every leaf.

The “entertainment” of souls symbolized by what another poet tells us are—

Star that in the earth’s firmament do shine—

is, then, a dignified and lovely duty.

I decided forthwith to let that line stand as it was written.

Is there another reader of this page, I wonder, who ever studied the Flora’s dictionaries that were in our foremothers’ and maiden great-aunts’ libraries, and consulted more frequently than they turned the leaves of Johnson and Walker’s Lexicon of the English Language? I have not seen a copy of “Flora’s Dictionary” in 50 years. Or of another bethumbed manual, compiled, if my memory does not play me false, by Frances Osgood. It bore the flourishing title of “Flowers of Poetry and Poetry of Flowers.” An admirer of the popular cousin for whom I was named gave it to me on my 12th birthday, and she and I used to con the flowery pages together. That the language of flowers therein expounded differed often, and at times seriously, from the authorized and more business-like work I have twice mentioned, sometimes gave rise to laughable “happenings.” Will the modern girl reader be patient with the telling of one of these?

Both volumes were in use in a quaint old homestead “away down South in Dixie,” where a gay house party was assembled for a week in July.

There was the usual number of alleged and suspected lovers, and so much wooing and being wooed going forward that I, though a child, could not err in the understanding of the signs thereof. One determined suitor of a daughter of the house put his fate to the test in the white, high noon of a summer’s day, catching his Dulcinea at the piano in the shaded drawing room, and proceeding, then and there, to enter ardently upon an exposition of the business that had drawn him thither. He was in the full flood of protestation when the rest of the party, unwitting of the imminence of the crisis, fluttered into the room from the verandas and lawn, seeking coolness and shadow and declaiming against the fervent heat of the outer world.

The luckless swain had not another opportunity to press the unfinished suit for the rest of the day, seek it though he did with assiduity that awakened the suspicions of the initiated. His guardian angel was assuredly off guard that season, for he was so far left to himself as to bring a bunch of sweet peas from the garden late that afternoon and present it to his Amaryllis as she sat on the porch surrounded by a circle of mischief-loving lookers-on. A stifled laugh rippled through the party, swelling into a burst of merriment as the girl looked up from the offering, her cheeks scarlet and her eyes flashing indignant amazement upon the poor blunderer. For everybody there except himself knew the definition set over against “Sweet pea” in Flora’s Dictionary:

“An appointed time and half disclosure!”

As the discomfited donor explained to a friend who afterward took him to task for the awful faux pas—he had consulted a floral calendar (I think it was my “Poetry of Flowers”) that gave the sweet pea quite another language.

“It was, ‘Your qualities surpass your charms,’” stammered the worsted wooer to his confidante. “But nothing will convince her that I didn’t intend to tell the other story!”

Street Flowers.

The moral of the true anecdote was more apparent in that day than now. Floral lexicons have gone so far back out of fashion that young people under 30 who condescend to read this talk now hear of them for the first time. Yet Bulwer-Lytton had not then written:

Who that has loved knows not the tender tale
Which flowers reveal when kips are coy to tell?

A couplet which, by the way, would have lashed the mortification of our awkward swain of Lang Syne to madness.

I heard a gallant of this generation say the other day that “flowers are such a safe offering, don’t you know? They express appreciation of a woman’s charms and admiration and all that, of course, but they are too perishable to be used as ‘Exhibit A’ or ‘Exhibit B’ in case of complications.”

The idea crossed my mind that the florist of today may be in collusion with the up-to-date man about town in hastening the effacement of “exhibits.” The arrangement of the “set bouquet” affected by a fast set of pleasure-makers is sheer barbarity. The attenuated wires wound about the stems check the circulation of the tender blossoms as truly as a tourniquet arrests the flow of blood in your limb or mine. When taken apart, the manufactured bouquet betrays other cruelties and shams. Rosebuds with but an inch or two of stem are lashed with the thin wire to sticks that simulate stalks, and the apparent freshness of flower and leaf is induced by some such process as horse dealers resort to freshen up and inspirit the wretched hacks they wound sell. It is an unexplained mystery of iniquity to the buyer that the flowers he selects at 5 o’clock P.M., all glowing and crisp as with the dew of the morning, are limp and miserable within half an hour after he has passed them over to Camilla or Sylvia at 6. If they hold their freshness until she can pin them on her bodice as the finishing touch to her evening toilette, he is lucky.

The evanescence of the bloom of “street bouquets” is too notorious to need more than a word here. Yet we have the boy whose shrill cry of “Flowers! Fresh flowers!” at the top of the subway steps or the foot of the “L” stairs imposes upon none except the very young and the very penurious.

To attempt “entertainment” of street flowers, by whomsoever presented, is a pitiable farce. When they are brought to me by the darling who, on her way from school, is betrayed into expending 10 cents of her weekly allowance in the purchase of mignonette or a “Beauty” rosebud “to surprise grandmamma,” I go through the form of cutting the wicked wire, and clipping the ends of the stems in the forlorn hope of coaxing back some semblance of life and bloom. When the doomed blooms are the gift of a misguided adult, I get them out of sight with merciful speed, by the time his back is turned.

Nobody, nowadays, makes up or presents a “mixed bouquet,” such as was esteemed en regle less than 30 yeas ago. I read but yesterday in a novel the description of such a love gift: “The heart of the collection was a single Cape jessamine. This was surrounded by moss-rosebuds, and these by modest mignonette. A fringe of stephanotis inclosed the fragrant beauties.” Nobody laughed at the picture when the book was published. It would be reckoned a monstrosity today.

Bright Flowers.

To our modern flower-love there is but one way whereby the gift of the fragile and eloquent treasures may be offered with a fair hope that judicious “entertainment” may protract their period of loveliness, therefore their ministry of the beautiful. Long-stemmed and fresh, they are laid upon waxed paper that will prevent evaporation of the vital essence—or sap—which is the life, and inclosed in a box with a close cover. Thus conveyed to friend, lover or invalid, they hold color and crispness. If we would keep them yet longer that they may grace some special occasion, we fit on the cover without disturbing the contents of the box and put them away in a dark, cool place, to await the moment of display. Before arranging them in a vase or bowl of water, clip the ends of the stems to encourage capillary attraction. Water is not sap, but it will lengthen plant life. A bit of charcoal in the bottom of the vase is a sanitary measure. Also, the admixture of a teaspoonful of ammonia in a pint of water. Clip the stems daily while the flowers last.

I have spoken of the always welcome gift of flowers to the invalid. One word of caution here may not be amiss. Never send flowers that are altogether white to the sickroom. Your florist ought to indorse this admonition, backing it up by incidents from his experience of the whims and fancies of this or that customer. The aversion to the receipt of a box of purely white flowers when one is laid upon a bed of languishing from which he may never arise may be absurd. Respect the fantasy. White flowers are for the casket and the tomb. The association in the distempered fancy of the patient may do actual harm.

One can hardly send a prettier and more tasteful gift at this season than a pot of Easter lilies. With intelligent care (entertainment?) they may last for several weeks. Keep them in a moderately warm room, apart from furnace heat and gas fumes; water them daily and give them all the sun you can secure for them. Under these influences the youngest buds will expand into symmetrical bloom. Cut off the dead flowers as they fade and darken into decay.

