The Box from Home

February 14, 2019 KailaLeave a comment

This is the second article in February of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on February 14, 1909, and is an article on sending a box of goodies to children attending boarding school.

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

The Box from Home

THAT was that I was trying to get off by express from a country railway station. It was addressed to a certain great preparatory academy at L—–, a rural town, but so widely advertised by the list of graduates who have distinguished themselves in universities to which the “rep” was the vestibule, that I was confounded at hearing that the express office at which I applied had no branch there. While I parleyed with the agent, endeavoring to convince him with a woman’s logic that, since I was positive I was right, he must be wrong, a man whom I knew slightly as a commute on the railway to New York, stopped and lifted his hat to me with:

“Pardon me! but can I be of any help to you? I could not avoid overhearing part of your conversation.”

I explained and he lent an attentive ear.

“I am on my way to P—–.” Naming a two a few miles from L—–. “If you will permit me to take charge of that box and see that it is transferred to the local delivery line at P—–, it will give me real pleasure to do you the trifling service.”

“But,” I began, “that would be asking a great deal from a busy man—”

He interrupted me, but courteously:

“It will be my pleasure, as I said. For I have not forgotten hat I, too, was a boy once,” glancing with a kind smile at the address on the case, “and what it was to me to get a box from home.”

I have never packed one since without recalling the smile in the kindly eyes and the softened tone that told of fond and grateful memories.

While I write of the incident there float back to me, as if 45 yeas were less than that number of days, the words of a letter received by me the middle of January, 1864. My favorite brother was in the Southern army, and was now a prisoner of war in a Federal fortress. Though the courtesy of his nominal warders I was permitted to send him a great case at the holidays. Nothing was “contraband” at that season of good will to men.

“I wish you could have seen the opening of that box!” he wrote. “The roast turkey, the ham, the fried chicken, the cakes—with all the delicious et ceteras, set out a royal feast. We shut our eyes (but not our mouths!) and ‘made believe,’ as the children do, that we were at home.”

The “Ground Swell.”

Those of our readers who are not good sailors will comprehend what is meant by the “ground swell” succeeding a storm. Voyagers who are never sick at sea—and, as the manner of such is, boast ostentatiously of the immunity—succumb to the long, slow roll of the sullen billows. The ground swell of subsiding excitement that follows the joyousness of the holidays is to many the dreariest period of the year. To the schoolboy and schoolgirl the routine of study is drudgery until they get used again to the pressure and pull of the harness. The month preceding vacation was all aglow with anticipation. January is like flat champagne. Hearts and spirits obey the universal natural law of rise and depression.

How many mothers remind themselves of the general operation of this law? Jack writes home that he is “in the dumps,” and Mary that she is homesick, and the trend of all the letters bearing the date of “January, 1909,” betrays the settled conviction of boy and girl that dolls are stuffed with sawdust and “all the world is hollow! hollow! hollow!” The ground swell is in full action.

Now is the nick of time for the box from home.

In preparing for Christmas the mothers who have had experience along this dark-blue line have held back a few things, which, but for that wise forethought, would have gone into the array of holiday gifts that made glad the hearts of children. Let her bring them out now from their hiding places and make them bear their part in the blessed work of “making believe.”

I digress here to observe that those who have put the habit behind them with other childish things lose much of the flavor and sweetness of everyday life.

The lose much who do not read Lewis Carroll’s inimitable “Alice” books. They lose more, and they will go on losing, who cannot appreciate the delicate, delicious humor of the works. Nobody who has been with our darling Alice “Through the Looking Glass” will ever forget Humpty-Dumpty’s arguments in favor of the “un-birthday presents,” as opposed to that bestowed on the anniversary. According to him, “there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents.”

“Certainly!” said Alice.

Then—“there’s a knockdown argument for you!”

My readers are more stupid than I could be made to believe if they fail to apply the “knock-downer” for themselves in connection with this, my un-anniversary lay sermon.

The case you fill for the “un-birthday” and “un-holiday” surprise should have a lingering fragrance of the festive season. Some wants were left unsatisfied, as you may know. I doubt if the boy has a pincushion on the dressing bureau he may share with a roommate. I would be willing to wager that he has not a shoebag to hang on the inside of his closet door, or a framed photograph of his country home. A cake with his initials on top will bring up a glow of self-importance that will strengthen his resolution to live up to the ideal the old mother sets up for him in her heart. A pocket edition of an author you know to be a favorite with him will go with him on trolley car and train, and when summer days come will be a companion in forest rambles.

Mary is not superior to enjoyment of home-made “goodies.” We have no better word for bonbons, fruits, cookies, nuts, candied cherries and plums, beaten biscuits, wee jars of pickles and jams, fancy cheeses—that go into the composition of a Saturday supper in a dormitory, with one’s dear particular group of cronies to help dispose of it.

The box from home may keep the “dumpish” boy off the streets for more than one night. It will put a different complexion upon the world Mary has discovered to be hollow all through.

If you have no bairns of your very own, or if yours have passed their school days, or if they are still in the nursery, do a little make-believe on your own account. The year is still new and the need of each human creature for comfort and cheer is ever old and never distant from each one of us. Bethink yourself who dwell in luxury and love among your own people of the lonely lad who is trying to “keep straight” in a sixth-rate boarding house upon a wage of $10 per week; doing his very best to be honest and clean and diligent in business for the sake of the old mother who lives 1000 miles away, or for the dearer sake of her who died last winter.

Brace up the sinking heart of the girl from a village you know of in New Jersey or in Michigan, who is fighting the world single-handed. God help her! in in the wilderness of a city of 1,000,000 souls (so-called), not one of which cares for hers. Bestir your wits and energies to send her a box from home. She may have no home now, but beguile her into believing that she has by the beautiful appropriateness of what she will draw from the depths of the fairy coffer. Things which her mother might thought of; useful trifles that she may keep about her every day and handle gratefully; books of cheer wet and dreary evenings when she is too tired to sew or knit or even to sleep. Not trashy, sensational fiction or goody-goody books, but healthful stories with more laughter than tears in them. And do not forget “sweeties” of the right kind, done up in tissue paper and tied with bright ribbons, such as everybody used at Christmas and next-t-nobody uses between times. In short, such a box as the girl would have had on a birthday from the homestead in that far-off State had not poverty pulled it down over her head and beaten her forth to struggle for bread and shelter.

Marion Harland

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For Sweet Charity’s Sake

February 7, 2019 KailaLeave a comment

This is the first article in February of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on February 7, 1909, and is an article on hosting a St. Valentine chairty fair.

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

For Sweet Charity’s Sake

From time immemorial the fancy fair, the benevolent bazar — in fact, eleemosynary entertainments of what-soever kind—have been the favorite butt of the satirical and the stingy! We are told of worthless articles which are sold at big prices; of “no change” systems; of the shameless expenditure of time and labor for that which satisfies nobody; of the humbuggery of the whole business—until a certain unsavoriness clings to the very name of anything done for “sweet charity’s” sake, if it takes the shape of buying and selling.

Therefore, when I intimate that a pleasant “function” may be arranged in anticipation of St. Valentine’s Day that will bring innocent enjoyment to the participants and customers, and net a neat sum for some deserving object, I foresee dissent and demur on the part of those I would interest. Let us reason together a bit concerning the prejudice we cannot ignore. I grant that it would not “pay” in any sense of the word for such a busy woman as, say, myself, to spend evenings in stuffing pincushions and embroidering sofa pillows, and mornings making cakes and pastries, I could better afford to donate ten, twenty, fifty dollars to the “cause” than engage in labors so expensive, in view of money value of time. Men usually condemn fairs and bazars upon this principle. Business and professional husbands and father estimate the worth of women’s work by the value of their own, whereas the hours, bestowed by the average housewife and the daughter at home upon charity work represent neither dollars nor cents. What the things manufactured by their nimble fingers will bring into the church, club or association is so much clear gain.

So much for the pecuniary side of the question. The moral and social advantages of the function are not slightly esteemed, even by those who assist in the church supper or the fair projected by the young people of the neighborhood in behalf of a local charity. It is much, as pastors and pastors’ wives will tell you, to bring all classes of the church together upon an equal footing; to level, for the time, the fences built by folly and lucre between neighborhood cliques, and to unite all in a common interest. It is a step in the direction of the millennium of universal brotherhood.

Am I didactic? Forget all except that I would have those who love their fellow-men engage in the beautiful enterprise of working for others and forgetfulness of the petty claims of personal dignity and fancied self-consequence. It is a good way to begin the year.

“Hearts Are Trumps.”

Now for our valentine party.

It goes without saying that “hearts are trumps,” for this once, at least. Set your lively wits to work to devise novel ways and means of illustrating the idea. Provide a generous supply of what were known in my fancy-fair days as “bachelors’ pincushions.” They are heart-shaped. Cut two pieces of cardboard into the right form; cover each with thin muslin, basted smoothly over the cards; then with silk, velvet, cotton, satin or morocco. Baste or glue upon the shapes; lay a thickness of cotton batting between the two sides of the heart, and bind or stitch the edges neatly together.

If you have skill with the brush or pen, you may decorate the outer covering with devices suitable to the season. Stick pins closely around the whole heart, and the cushion is ready for the bachelor’s pocket or desk or dressing table. They are really useful, being far more convenient for reference in a “hurry call” for a pin than a paper or “book” holding the tiny indispensables to human comfort.