Marion Harland

OTHER ARTICLES ALSO PUBLISHED…
Family Meals for a Week
The Housemothers’ Exchange

The Bulbs We Planted

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This is the first article in April of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on April 4, 1909, and is an article on planting spring-time bulbs.

Transcribed from the Sunday edition of the The Buffalo Sunday Morning News.

The Bulbs We Planted

IN SETTING pen to paper below the title inscribed above, I confess to a mighty temptation to moralize upon the glamour of human hopes and the varying results that attend upon our planting.

Pushing this aside, I fall a victim to the more sensible inclination to insert here and now an extract from a bewitching letter from a Chicago woman who treats of bulb culture, together with a variety of other topics. If I had a valid excuse for publishing her communication entire, our members should have it. As it passes from theme to theme, swiftly and gracefully, getting honey for each, the rest of the epistle must wait until occasion justifies the publication.

Have I ever told in the exchange the story of the boy who asked his mother “if the old moons were not cut up into little stars when they got too small to be used as moons?” It is one of my pet anecdotes, and I apply it to the letter in hand. The little stars—all bright—will twinkle forth in due time.

Good Luck.

As a beginning: “I will give my experience in raising Chinese lilies, in answer to Mrs. A.R. (Chicago).

“My younger days were passed in California, and every year our Chicago house servant gave us the bulbs, and said if they bloomed by New Year’s Day we would have ‘good luck’ that year.

“If you grow them in water, they will never bloom again in water. If, however, you plant them in the ground after they have finished blooming in water, they will come up every year, and at the end of five years (!) they will blossom again, and every year after that. I did as he told me, and found all true. He said, also, that if they were planted in earth the first time, they would always bloom yearly. I never tried that, so I cannot vouch for the truth of it.

A Showcase Fernery.

“The description and the picture of your fernery made me homesick. I made one, when in California, of a showcase, which may be a hint to those who cannot afford to have an expensive one made. I went to the woods every spring and brought home fresh moss and ferns. It was a constant source of pleasure.

“Some one asked some time ago for the name of the author of a poem beginning:

God might have made the earth bring forth
Enough for great and small;
The oak tree and the cedar three,
Without a flower at all.

“it was written by Mary Hewitt. I have the whole poem of eight verses, which I will copy, if the person referred to has not received it.”

With this true-hearted flower-lover, I am thanking the Giver of every good and perfect gift today that He did not leave the buds and blossoms out of His plan of creation. For in cottage window, in city flats with but one lookout toward sunshine, as in conservatory and greenhouse, the bulbs we planted ten weeks and more agone are answering to the subtle call of spring. The most erudite naturalist knows no more than the illiterate dullard by what mysterious means that call is conveyed to the very heart of the frozen earth. Had we buried our bulbs in boxes of sand and left them in windowless cellars, they would have felt—I can hardly say “heard”—the summons and stirred restlessly in their sleep and darkness. In the reflected sunshine where stands my fernery, and nearer the window, a row of flower pots and bulb glasses, leaves and blossoms (what few there are of these last) lean joyously toward the outer world. I could fancy that I detect an air of anticipation of longer days and a daily slant nearer to their ledge of the vivifying beams which mean warmth and growth the world over.

Mainly Rules.

Hyacinths are the most satisfactory bulbs for the amateur window gardener. They are hardy and sweet natured, as well as generous of fragrance. No other bulb that I know of—if we except that capricious sacred lily of the Chinese—takes so kindly to water. It is better to set them in colored glasses than in clear. The light dallies so long with the roots that the flowering in neglected. I had never heard this until I found out for myself that the blossoms borne by the plants in uncolored and transparent glasses were insignificant by comparison with those set in the colored. I am told that the blue rays are more beneficial to root-growth than any other color.

Apropos of roots, I saw yesterday a curiosity in the form of a sweet potato which was set in the mouth of a Mason fruit jar just before Christmas. The tuber is held in place by a bit of twine, two-thirds of it being submerged in the water that fills the jar. It had not been in this position three days, when hair-like roots shot out from the lower part of the potato, and in a week the top of the tuber followed suit with delicate sprouts, developing into tiny leaves in a fortnight. Now the jar is full of a twisted mass of rampant rootlets that seem to press impatiently against their prison walls, struggling to get into the light. Long attenuated vines hang down on the outside of the jar. Some are two feet in length, some three. All are disconsolate in expression, and the wee leaves are almost white. This, although the jar stands in the full sunlight all day. The strength of the tuber had expended itself on the roots stimulated by the unchecked sunshine.

Some of the Chinese lilies we established, according to rule and order, among clean pebbles in bowls of water hat have been refilled daily have towered aloft into a jungle that looks like a Florida canebrake of spear-shaped leaves, rankly green, but with never a symptom of blossoming. Perhaps they bloomed in water last year, a fact of which the honest florist from whom we bought the bulbs could not have been ignorant. In which case, we must wait four years longer after we plant it in the earth before we may expect another flowering. The revelations of the Chinese butler on this head (or want of head) may well make cautious in our purchases next autumn. Each bulb should be labeled with the date of the last blossoming, and whether this was done by water or on hand.

Freesias have earned a well-merited popularity since their introduction into American gardens a score of years ago. They are easily raised in the window parterre that boasts a fair supply of winter sunlight. I have petted them into pale but odorous flowering in my jardinière, where the slant rays did not visit them until March 1. They take kindly to house culture when planted in rich earth and allow what may be called a living income of sunshine. They are graceful in form, in color a creamy white, with sometimes a dash of warmer orange at the heart, and exquisite in the delicate apricot perfume that is pervasive, yet never cloying.

It would be interesting to know how many of the bulbs we planted at Christmas or thereabouts blossomed at Easter, as we meant them to do. May we not hear from our house gardeners on this point? I promise not to moralize upon the several reports, and to yield hearty sympathy in each experience, be it discouraging or hopeful.

Marion Harland

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Concerning Oil Cloth

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This is the final article in March of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on March 28, 1909, and is an article on the importance of using oilcloth in the kitchen to protect floors, walls, shelves, and the table.

Transcribed from the Sunday edition of the The Buffalo Sunday Morning News.

Concerning Oil Cloth

THEY call it American cloth in English talk and writings, and a plebeian flavor clings to every such mention of it. It belongs to stories of squalid lodgings and shabby-genteel eating houses in the rural districts and at the seaside. It cannot be denied that, in our own country, this native product of inventive genius has lost caste within a quarter century. Middle-aged women recollect when the dining table was covered between mealtimes with a square of painted oilcloth, bound with galloon or tape. In some households it was not removed when the damask went on. The oilcloth, if or good quality, was lined with heavy canton flannel, and reversed in spreading the glossy linen over it, serving the double purpose of protecting the mahogany from hot dishes and splashes of liquid and deadening the impact of crockery and silver against the polished surface.

We use the “silence cloth” of quilted muslin or of felt, now, to protect the table and to make the damask lie smoothly, at the same time gaining the effect of a better quality for the linen. A thin, well-laundered table cloth laid over the felt takes on the look of a heavier weave than if spread on the bare boards. It wears longer, too, and keeps cleaner. I have explained repeatedly to the young housewife that a creased and limp cloth “catches dirt” sooner than a smooth, thereby increase the laundry bills.

Zinc Versus Oilcloth

But to our oilcloth, which still has its uses. I might add—and its abuses. For a long time it held its own on the kitchen work-table. It was easily cleaned; it did not absorb grease, and it was impervious to unholy drippings which would have soaked into the wood but for intervention. Zinc drove oilcloth out of housewifely favor on table-tops. Let me say, digressively, at this point, that my vanity as a kitchenly authority had a hard blow in the discovery that I was not the first woman to discover and utilize the value of zinc as a tablecover in laundry, pantry and cookroom. I verily believed that nobody else had ever thought of superseding oilcloth by nailing a sheet of zinc upon the deal boards and tacking the edges neatly under the projecting top of my kitchen work-table. My pride had a fall a year later when I read a recommendation of the plan in a cooking magazine, written by one who certainly had never seen my “invention.”

Oilcloth had a way of curling up at the edges, and one dared not set down a hot saucepan upon it for a second. Carelessness in this respect was registered in discolored rings and crescents, which presently wore into bare spots, through which the foundation of the fabric showed forlornly. Zinc is heat-proof as well as water-proof.

Dubious Economy

The stouter floor oilcloth held its ground longer. In fact, it is still extensively used in halls and kitchens, especially in the country. The gorgeously impossible flower and fruit patterns that pleased our childish fancy have passed away, with the monstrous deigns of carpets affected by our grandmothers. Neat, geometric figures, in imitation of tiled pavements and other “conventional” designs, show an advance toward just artistic taste that is gratifying.

In buying oilcloth never lose sight of the truth that a cheap article in this line is the dearest in the end. Likewise, that the end is not far off for the housewife who lays the “bargain” upon hall or kitchen floor. Within a few weeks there will appear little lanes and alleys, criss-crossing one another, where the mother’s busy feet and the boys’ brogans have trod into the soft lacquer, which is the best the manufacturer can afford “at that price.” The coating is thin, and the cotton web it overspreads is also of poor quality.

The number of distressful letters I receive from housekeepers begging for some method of making oilcloths last long enough to pay the buyers for putting them down are abundant proof of the false economy of laying cheap stuffs upon floorings where there is much passing. “Much traffic,” one housewife styled the going to and fro of many hurrying feet. It was an apt word for the rush of the day’s occupations in an American home.

If you can possibly afford it, buy linoleum—the aristocratic cousin of oilcloth—for the kitchen and bathroom. It outlives the usefulness of the best oilcloth by an incredible term of years. The “inlaid” linoleum of fair quality is the next best thing to a tiled floor.

Some years ago I visited a friend who had hung the walls of her kitchen with oilcloth. The pattern, an arabesque design in green and white, matched the linoleum on the floor, and the effect was most pleasing.

She expatiated upon the merits of the material for covering the side walls with all the zeal of an inventor and benefactor. It was easy to keep clean. A little soap and water, a soft brush, a soft cloth—and presto! a wall as good as new. It as not injured by smoke and steam, as paper would be. It did not scale off and crack after the manner of painted walls. It was tacked smoothly to the wall and finished at the top with a pretty frieze. I heard from my friend last summer a tale of disappointment that was affliction. The vaunted oilcloth had proved a harbor and breeding ground for roaches and croton bugs—for black and red ants that equaled Pharaoh’s plagues in degree if not in variety. It was necessary to tear down the beautiful screen to unearth the pests. The walls behind it were literally black with the hordes.

“I am having the walls and floors painted!” wailed the disconsolate victim. “But shall I never get rid of the infliction I invited so ignorantly?”

Other housemothers tell me of similar experiences with the pinked shelf oilcloths that have superseded paper in most of our pantries, storerooms and china closes.

“There are so many hiding places for vermin of all kinds,” writes one. “Hereafter I use papers and look under them every week.”

I answered that she would find it an easy to look under the oilcoths. They are prettier, firmer and not susceptible to dampness; more easily dusted and altogether preferable to shelf papers, provided they are lifted frequently and search made for the intruders. If the shelves are treated once a month to a hot bath plentifully dashed with red pepper, the tiny pests will not take refuge under them.

I am surprised that so few housewives supply themselves with kitchen aprons of oilcloth. A light and flexible quality should be selected for this purpose. The apron must be made with a bib, kept in place by shoulder straps. It should be ample in size, furnished with a couple of pockets and bound with galloon. It may be slipped on over the dinner dress at the mistress’ flying visit to the kitchen to see that all is in proper trim, or to put the finishing touch to some peculiarly delicate dainty. A pair of oilcloth sleeves, buttoned at the cuffs and shirred above the elbows with a “drawstring” would complete her defensive armor.

Marion Harland

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The Business Guest

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This is the third article in March of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on March 21, 1909, and is an article on what to do when a housewife’s husband brings home a surpirse business guest.

Transcribed from the Sunday edition of the The Buffalo Sunday Morning News.

The Business Guest

JOHN MILTON was not happy in his married life. From what his biographers hint, rather than assert, we gather that Mistress Mary Powell, “a simple and apparently stupid country girl, accustomed to dance with king’s officers at home,” soon wearied of the quiet, humdrum life she led with her poet-husband, and after provoking him to stern rebuke for her follies, she ran away to her old home, under pretense of visiting her parents, and flatly refused to return to John’s household drudgery until such time as pleased her caprice. When she did come back, we are told plainly that she was more of a hindrance than a help to the student; also that she crowded his house with her own friends and kindred and paid scant attention to his erudite associates.

It may well be, then, that recollections of his own unsatisfied desires by the very force of contrast helped him to paint the picture of the first garden party of which he have any record. Espying the majestic angel through the vista of trees, and divining that he would shortly visit him, he ordered his spouse to get ready a luncheon worthy of Eden and the celestial stranger. Eve’s ready promise too—

“Haste, and from each bough and brake,
Each plant and juiciest gourd, to pluck such choice
To entertain our angel guest, as he,
Beholding, shall confess that here on earth
God hath dispensed His bounties as in heaven—”

has stood for over two centuries as a model example for the housewife whose husband, without or with warning, brings home a Business Guest to partake of her hospitality.

A more authentic instance of early and gracious hospitality in like circumstances is the beautiful story of Abraham’s entertainment of the three men who appeared to him as he sat in his tent door under the oak of Mamre in the heat of the day. After seating them in the grateful shade and offering water to wash their tired and dusty feet, he sped him to Sarah and bade her with patriarchal imperiousness:

“Make ready quickly” (the original means in modern English: “And be quick about it!”) “three measure of meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth.”

“Pot-Luck.”

Sarah, we know, was a bit—and not a little bit—of a virago on her own account, yet she obeyed her lord’s behest with as cheerful alacrity as the chief wife of the Beduin sheik at whose door we alighted when noon was high over the plains of Jericho ten years ago—and made haste to prepare coffee and unleavened bread, honey in a lordly dish and the “leben” our translators have done into “butter” in the narrative of Sisera’s flight and death.