Heart-shaped shaving cases, calendars, matching holders, workbags, fancy shopping bags, needle books and “housewives” (our foremothers called them “huzzifs”), centerpieces and dollies—the line of possibilities for the managers of the fancy tables is limitless.

As to the supper, imagination and ingenuity have here as wide a range. Salads of lettuce and celery hearts may be disposed of in the desired heart-shape upon chilled platters; it is easy to procure heart-shaped moulds for jellies and lees; small tarts are cut in the same form while cookies and crullers lend themselves readily to it.

In the matter of decoration, my young workers need little instruction from me. Wreaths, of evergreen are twisted into hears; chains of smaller hearts depend from the wall garlands. It is even feasible to have the small supper tables set about the hall for the convenience of select parties of feasters, cut into the popular form. They are of cheap deal and any carpenter can hew out the wedge-shaped “nick” and round the double curve to produce the desired effect—a rude semblance of the conventional idea of the all-important organ.

Right thankful am I that this season there is no talk of “leap year” such as vexed my matronly soul last February! I believe in legitimate transactions in hearts, but I would have them constructed in the good old-fashioned way. For four years we are tolerable safe from indecorous invasion of masculine rights in the matter of proposals and the feminine prerogative of acceptance or rejection.

St. Valentine Cookies.

Cream together two cupfuls of fine sugar and one of butter. Beat three eggs light, yolks and whites separately, and add the beaten yolks to the creamed butter and sugar; next, an even teaspoonful of ground mace, and half as much cloves. Sift twice, and together, a pint of flour and an even teaspoonful of baking powder. Add this to the mixture you already have, alternately with the stiffened whites. The dough should be just soft enough to roll into a sheet a quarter of an inch thick. Cut into heart shapes; stick a bit of citron, like a tiny heart, in the middle of each, and bake in a steady, brisk oven.

Almond Cookies.

Warm the butter very slightly. Cream light a cupful of butter with two cupfuls of powdered sugar. Beat two eggs without separating yolks and whites. They should be smooth and light. Whip these into the sugar and butter with half a teaspoonful of grated nutmeg. Sift together twice a heaping pint of flour and a teaspoonful of baking powder. Add to the rest of the ingredients, and lastly, when all are well incorporated, half a cupful of almonds, blanched and minced very fine. Moisten them with rosewater as you chop, to present them from oiling.

Roll out light and quickly into a sheet a quarter-inch thick, cut into hearts, put a split almond on the top of each, and sift coarse granulated sugar over them before they go into the oven.

Ginger Cookies.

Rub a cupful of sugar to a cream with a scant cupful of butter; beat into this a cupful of nice molasses and one of milk. Beat for a whole minute before adding a teaspoonful, each of ground ginger and of cinnamon. Sift an even teaspoonful of baking soda twice with three cupfuls of flour and mix all together, beating with long, upward strokes. The dough should not be too stiff to roll out easily into a thin sheet. Stick a raisin in the center of each cake.

Although there are no eggs in these cookies, they are delicious when properly made.

Marion Harland

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Why Do We Invite People to Our Homes?

January 31, 2019 KailaLeave a comment

This is the final article in January of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on January 31, 1909, and is an article on hospitality.

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

The Breakfast Table

The instinct of hospitality is inherent in the human race. If one doubt the assertion, let him look at the story of mankind from the days of Abraham and Job until now. Furthermore, at the fact that no tribe, however barbarous, is devoid of it. The most courteous reception I had in the course of extensive travels at the East was from a Bedouin sheik on the plain lying between Jericho and the Dead Sea. He came out of his tent to assist me to descend from my palanquin, and insisted that I should enter his home. When there he summoned his wife to make coffee and serve it with his own hands. But the most marked feature of the reception and entertainment was that, although the dress and deportment of the visitors were strange to the tent-dwellers—especially the costume and unveiled face of the only woman in the traveling party—not a glance or gesture betrayed the amazement the wild men of the desert must have felt at the spectacle. There were at least 50 Bedouins in the great tent, and all followed the example set by the chief of unbroken courtesy and grave deference to the little band of guests. They asked no questions and showed no curiosity, yet were on the alert to anticipate and meet our wishes.

(An example—I observe in passing—that might be imitated by so-called enlightened communities, to the advantage of society.)

Dulled by Domestication.

Naturalists tell us, and our own observation sustains their story, that domestication dulls the instinct of animals. Wild creatures do not eat poisonous herbs and fruits. When tamed and acclimated to the customs and environment of artificial civilization, the power of discrimination between the noxious and the harmless is lost. Have we human animals lost something of the instinct of hospitality with the advance of luxury and refinement? We still ask people to our homes, and, while they are there, go through certain prescribed forms of “entertainment.” Certainly not with any thought of the wonderful truth that the instinct aforesaid is one of the hallmarks of our superiority to and sovereignty over the beasts that perish. Dumb brutes—wild and domestic—are not hospitable. Who ever saw a bear share his winter waters with a fellow outside of his own family? Or a dog resign his bone to a tramp cur—unless the intruder were bigger than himself?

Barring out natural instinct, conscience and conventionality combine to move us to open our doors to our kind. To the thoughtful and benevolent to be hospitable is a Christian duty. It is enjoined in the Scriptures over and over, in terms so strong and explicit that the obligation cannot be denied. I could fill this column with quotations—“proof texts,” as Bible scholars call them—that establish this. It is, then, plain why we ought to exercise the grace. Why we do is quite another matter.

Beginning near the foot of the list of “Whys,” the burdensome sense of social debit and credit impels 90 percent of home-dwellers to institute “functions” for the benefit of friends and acquaintances, issuing cards, writing and giving verbal invitations to enter their respective houses or rooms, and to eat, drink and be merry. From the leader of the “smart set,” who believe that a card to one of her annual crushes means enlistment among the Four Hundred, to the mistress of a five-room flat, pinching her table bills for a week before and after the “family dinner” to which she must ask the country cousins who put her and her baby up for a month last summer, and are in town for a week at a hotel—every housemother acknowledges the debt to other householders and entertainers. We may writhe and fret, but it is as emphatically a debt as that represented by the grocer’s bill. Mrs. Smith makes a dinner for the Thompsons, for whom she does not care a straw personally, because she was asked last winter to a similar function by the prospective guests. It is a bore, but she will experience, when it is over, relief as absolute as when she has paid her semi-annual visit to the dentist. Both “nuisances” are off her mind.

Mrs. Jones bemoans to her husband the necessity of “giving something before long
to pay off the social accounts against her in the neighborhood. She runs over her visiting list, growing more plaintive in marking the name of each person to whose house she has been bidden since her own last “affair.”

“At this rate we shall be social bankrupts before long!” is the winding up of the “exhibit.” “The times are too hard for a succession of dinners that might pay off the big debts. And it would take all the season to get through with them. Better have one large afternoon reception, and—”

“Sponge off the slate!” interpolates her plain-spoken lord.

She may not like the phrase, but what else does she mean?

“A perversion of the spirit and letter of hospitality!” cries the old-fashioned reader. Granted! Let her among you who has not yielded to the like temptation take up the cry.

Mrs. Rising-Parvenu finds a pretext in the visit to the city of a distinguished personage, with whom she had a slight acquaintance at a watering place—or maybe at school, years ago—for sending a card of invitation to Mrs. Haut Ton, who is intimately connected with the “star” by blood or friendship. Mrs. Haut Ton may sneer in private at “that woman’s presumption,” but she accepts the invitation, and finds in Mrs. Rising-Parvenu’s superior wealth and her motor car and steam launch compensations for the condescension.

It is a case of “quid pro quo” all down—and up—the social ladder. Some of the climbers perceive the truth. More blind themselves to the hideous mockery. Be sure none of the lookers on is hoodwinked!

Come we, now—after clearing eyes and lungs—to the pure joy of taking into the heart of the home, which is more to us than the whole world outside of it, true friends who have no ignoble reason for accepting our call to come to, and to be with and of us. We may, out of love and pride in them, summon congenial spirits to partake of our pleasure. For these are they whom we delight to honor. I think we enjoy their dear society the more when we do not break the peaceful routine of family life further than to put another leaf into the table and set on one or two plates the more.

Perhaps love suggest the favorite dish of one or both of the guests; there are fresh flowers in the spare chamber; if the expected visitors travel with light luggage, a dressing gown and bedside slippers are laid in readiness for possible demands. And when they are really here, “we take them in,” in the scriptural sense of the much-abused phrase.

Hospitality of this strain is a privilege so precious that we lose sight of the element of duty.

Which element rises into bold prominence in the exercise of the sacred obligation toward another class of our fellow-beings. Let a single sketch from life illustrate what I mean. It was my happiness to know, not long ago, an “elect lady,” whose beautiful country home was filled all summer long with chose guests. Among these were ever to be seen what an irreverent youth named (behind her back!) “Auntie’s assortment of halt, maimed and blind.” I used to think of them as “other people’s poor relations.”