Oriental hospitality is as punctilious in claims upon householder and tent dweller now as when the apostle to the Gentiles admonished the converts not to be unmindful to entertain strangers, adding for their encouragement: “Some have thus entertained angels unawares.”

If the housewifely reader be disposed to cavil at the length of this preamble, I hasten to remind her that few of the minor happenings of domestic life vex her righteous soul more sorely than when John brings home a business friend to dinner, or to spend the night. It so often falls out, in the natural perversity of “things,” that the guest who is not a friend and barely an acquaintance appears upon the scene at the most inopportune season for the family comfort, that reminiscence adds gloom to anticipation. The fact that John—the very embodiment of gentle considerateness of her convenience and happiness—“couldn’t get out” of asking the man from Chicago or Atlanta or Montreal to take “pot-luck” with his family does not abate the nuisance. You may be morally certain in the depths of your conscience that John had some irrefutable reason for imposing the alien element into the peaceful domestic brew. For he loves his home and enjoys an uninterrupted evening in the bosom of his family as much as most men enjoy their clubs. I doubt if the best wife who ever loved and respected her husband as the wisest of men fully appreciated the business expediency of asking “a man” home to dinner, even though his wife may not quite approve of the politic measure.

In our gossip of Eden and Mamre we made clear the point that the angels who dropped in unexpectedly were Business Guests. Also, that the choicest dainties of Paradise and the quick loaves and the roast veal were made ready and pressed upon the strangers before the hosts had an inking of the purport of the business. I did not say this in jest. There are lessons to be learned from every page of Holy Writ. The Martha of the twentieth century may sit at shrewish Sarah’s feet and learn of her here.

I know (nobody better!) what a jar to the orderly routine of the day is the unlooked-for apparition of the aforesaid “man.” I recall dreadful moments when he was three men. Do not smile when I say that the thought of the three who “looked in” upon Abraham, resting after a hot day’s work—perchance dozing—in the tent door, came to me with healing in its wings. I would not be outdone in philosophic composure by Sarah!

Coming to close quarters with the trial—here is where “The Emergency Shelf,” of which we talked together last year, is a stay and a solace. Without stopping to pry into the occult causes of the coincident appearance of the Business Guest with the infrequent assignment of cold corned beef to the place of honor of the menu, if the meal be luncheon or supper, or the second day’s appearance of the roast (warmed up, or down?) which you and the cook decided would just “do” for the family proper, or the more mysterious fact that the most important “man” for whom John would have you and the home show at their best, inevitably shows up on washing or ironing day—let us reason together regarding the manner in which the infliction should be met. Before we attack the “shelf,” put yourself in John’s place from the moment he informs you through the telephone that he has asked a business friend from out of town to dine or sup or lunch with him. The telephone booth being soundless and discreet, he deprecates the necessity confidentially, and hopes—anxiously—that it won’t throw you out in the least. If he have the habit of talking over business with you he hands a hurried abstract of the imperative circumstances which have urged him to this step without consulting you. He knows from past experiences how nobly you rise to the situation etc., etc., et cetera.

Putting yourself in his place, justify all that he says of yourself. Bid him bring his Man along and to rest confidently in the persuasion that you will do your best at such short notice.

Cold corned beef is—cold corned beef! Nevertheless, it may be made a shade less plebeian by the accompanying sauce of grated horseradish beaten to a cream with a little white of egg and the slices may be lapped symmetrically over one another on the dish and furnished with celery tops or parsley. Baked potatoes—preferably sweet—go well with the meat, and require no preparation beyond washing and wiping. Baked cream toast is another good impromptu dish. Begin the luncheon with sardines. Serve with them brown bread cut thin and buttered and pass sliced lemon with the sardines. The meat and vegetable and the dish of steaming hot cream toast come next. Then cake and homemade canned fruit from the “shelf.” Hot, creamy cocoa should go around with the cake. If you have time and opportunity to get lettuce for a salad, you give a touch of elegance to the meal without much expense. Season with a French dressing and pass heated crackers and cheese with it. It should immediately precede the sweets.

This schedule is designed as a suggestion of what may be done at short notice to alter the character of a luncheon. It is not likely in this age of telephones and well-trained husbands that you will not have an hour’s notice of the addition to your family group. Should the business guest be picked up on the way uptown and introduced to you unceremoniously, meet the shock with a smiling face, and make up by a cordial welcome for ant deficiencies in the menu.

DON’T APOLOGIZE!

Excuses and and flurries accentuate blemishes and do not engender charitable judgment. On the contrary, the stranger is led to the conviction that you are careless of John’s everyday comfort. Stand fast by the rule which every bride should make at the outset of housewifely life, namely, that what is good enough for her husband is good enough for ant other man. The clean and smooth tablecloth should be a matter of principle; shining silver and unnicked china, bright glass and clean napkins are the honest due of the man whose labor supplies the means to keep the house “going.” Study for him little niceties of table appointments and daintiness of personal appearance.

An Honored Guest.

“I have been married forty years,” I heard a white-haired lover-husband say. “In all that time I have never seen my wife sit down to a meal in a slovenly dress or with unkempt hair. And I have never been ashamed to set an accidental visitor at the table she has spread for me and the children. Such things make a man respect a woman, you will say? Yea! and they keep up the average of his self-respect. The boys and I must live up to what she believes us to be. Since she prepares for us as for honored guests, she must not be disappointed in us.”

He was not a sentimental man in the usual acceptation of the word. He was sensible and appreciative of the position his wife assigned him in his own house.

One brief word as o your attitude toward the Business Guest. Never let him feel himself to be an interloper. You may think to yourself that he might have gone to a hotel instead of deranging your plans for the day by accepting the invitation John could not help extending to him. While he is within your doors, it is your sacred duty to treat him as if he were there by your especial and cordial wish. You owe it to yourself, to your husband and to the holy name of Hospitality.

Marion Harland

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With a Chafing Dish

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This is the second article in March of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on March 14, 1909, and is an article on the chafing dish for Lenten cooking.

Transcribed from the Sunday edition of the The Buffalo Sunday Morning News.

With a Chafing Dish

“DO NOT leave Paris without visiting M. Frederic Delair. To watch him as he prepares, on half a dozen chafing dishes, the pressed duck to which he has given an international reputation, is an experience you cannot afford to miss. And to eat it after he has cooked it is a gastronomic event.”

With the admonition in our minds, we left our hotel one August evening after a wearying round of last sightseeing that disposed us for rest rather than for new “experiences” of any kind. Had we not been hungry as well as tired, I doubt if even the fear of losing the spectacle of M. Frederic and the international gastronomic exploit would have tempted us forth.

We took a couple of motor cars for the party. The absurdly low rates at which the tourist may ride through foreign city and country are a lure to the expenditure of all one’s loose cash in riotous motoring; one is ashamed to recall after one returns to his native land and home cab and hack fares. In ten minutes after leaving the Normandie we alighted, cooled by the rapid spin through street and boulevard, at a modest restaurant in a quiet corner that did not look “fashionable.”