Reduced gentlefolk of both sexes—pale teachers, who could not afford to go to the seashore or mountains, old and impecunious men and women who had seen better days; semi-invalids of all ages; now and the, the daughter of an old friend, forced by fortune to earn a living as shopgirl or stenographer—representatives of all these classes had, in turn, the advantage of a sojourn in the luxurious mansion and the post of chief guests. If the hostess seemed to overlook any of her visitors, it was never one of these. While they abode under her roof she bound up their wounds, ministered to the broken-hearted and gave temporary deliverance to the prisoners of poverty. She has had her reward in the “joy of her Lord.” I love to think of the full cordiality of the welcome that awaited her in the home of which the sweetest home of earth is but a feeble foretaste. I could fancy, when the end came, that I caught the echo of the Master’s plaudit:

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done unto Me.”

This is the highest order of hospitality, the noblest exercise of the heaven-born grace.

Marion Harland

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Second Paper on Colonial Cookery

January 24, 2019 KailaLeave a comment

This is the fourth article in January of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on January 24, 1909, and is a continuation of the previous article on colonial cookery.

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

Second Paper on Colonial Cookery

The “spider” and the “hoe,” described in our former chapter on the colonial kitchen, had short, thick handles, by which they were lifted on and from the fire. The handle of the frying-pan was from three to four feet in length. There was not an inch too much of it when pancakes were to grace the family board.

The traditional feat of tossing a pancake up the chimney with dexterity that made it turn a somersault in the transit and alight unerringly in the middle of the pan may be an overstrained version of the fact that pancakes were tossed high and straight by accomplished cooks. If the daughter of a housewifely mother in training for managing a home of her own did not win the reputation accorded by a western traveler to the locomotive on a certain railway, of “jumping higher and lighting truer than any other in the State, the more refined phraseology of her eulogists meant the same thing. “She beats all for tossing a pancake,” conferred the degree of “past mistress of cookery.”

Here is one recipe for the vaunted delicacy.

Old-Time Pancakes.

“Beat six eggs light; whites and yolks must be separate. Beat the yolks 10 minutes by clock, then strain. The whites must stand alone. Mix the beaten yolks with a pint and a half of sweet milk that has not been skimmed. Warm milk from the cow is best. Then stir in a quarter of a pound of melted butter. Sift a scant cup of flour with a little salt; stir the flour, one handful at a time, into the egg and milk by turns, with a great spoonful of the stiff whites.

“You must have the frying pan clean and on the fire with a quarter of a pound of butter heaped in it. It must not burn, but it should hiss around the edges. Put in enough batter to cover the whole bottom of the pan, but the pancake should not be too thick.”

“Fry over hot, clear coals, toss the minute the lower side is done. Sprinkle with sugar with which you have mixed a little cinnamon. Or, if you prefer, roll the pancakes up plain and eat with a sweet butter sauce.”

“Mem. It is customary to have pancakes on Shrove Tuesday.”

You will complain that the formula the eighteenth century matron had time to write and to follow is elaborate by comparison with the terms of our modern recipes. What, then, will you say to our next selection?”

To Make Oyster “Pye.”

“Take a quart of large oysters and boil them in their own liquor, with onion, a little thyme, winter savory and sweet marjoram. Season with whole peppers and a blade of mace. When they have stewed a little take them off the fire and let them stand until they are almost cold. Then take the yolk of an egg, beat it up in a little of the liquor, and take some parsley, thyme and a little lemon peel, 12 of the oysters, a little salt, pepper, and a blade of mace and two good spoonfuls of grated white bread. Mince all very small, mix it with egg, and make it into lumps as big as oysters. Then make a good short crust, and put it in the patty-pan. Then put in the parboiled oysters, the lumps of ‘forced’ (sic) meat and the marrow of marrow bones, the yolks of 10 hard-boiled eggs, whole. Then cover your ‘pye,’ and just as it goes into the oven put in liquor the oysters were stewed in. It will take an hour’s baking. Then take off the lid. Have ready half a pound of butter, half a pint of gravy, the yolk of a hard egg, bruised and dissolved in the gravy, and a little lemon peel shred very small. Put it over the fire and make it very hot. Then squeeze in the juice of half a lemon, and pour it all over the ‘pye.’

“Lay on the lid again, and serve very hot.”

Without stopping to inquire how much oyster flavor remained in the “pye” by the time all the ingredients were in, pass we on to a formula that is simplicity itself when contrasted with the last:

To Make Butter Chicken.

“Take two chickens, picked very clean, and boil them with a blade of mace and a little salt. Take them off and cut them in pieces and put them into a toss-up pan with a little parsley. Shred a little parsley, a little lemon peel, a bit of butter, a little of the liquor the chicken was boiled in. Toss up all together with four spoonfuls of cream. Put in a little salt. Put it into your dish and some juice of lemon. Garnish the dish with sliced lemon, then serve it up hot.”

Crab Soup.

A recipe for crab soup was given to me, with the assurance that the original was found in a scrap book which bore upon a tattered fly-leaf the name of “Martha Washington.”

“Boil one dozen large, fresh crabs. They must be lively when they go into the pot. Let them get cold and pick out the meat with a fork or awl. Cut into bits a pound of corned pork and boil very fast half an hour. (Mem.—Smoked bacon will not do.) Take the pot from the fire and set in very cold water to cool. Skim off the fat as it congeals on the top and throw away. Put the liquor the pork was boiled in back over the fire. As soon as it is hot put the crab meat into this and stew slowly half an hour. Meanwhile whip the yolks of six eggs very smooth, pour upon them, stirring all the time, a pint of fresh milk which has not been skimmed, heated scalding hot. Put this into a clean stew pan, stir in the crab meat and the liquor in which they were cooked. At the last stir in a spoonful of green parsley chopped very small. Serve very hot.”

We heave a sigh of relief that onions, heard-boiled eggs and “lemon peel shred small” do not smother the taste of the sea food in this formula.

Writers of New England folk tales have made us familiar with the name of “tansey pudding.” One of them speaks of it as “a delicate dainty.” Could it have been what our North river chatelaine registers under the head of “a tansey”?

To Make a Tansey.

“Take the yolks of 18 eggs, the whites of four, and half a pint of cream, half a pint of the juice of spinage (sic) and tansey, together with a spoonful of grated bread and a grated nutmeg. Put in a little salt and sweeten it to your taste. Then beat it well together and put it in the dish and strew loaf sugar over it. Garnish it with oranges cut in quarters and serve it up hot.”

Presumably the dish was put into the Dutch oven after the loaf sugar (pulverised in the mortar and sifted through coarse net) was strewed on top. Please note that the write hints at nothing of the kind, or so much as approaches the fire in imagination until she enjoins that the “tansey” be served up hot.

Alas for the tyro in housewifery who was her contemporary, if she tried to lean practical cookery from the manuscript manuals of her elders!

Eggs were not 50 cents per dozen 150 years agone, yet 18 for one dish of “tansey” and a dozen for the next recipe on our list must have kept Dame Partlet and her pullets busy.

To Make Puffert.

“Take 12 eggs, one pint of milk, three-quarters of a pound of butter, one pound of sugar, one pound of currants, four pounds of flour, three spoonfuls of yeast, 12 cloves and one nutmeg. Mix well together; let it stand to rise. Then bake it. The milk and butter must be warm.”

Again, alas for the learner who could not read between the lines how long “it” was to rise; when the eggs were to go in; how the flour should be incorporated with the fruit; if this last were to be dredged, and if cloves were put in whole.

The cook-book maker of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sets, in fancy, the unskilled worker before her, and, if she understands her trade, instructs her reader as if the learner were ignorant of the successive processes of compounding and cooking. Our very great-grandmother took too much for granted. Hence we find her store of practical recipes—which she called “receipts”—broken reeds, when we would fain depend upon her garnered wisdom. Her books are amusing reading. And other lessons than those that have to do with the preparation of rare and racy dishes are to be gathered from the study of them and of the times to which they belong.

Lessons of contentment with the lives we stigmatize as artificial and unhealthy, fast and crowded. If those were “good old times,” ours are better. If spinning was fine exercise for the growing girl, tennis, golf and other outdoor games are more healthful.

Solomon kept a very far look ahead in these as in major and minor masters of his day and ours.

“Say not though, ‘What is the cause that the former days were better than these?’ For thou dost not inquire wisely concerning us.”

Marion Harland

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Colonial Cookery

January 17, 2019 KailaLeave a comment

This is the third article in January of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on January 17, 1909, and is an article on colonial cookery.

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

Colonial Cookery

I WAS conducted through an alleged “suite” of rooms the other day that ended in what should have been called “a light closet,” if it had not had at one side a tiny gas range that might have helped furnish a doll’s house.

“This,” said my hostess, proudly, “is my kitchenette! I had never heard the word before. No other would have fitted so well into the wee corner at sight of which I could not command my risible muscles. For that means the preparation of meat and drink for a family of four. So much—or so little—for the march of modern improvement in the housewifely world.

The whole kitchenette would have gone badly into the fireplace of a colonial kitchen. Those who have seen the domestic offices of lordly mansions in England and o this side of the Atlantic, visited now as antiquities, lived in as homes a century and a half ago, will testify that the above assertion is not an exaggeration of a fact. Even in thrifty New England, where space was not wasted as in the Southern and dwellings were more compact than in New Amsterdam and South Carolina, the huge fireplace filled nearly all of one end of a kitchen spacious by comparison with the rest of the house. The fireplace was wide, and it was deep. Massive andirons (we call them firedogs now) sprawled for a part on the hearth laid with great flat stones. Midway in the cavernous mouth of the chimney was fixed the crane, a stout, horizontal iron bar, hinged at one end, and fastened deep in the masonry. From this were suspended on pothooks and hangers, pots and kettles, big and little.