“Frederic Delair, Sr.,” was on the sign above the door. Generations of seniors and juniors may have served the public and filled their own pockets at the same “old stand.” The sensible Parisian does not move uptown as soon as he has made his fortune in a particular locality.

The interior of the famous eating house was no more pretentious than the façade. Several long, low-browed rooms opening out of one another were neatly furnished with tables set with the exquisite taste that belongs to the humblest French café. The linen was glossy, the silver shone and the glass sparkled. Flowers graced every broad and filled jardinieres were set in the windows. Early as it was, but one table capable of accommodating our company of five was unoccupied. Groups of well-dressed, well-mannered guests had taken possession of every room, and we were at once struck by the general air of expectancy that pervaded the assembly. It was no ordinary and conventional bite and sup that had drawn us hither.

The August Chef.

Down the middle of each room was a row of service tables, presided over by “garcons,” spick and span in attire, irreproachable in clean-shaven faces and in coiffure. We had hardly settled ourselves to our satisfaction when a man walked slowly down the length of the suite of rooms in the aisle next the service tables. His movements were so deliberate that we had time to comment in idle amusement upon the incongruity of his appearance with the smartly dressed officials before we noted that he addressed some remark in passing to the occupants of the various tables. He may have been 55 years of age; a full beard, which left his upper lip bare, was lightly grizzled; he wore a long frock coat, sagging open from eh waist down; a wisp of cravat was white; his build was stocky, and he stooped very slightly in walking. He might have posed as Edward Eggleston’s Hoosier Schoolmaster, or he might have been the Parson Poundtext of 50 years agone, just off the circuit of a dozen Tennessee counties. Not until he halted at our corner table and “hoped that mesdames and messieurs would enjoy the dinner that would presently be served to them,” enunciating the formula in gentle, persuasive tones in French that had a plaintive cadence, did it down upon us that he was connected with the café. A major-domo, perhaps, or a superannuated head butler, kept for form’s sake, we concluded among ourselves.

Amused curiosity gave way to amazement, as, with the mien of a master, he took his stand by the central service table and accepted the glittering carver handed to him by an obsequious waiter. At the same instant six men appeared in the kitchen door, bearing as many lordly platters, each containing a pair of roast ducks, plump, smoking hot and savory. In a trice these were set beside six chafing dishes we had not observed before. Each chafing dish was flanked by an odd construction of bright metal surmounted by a wheel. Five assistants seized carvers, and with the precision of machines, the ducks were stripped down to the carcasses. I never saw such swift carvers elsewhere. The sliced breasts and the disjointed wings and legs were laid upon hot dishes; all that remained—bones and stuffing—went into the hoppers of the queer machines, and the shining wheels revolved as if moved by one man’s hand and will. From the tunnels at the bottom of the presses began to flow into vessels set to receive it a rich, ruddy liquid—the very essence of the juicy, flavorous meat. This was turned into the deep “blazers” of the chafing dishes, seasoned, and thickened with the same marvelous speed and dexterity that had characterized the preceding maneuvers, and the double burners below the dishes were lighted. Between the lazing lamps and the door were glass screens hinged to protect the flame from chance draughts. When the bubble began, the sliced meat was laid in the unctuous gravy; a few minutes sufficed to heat it through, and pressed duck was served and distributed to the waiting and watching crowd.

As soon as the ceremony began, every man and woman there had turned about to face the high priest and his satellites. It fell out that the portion assigned to us in the corner was that prepared by the hands of the august chef. To say that e partook of it reverently would hardly be an exaggeration. Not a word had been spoken by him or his lieutenants while the swift work went forward to complete perfection.

Anywhere else the performance might have been ridiculous. Scene, actors and accessories made it almost solemn.

The French cook is an artist born. To Frederic Delair, Sr., the task laid to his skilled hands was as important as the rendition of a great musical opus to the maestro who plays upon men’s heart-strings as upon a well-tuned harp. If I had never comprehended until that night what has made his nation the banner cooks of the world, I would have learned the secret through the pantomime enacted in our sight.

The Lenten Chafing Dish.

As I have written once and again, we take cookery too lightly. If we do what is set before us, with our might, it is muscle and not spirit that performs the work. One and all, we might become humble learners in the Academy of the Fine Arts presided over by the grey-bearded genius who looked like a frontier circuit-rider, and felt himself to be a king among men.

An American author who has gained for herself an enviable reputation as a past-mistress in the manipulation of the utensils she praises, writes of the chafing dish:

“There are still a few people who have so little appreciation of cookery as a fine art that they are bored by the sight of the workings of this utensil. These persons are, happily, in a small minority. Nearly every one feels a keen interest in watching the preparation of the dish that is soon to gratify his palate, and the hostess who presides over the chafing dish is usually flattered (or fluttered) by finding herself the center of observation.”

In another chapter of the valuable little handbook of the chafing dish from which I take these hints she goes on to say:

“The housekeeper of either sex who cooks on a chafing dish should be careful to have all the ingredients at hand before beginning operations. Many a good dish has been injured, if not actually spoiled, because the cook has had to wait at the last moment while some one hunted for the pepper, or measured the milk, or rushed for the lemon squeezer. Most of the measuring should be done in advance, and each ingredient should be put in place by the hand of the one who is to do the cooking.”

I congratulate the members of the Exchange in advance upon the fact that the few recipes, which are all I have room for here, are extracted by special permission of the author from the dainty and practical handbook to which I have referred just now. I purposely select dishes suitable for Lenten luncheons and suppers.

Fresh Cod with Anchovy.

Flake cold boiled cod, and to two cups of this allow two hard-boiled eggs, minced fine, a tablespoonful of anchovy paste and a cupful of white sauce. When this last is cooked smooth and thick stir in the anchovy and the eggs, and then the fish. Toss up from the bottom, that the taste of the anchovy may get all through the fish.

Shad Roes, Sautes.

Prepare the roes by boiling ten minutes in salted water to which has been added a teaspoonful of vinegar. This may be done in the lower compartment of the chafing dish. When the roes are done lay them in cold water for five or ten minutes to blanch them; then dip them in flour. Put two tablespoonfuls of butter into the blazer and lay in the roes. They will cook more evenly and quickly if you will cut each into two or three pieces.

When they are done, take them out, melt a little more butter in the blazer, and serve this with each portion of the roes. Pass sliced lemon with this dish.

Panned Oysters.

Melt two tablespoonfuls of butter in the blazer, and when it hisses lay in it twenty good-sized oysters which have been drained and dried between two towels. As soon as the edges curl, dust with pepper and salt and serve at once on toast.

Oysters a la Poulette.

Thirty oysters, one pint of cream, one tablespoonful of butter, one tablespoonful of flour, one-half teaspoonful of salt, saltspoonful of white pepper, three grates of nutmeg.

Put in the butter, and when it simmers, add the four; stir smooth, and mix in the cream, stirring constantly. Boil up once and put in the oysters. Cook about four minutes. Hen they plump nicely, season and serve on buttered toast or on toasted and buttered crackers.

Panned Oysters a la Newburg.

Cook the oysters as directed in the last recipe, and when they “ruffle” or “curl” stir in two tablespoonfuls of sherry in two tablespoonfuls of sherry or madeira. Cook one minute longer and serve on toast.

Little Pigs in Blankets.

Drain large, plump oysters and wrap about each a very thin slice of corned pork or fat bacon, skewering them together with a stout straw or a wooden toothpick. Lay in the heated blazer and cook until the pork heated blazer and cook until the pork or bacon is clear and crisped.

Eggs with Black Butter.

Three tablespoonfuls of butter, half a teaspoonful of vinegar, salt and pepper to taste; three or four eggs as you have room for them in the blazer.

Cook the butter in the blazer until it is a dark brown—almost black. Break in the eggs then, one at a time, and carefully, lest they should run. Baste with the butter until they are done, adding the vinegar just before you take them up, and sprinkle with pepper and salt.

Marion Harland

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Ways and Ways of Doing Things

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This is the first article in March of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on March 7, 1909, and is an article on how much easier life gets for the maid if she employs a business-like mindset to her work.

Transcribed from the Sunday edition of the The Buffalo Sunday Morning News.

Ways and Ways of Doing Things

“SHE is quiet and methodical.”

This was but one clause in the eminently satisfactory certificate given to Serena by her former employer.

One delightful Milesian used to call it “a stiff ticket.” I have never been sure that she was far wrong.

The aforesaid employer was “declining housekeeping”—which I believe to be a purely American phrase—and going to a hotel to live. There were but herself and husband “in family,” and where was the sense of keeping up a regular household for two old people?

This, likewise, I remark, is a sentiment and expression of American coinage.

But as to Serena, who had applied for the vacant place of waitress and chambermaid in my house. She was warranted willing, honest, neat and obliging. She had lived for 14 months in these capacities with the writer of the “stiff ticket,” who would not give her up now save for the declination I have named. Yet my yes returned once and again to the five words I have quoted on this page.

“Quiet and methodical.” No other employer with whom I have ever had similar dealings had used the phrase. It impressed me the more favorably that memory instantly conjured up the vision of the last incumbent of the office for which Serena had offered herself. Martha had not been noisy, it is true, but—methodical? At the idea I smiled broadly, and raising my eyes from the certificate, I saw the flicker of a responsive, yet a respectful gleam cross the face of my companion. She could not have divined the source of my amusement, but she saw that I smiled in a friendly fashion and reflected the light. I have bethought myself sometimes that that brief sympathetic flicker was a key to Serena’s innermost self. Nothing escapes the eyes that never stare inquisitively, and action follows perception.

A Willing Soul.

I engaged her on the spot. She has been an inmate of my house now for five years, and in all that time I have not had occasion to reprove her once for negligence or for any fault of manner of speech.

When, one morning last week, she forgot to put the salt on the breakfast table, a chuckle of delight ran around the board.

“The first time we ever caught her napping!” ejaculated a grinning lad.

And another, as the maid hastened to repair the omission: “Why, Martha, in all the two years she was with us, never set the table once without forgetting something. Don’t you recollect the morning we counted 10 articles she had to put in place after we sat down to breakfast?”

The tale was literally true, and she had believed, like a willing and honest soul (for she was that!) that the table was properly laid. From the time she left her bed with the sun and sought it long after the god of day had withdrawn his face from our side of the world, the girl was in a hurry. She swept with quick swirls of the broom that would have left a stream of mare’s tails in her wake had she been the old woman that brushed cobwebs from the sky; she scrubbed hard, irregularly and painfully, overlooking a corner here and there in her anxiety “to get through with the job.” That was a frequent sating with her. Every task was a “job,” and her eyes were always fixed upon another just ahead of her. Details were as nothing in her sight. “Consequentimentally”—as Mrs. Plornish says in “Little Dorritt”—Martha had what the boys called “the best forgettery” upon record in our domestic archives. It was absolutely phenomenal. And strange to say—for the girl, as I have said, meant to do right abashed her. She rectified them without a blush or murmur of apology. They were all in the day’s work.

Why did I keep her for two years? Partly because she was neat in person, quick of apprehension, willing, industrious and honest; partly because, as I shall show presently, her “ways” were so much like those of an immense number of other women. “Method, system and businesslike” are words which have no place in their working vocabulary. When at last Martha became the wife of a mechanic and departed to another city to miskeep a house of her own, we were sorry to part with her personality.

And, up to the last, her desire to preform her duties properly was so apparent that we were lenient in judgement.

Serena talks little in our hearing at any time. When about her work she never speaks except to answer questions. She does not “take life hard.” On the contrary, she is uniformly cheerful, and the children love to be with her. The secret of her success as a housemaid may be condense into one sentence: She knows what she means to do, and she thinks of nothing else while she has the task in hand. For the time she is a well-regulated machine, warranted to keep in order and to turn out certain results. Each hour has its appointed duty, and she drives steadily on until the next hour brings the next duty. The observant eyes have a cool brain behind them.

To sum up the case, she runs her housework as a man runs his business. I should not dare assert it were this a fancy sketch.

The world is likely to be turned upside down by the frenzied efforts of “pioneers” in the mission of raising women citizens to the level of men. Without trenching upon the field of controversy, may I say a few direct, plain words to my fellow housemothers with regard to what we have actually in hand and not what may or may not be?

Business Methods in the Home.

To begin with an unpalatable truth: As housekeepers we are, as a rule, unbusinesslike. When men say this we retort that a house cannot be run like a store or shop or office. Sometimes the husbands believe us. Oftener they are silenced, not convinced. The boldest and most compassionate of them dare not attempt to point out the flaws in his souse’s system of daily toil. I would better say “her lack of system.” When I have hinted at the possibility of performing the multifarious tasks incumbent upon wife, mother and caterer, according to rule and measure, I am assured that it is impracticable. I would not attempt to say how many thousand times that hateful adage.
“Man’s work is from sun to sun,
But woman’s work is never done,”
has been flung at me in the course of arguments upon the vexed subject.

There is no stranger feature in the whole question than that factory girls and clerk after they are married never think of applying to domestic labors the habits of punctuality and precision they learned in their former spheres. Yet the woman who brings energy, will and ingenuity to bear in the resolve to regulate her household by fixed laws, assigning to each hour its task and finishing each before the next is brought forward, finds to her amazement that she secure for herself what the rhyme I quote intimates can never be hers, to wit, leisure.

To illustrate, by a return to the true story of my maids, Martha never had “a moment to herself,” as she put it. Serena secures an hour in each afternoon for a bath and dressing for the evening, and has five evening per week on an average in her quiet room for her own sewing and reading.

I know—no one better!—how many and vexatious and inevitable are the interruptions which are hindrances in the “just one day” of the housemother’s life. Our husbands, sons and brothers have the same in number, if not exactly in kind. These are “circumstances” which we are to expect and to conquer. In planning what is to be done today allow for these. As your husband would say, “leave a margin,” or perhaps he will phrase it, “Set it down to profit and loss.” But hold fast to your schedule—when you have made it.