Two generations later school children knew their first copies in writing books as “pothooks and hangers,” with no thought of the origin of the words. They were solid verities, material agencies to our colonial dame. Crane and dependencies were of honest wrought iron. No “castings” for the cook of that day. Below the crane, whether it were dull or empty, burned a fire that never went out in winter, and smouldered for weeks together in summer under a blanket of ashes.

Before Stoves.

The cook stove and range were as yet in the imagination of the daring inventors. Everything was cooked over and in front of the open wood fire. Tea kettles clothes boilers, big-bellied pots, in which hams and “barons” of corned beef were boiled, and smaller “stew-pans” for vegetables, swung amicably side by side, in the red glare of deep beds of hickory embers.

In front of this substratum of living coals—so hot that the very ashes were alive—were ranged vessel in which baking was done. The semi-weekly baking of bread in the northern States was in the brick oven, built in the outer wall of the kitchen.

We see brick ovens still in colonial houses that have escaped the vandalism of improvement. They are usually closed by a blank wall within, leaving no token of their former work. From the outer wall protrudes the useless hump, like a wen upon the face of the “restored” homestead. Said restoration never goes so far as to open the mouth of the oven. It had an iron door in the days of its usefulness, and an iron floor laid upon a brick foundation.

On baking day the interior was filled with short billets of hickory or birch, the torch was applied and the door was closed. A narrow flue supplied a draught that converted the wood into coals. After they had heated the oven walls through and through, the coals were transferred to the fireplace, the floor and sides of the oven were swept clean and the loaves of bread were slid into the innermost recesses of the cave from a broad wooden shovel kept for that purpose.

It was my privilege as a girl to see, in the venerable homestead which was the birthplace of eight generations of our family, the identical shovel, black with age and hard as lignum vitae, from which had slidden brown and white loaves for 200 years. The dear great-aunt who then presided over the household took the Virginia guest into the spacious kitchen, lifted the latch of the iron door, and with her own hands showed me how the ancient utensil had done its part in the family baking.

“The oven was still in use when your father was a boy,” said the gentle voice. “Tell him that you saw it and the old shovel.”

When the fragrant loaves—light, hot and mellow brunette in complexion—were drawn from the recess, cake and gingerbread went in, and if the oven were a good specimen of its kind, there remained after the cakes were done heat enough for the weekly batch of pies.

The “Dutch Oven.”

I never saw the “brick oven” at the South. Bred was made daily there and in variety that still earns for southern “hot-breads” international reputation. It was baked in loaves, or as rolls, closely set together in the “Dutch oven.” Why the name, I do not know. It was a round or oval pot with a flat bottom and a tightly-fitting lid. Iron legs held it above the coals, among which frying pan and griddle loved to nestle, for baking and roasting required that air should pass between the coals and “oven.” A shovelful of coals covered the lid and kept the heat even.

“A spider” was a smaller pot of the same shape and furnished with three strong short legs. Johnny and hoe cakes were known also as “spider cake” when cooked in this. The hoe had no top. It was round and legless. To bring cakes and pones to perfection it was set in hot ashes—the live ashes of which I spoke just now—a mass of sparks dug out of the bowels of the fire that was never quenched for six months on a stretch.

Our colonial ancestors brought the turnspit with them from England. In some houses they were retained until the beginning of the 19th century. I talked last week with a gentlewoman of the old school, who had seen the “spit” in action in her father’s house.

“It demanded constant attention,” she said. “After the roast went on it was one person’s business to keep the ‘jack’ in gentle motion. But the properly-tended roast was perfect of its kind. A dripping-pan placed under I saved every drop of gravy.”

Where the spit was not available, large roasts were set before the fire in roasting-pots of corresponding dimensions. Coals were piled beneath and on the lid. The lid had to be removed for each basting and turning of turkey or joint.

The concoction of sweet dishes involved an amount of work the modern housewife would be horrified to contemplate.

Spices and pepper were ground involved an amount of work the modern housewife would be horrified to contemplate.

Nothing was bought ready made. Even flavoring essences were of home manufacture. Within my memory, the housewife who clung pertinaciously to the former ways as indubitably better than these, flavored blanc mange, jellies and cakes with lemon by rubbing the fresh peel upon lumps of loaf sugar, and with bitter almond by rubbing the sugar with green peach leaves. Rosewater flavoring was obtained by steeping rose petals in brandy. After the lump sugar was tinged to the proper degree of yellow or green, it was pounded in a mortar with a pestle, then sifted through lace or muslin to the powder suitable for cake-making.