Did you ever talk to the manager of a successful hotel? Or ask to be conducted through the kitchen of the same establishment? You will learn much that will set you thinking, if you will do these things. I did. There is no reason why your house may not be “run” with the like regard for order and punctuality on a miniature scale. I have the pleasure of visiting homes where the experiment has been made, and successfully. Would it not be wise for each “progressive woman” to introduce “business methods” into her own home before essaying to lend a hand in making national, State and township laws? It may be capital practice for what lies before the sex in the future of the country. It should be easier to manage Bridget, Dinah and Thekla than to manipulate their masculine counterparts in primary meetings and at the polls. Lift the reproach of “unbusinesslike ways” from women. Put it out of the power of satirists to ask:

“If thou hast run with footmen and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses? And if in the land of peace wherein thou trustedst, they wearied thee, then what wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan?”

Marion Harland

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Hot Cakes

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This is the final article in February of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on February 28, 1909, and is an article on hot cakes.

Transcribed from the Sunday edition of the The Buffalo Sunday Morning News.

Hot Cakes

AN EMINENT English physician—the late Dr. Milner Fothergill—wrote to me of an article I had published, advising light and simple breakfasts for American families:

“You are on the right track. More power to your elbow! The almost in evitable feature of your national breakfast—buckwheat cakes—is an outrage of natural laws.”

I felt, then, that he was too sweeping in his condemnation. There is an old song that expresses the sentiment of the average “native” on this head:

Do you ask what I love best of all things to eat?
Let them come every day, or come without warning—
There is nothing in all the wide world so sweet
As sausage and cakes on a cold, frosty morning.

The rhymester hit the nail on the head in the last line. “The outrage” is most digestible and most toothsome in the keenest winter weather. The “cold, frosty morning” goes as naturally with the buckwheats as the sausage, and the addendum of maple syrup, which completes a satisfactory meal. Canny housemothers adapt diet to weather. Hot cakes belong to frost and snow, as ices and jellied tongue and crisp salads to the dog days. To the failure to accommodate food to the thermometric conditions is due much of the reproach under which this one of our national dishes lies. At the right season, and made in the right way, hot cakes never come amiss. Nobody denies their popularity. I suppose the proverb, “It goes off like hot cakes,” must be of American birth. We borrowed the germ from the aboriginal Indian. He pounded maize upon a flat stone, mixed it with water to a pulp, and baked it upon another flat stone heated in the embers. The hungry settler who chanced to be his compulsory or voluntary guest, eating of the hot corn cake, pronounced it very good, and improved upon it to the evolution of johnny cake and griddles.

That is the name they go by in Yankeeland to this day. At the South the are “batter cakes,” probably in contradistinction to the firmer dough of “pone” and “ashcake.” South of Mason and Dixon’s line they are but one of the numberless “hot breads” which furnish the breakfast table with the regularity of sunrise. It may be remarked in passing that in defiance of dietetic dicta dyspepsia is not so common a disease at the South as in New England. I do not account for the phenomenon; I merely record the fact.

It Stuck to their Ribs.

An intelligent widow, left as a young woman to bring up six children upon painfully narrow means, tabulated the results of gastronomic experiments upon the digestion and consequent growth of her brood. She writes, when they are all men and women:

“I found that a hearty winter breakfast of buckwheat or rice cakes and molasses satisfied them for the forenoon as nothing else did. As the oldest boy phrased it: ‘It stuck to their ribs longer.’ You will comprehend what he meant. It kept them from being hungry in school and while at work. They were sturdy and active and spent much time in the open air. That may account for the fact that buckwheats and molasses never disagreed with them. I was careful that the batter should be light, and the cakes were cooked with as little grease as possible.”

Had she made the experiment later in life, she would have learned that the cakes may be baked and not fried. The gain to the average digestion effected by the use of the soapstone griddle is inestimable.

The dietetic disadvantages of hot cakes lies chiefly in the frying process. Even when the griddle is at the precise degree of heat requisite to cook them through and brown them quickly some of the fat will strike into the heart of the batter and more clings to the surface of the cakes. The soapstone abolishes the evil. It should be cleaned thoroughly with hot suds, rinsed in two waters, dried and then rubbed with plenty of salt.

“But does madame know how much salt it do take?” asked one novice in the use of the utensil. To which I replied that salt is cheap, and bade her beware that not a drop of grease ever touched the griddle. If this admonition be obeyed there is no smell of hot fat in halls and other rooms than the kitchen—nor, indeed, there! The cakes leave the soapstone brown and firm and so free from oily matter that they do not grease the hot napkin enveloping them when served.

That they are far more wholesome than when fried goes without saying.

Old-Fashioned Buckwheat Cakes.

One quart of the best buckwheat flour, four tablespoonfuls of yeast, one teaspoonful of salt, one good handful of Indian meal, two tablespoonfuls of good molasses (not syrup) enough warm (not hot) water to make the ingredients into a thin batter.

Beat long and hard; much of the excellence of the cakes depends upon them beating. The old-fashioned cook beat the batter for ten minutes. Cover, set in a moderately warm place to rise, where there is no danger of a sudden chill during the night. In the morning it should be a spongy mass, nearly as white as cream and full of bubbles. Should it have a sour smell, beat in a very little soda dissolved in warm water. Mix at night in a great stone or agate-ironware pot, and leave some of the risen batter in the bottom—about half a pint—to serve as a sponge for the next night, instead of using a fresh supply of yeast. If the weather be cold, you may do this nightly for a week. Don’t try it for a longer time, for fear of mustiness. Add the usual quantity of flour, meal, salt and molasses every night, the old batter taking the place of yeast.

Some New England foremothers put into the batter two-thirds buckwheat flour and one-third oatmeal, and left out the cornmeal. To my way of thinking (and taste) the Indian meal makes the makes more porous and palatable.

Old Virginia Flapjacks.

One quart of buttermilk.
Two eggs, beaten light without separating whites and yolks.
Two tablespoonfuls of the best molasses.
One tablespoonful of melted shortening.
One tablespoonful of salt.
One teaspoonful of soda, sifted three times with the meal and flour.
Half a cupful of flour.
Two cupfuls of Indian meal or enough to make a good batter.
Sift together meal, flour, soda and salt. Do this three times. Stir the beaten eggs into the buttermilk with shortening and molasses. Put the sifted meal and flour into a great bowl; make a hollow in the middle and pour in milk, eggs, etc., stirring vigorously all the time. The batter should be a trifle thicker than that for flannel cakes. Bake at once.

Flannel Cakes.

One quart of sweet milk.
Three tablespoonfuls of yeast (or half a yeast cake dissolved in warm water.)
One tablespoonful of melted butter or other shortening.
Two eggs, the yolks and whites beaten separately.
One teaspoonful of salt.
About two cups of sifted flour—enough for a good batter.
Make a sponge of yeast, milk and salted flour overnight and cover. Leave in a sheltered corner to rise. In the morning add the beaten eggs and the butter. Some think these excellent cakes improved by the addition of a tablespoonful of molasses beaten in with the eggs and butter. They take on a richer brown if this be added.

Marion Harland

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Fish, Flesh or Fowl

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This is the third article in February of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on February 21, 1909, and is an article on xx

Transcribed from the Sunday edition of the The Buffalo Sunday Morning News.

Fish, Flesh or Fowl

THAT we of the Anglo-Saxon race—Britons and Americans alike—eat more meat than any other nation is a fact established beyond the reach of dispute. It would be waste of time, space, ink, paper and nervous force to enter upon a survey of the reasons why it would be well for us, physically, mentally—and vegetarians say morally—to eat but half as much flesh foods as we now consume. I doubt if all the lectures, essays and private arguments on the subject with which we have been pelted within a quarter century have lowered the income of one butcher in these United States. A thoughtful minority of readers who are willing to be learners, acknowledging that a heavy meal of beefsteak, fried potatoes and buckwheat cakes is not the best preparation hygienic science could devise for the day’s work, especially for the brain toiler, have modified the morning bill of fare. Fruit, cereals, made more nourishing by cream; broiled English bacon, toast, tea and coffee are stereotyped menus in thousands of homes. In as many fish is eaten more freely as a substitute for grosser meats. In like proportion eggs has assumed higher values, and command in consequence fabulous prices.

This complexion of dietetic opinion has done more than reverence for churchly ordinance to turn the attention of buyers and consumers to Lenten observances. I quoted here years ago the illustration of two points of view from flesh foods for the period enjoined by more than one communion of Christians:

“You are keeping Lent, I see, William,” said a Presbyterian master to his coachman as the former stopped at the door of the cottage in which the man’s family was at dinner.

The table was simply spread with salt codfish and potatoes.

“Ah, well,” pursued the employer, thoughtfully, “I believe it would be well for all of us if we abstained from eating meat four days in the week as the spring comes on.”

William pulled at his forelock.

“Yes sir! But, if you please, sir, you’re meaning that it would be better for the body. We think it is better for the soul.”

“It’s difficult to separate the two,” said the other, pleasantly, and went his way.

The Semi-Vegetarian.

He was right. While the two hold together we shall never show how much religious melancholia is the offspring of indigestion, nor how much easier it is for one whose stomach gives him no trouble to be a saint than it is for the confirmed dyspeptic to be a tolerably decent citizen and family man.

Granted, then, that we do eat more meat than is wholesome for us all the year around, and particularly in springtime, when the digestive organs are jaded by caring for much fiber and salted fats for four months on a stretch, what shall we buy and eat in place of beef, mutton, pork, veal and poultry?

The semi-vegetarian is quick to reply with a list of seafoods. “Full of phosphates, tender of tissue and with no coarse blood corpuscles to clog the stomach! Look at the hardy Norsemen and the islanders who subsist almost entirely upon fish and bivalves! Fevers and kidney complications are unknown, etc., etc., etc!”

The thorough vegetarian holds, as one wrote to me the other day, that “a fish suffers as much in the killing as a warm-blooded creature.”—while anther “thanks God nightly that nothing He has made has died that she might live.” This real simon pure and thorough-paced vegetarian, is ready with a substitute for meat, fish and crustaceans.

The Abused Organs.

“Nuts!” he proclaims, “solve the food problem to the demonstration.” Eaten with salt, or with sugar, or plain as they came from the tree; ground into protose, in imitation of Hamburg steaks; moulded into croquettes and fried in vegetable oil or butter; pounded fine and blended with milk and butter into a puree—there is, he affirms, practically no end to the varieties and uses of them—the food God made to grow for the service of man. In desserts, they are of acknowledged worth the world over. The gourmand, surfelted by the beastly profusion of roasts, entrees, games and gravies, resort to nuts and raisins, to walnuts and wine, to restore tone to the abused organs. It is a natural taste—that for this staff of life. What child does not take to a nut tree as naturally and eagerly as a squirrel?

Beans, peas and cereals of all kinds vary his dietary, but nuts are the staple.

Fish, eggs, milk, nuts and green esculents—we have here the menu for our reformed dietary for 40 days to come. As a woman who has lived long and seen much of the planet upon which we live, I may ask humbly, respectfully, what is to be done for those of us who cannot drink milk regularly without growing bilious; those who dislike eggs and cannot digest them; the respectable minority to whom fish is generally rank poison; and the greater number of men and women, and especially children, with whom nuts disagree violently, when eaten in abundance?

That all these exceptions (if you choose to call them so) do exist, and some of them in force, I constantly affirm. There may be healthy human beings who cannot digest meat and to whom the taste is disagreeable. I sat out a dinner party next to one such once upon a time. There were 12 courses—all well cooked—and she dined upon a boiled potato and a water ice. But, then, she was an extremist who maintained that milk and its by-products, butter, are “animal matter.”

Let It Alone.

If this sound flippant, believe that it is written in very sober perplexity, as the Lenten season draws on apace. If church and hygiene concur in prescribing fish as part of daily food, in the place of flesh, with eggs as the alternative, it is the bounded duty of those whose digestive idiosyncrasies revolt at the suggestion to fight against aversion, based upon experience, and learn to eat fish and eggs? We have become uncomfortably familiar with the words “ptomaine poison” within the last few years. Stories of fish, kept in cold storage from September until April, then vended as “fresh,” have made us shy of marketed salmon, cold and halibut. Even if we can be sure that our breakfast eggs are not of the crated variety, we tire of the ovates after 50 or 60 repetitions.

I wish some of staff of physicians and nurses would let us have their honest verdict upon the nut craze. I have not exaggerated the claims made by vegetarians of a certain type, on behalf of these substitutes for flesh foods. In reading the argument adduced in support of said claims, I have been led to collect statistics from mothers and housewives relative to the wholesomeness of nuts. I am surprised to find how many report evil effects from free use of the “substitutes.” With some systems they induce constipation; several women agree in declaring that they have headaches always after parking heartily of them, and six mothers report that eating nuts produces what are sometimes called “cold sores,” and by some known as “fever blisters,” on the lips. I have known for a long time that I cannot indulge in Brazil nuts and English walnuts without suffering from an irritating rash, and that the outbreak of “fever blisters” about the lips is a warning signal that no more of the oily nutriment must be eaten for awhile. Raw chestnuts are notoriously unwholesome.

What is the conclusion of the whole matter? One thing is clear: It is presumptuous and irrational to ordain a fixed dietary for human creatures. The homely adage that “one man’s meat is another man’s bane” is as true as if it had been recorded in the Scriptures. In the same family, as mothers will testify, there are as many varieties of likings as there are children. I do not believe in pampering foolish fancies in ordering our bills of fare. Boys and girls should be trained to partake of what is set before them, asking no questions for civility’s sake. But, when a certain article of food disagrees with child or adult once and again, it is absolutely wrong—a sin against nature and health—for that person to eat it. Something in you wars against that particular combination of ingredients. Let it alone! Be it fish, flesh, fowl, eggs, or even “the one perfect food—milk!” Some imperfection in the individual makeup is antagonistic. Follow the teachings of Mother Nature, when you have assured yourself that it is she who is speaking, and not caprice.

Marion Harland

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