Had “Longer Days.”

I shall, by and by, offer recipes in evidence of the truth that our foremothers had longer days than ours, hence more time to bestow upon the various processes of culinary operations.

One important branch of cookery in that far-off time when, according to my computation, there were 48 hours to the day, 14 days to the week, and 60 to the month—was putting up all manner of fruits and a few manners of vegetables for use when fruits and green vegetables were clean out of season.

I have recipes for pickles that call for an hour a day for a whole month; for preserves that could not have been brought to the requisite lucency and crispness by less than 12 hours’ skilled labor. Apples and peaches were pared, sliced and dried under the watchful eye of the mistress, turned twice a day, taken out with the young turkeys if the sun shone, and brought in should the skies threaten rain. Then they were put up in muslin bags and examined every Monday, lest worms and mould might attack them. Pears and peaches were pared, crushed and sun-dried into leather” and tomatoes stewed and strained and sunned into “honey.”

We have a way speaking of those departed dames as “thrifty and frugal!” To borrow an expressive nonsense word from Lewis Carroll, I fairly “chortled aloud” with wicked glee in poring over the time-sallowed manuscripts lent to me in the course of my explorations into the daily works and ways of our revered colonial housemother. Foodstuffs were cheaper then than now, it is true. But there was less money in circulation, and what was to be had was worth more than our currency.

Judge for yourself, my economical reader, as to the frugality of a bona-fide recipe, laid before me by the great-great-great-granddaughter of the chatelaine who administered domestic law in a dear colonial homestead on the Hudson River, over 160 years back of our extravagant times. I bring the spelling down to date:

A Stew of Pigeons.

“Take the pigeons, clean and flour them. Brown a quarter of a pound of butter in a stewing pan; put in your pigeons and, when they are brown on both sides, take them out, fling away your butter and wash your pan clean. Put your pigeons in again, with as much water as will cover them, two clovers, pepper, salt and one bay leaf. Let them stew slowly one hour and a half. Strain out the liquor and take the yolks of two eggs beaten up with a teaspoonful of vinegar. Mix in your liquor and thicken it. Put your pigeons in the dish and throw your sauce upon it. You must add to your sauce upon it. You must add to your sauce sweetbreads, mushrooms and roasted chestnuts. Boil these half an hour.”

The quantity of each of the articles last named is left to the discretion of the individual housewife or cook. Madame is more explicit in the next formula:

To Make Waffers (Waffles!)

“Half a pound of white flour, half a pound of fine sugar; then take a little water and boil and melt in it half a pound of good butter. Beat the yolks of two eggs well in a little lemon peel, orange water and a little lemon peel, shred small. Beat all these very well, butter your irons and bake them over a quick, clear wood fire. When the wafers are baked roll them up.”

Another authentic recipe is for

Pound Cake.

“One pound of flour, one pound of butter, washed in three waters, to get out the salt. Knead it well in the water, then squeeze out every drop of water in a clean linen cloth. Rub the butter then to a cream, with a pound of fine sugar flavored with lemon peel before it is pounded and sifted; beat into this a glass of brandy, a grated nutmeg and the same of mace, pounded fine and sifted. Now, whip the yolks of six eggs very light, and beat these into the butter and sugar and spice. At the last put in the whites whipped stiff and high by turns with a pound of sifted and sundried flour. Mix well and beat steadily for half an hour, always from the bottom of the batter.”

None of these were accounted “fancy dishes” by the thrifty dames aforesaid. They reel off the list of pounds of butter and quarter pounds thrown away as coolly as they call for mushrooms by the dozen and pairs of sweetbreads.

Next week we will record other and as startling instances of the “frugality” in time and material which, we were brought up to hold and believe as certain, was characteristic of our revered exemplars.

Marion Harland

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Planting Bulbs for Easter

January 10, 2019 KailaLeave a comment

This is the second article in January of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on January 10, 1909, and is an article on planting.

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

Planting Bulbs for Easter

It is a long look ahead for our amateur florist. Every anniversary falls into our lives like a surprise, no matter how long and how carefully we have prepare for it. Easier—the movable feast—seems to require less preparation at the hands of the housemother than the winter holidays.

Yet it behooves those of us who love flowers well enough to take the trouble to cultivate them to lay our plans now for filling our homes with beauty and fragrance on the most joyous festival of the year.

In our Easter talk (if it please the Lord of Life to keep us here and together until then) we will hold sweet converse as to the glorious promise symbolized in each opening bud. Today we address ourselves to homely details, without which we may not expect leaf or flower.

It sounds strange to the ears of country-bred readers to be told that it is not an easy matter to get heath for house plants in winter. For them there is always a corner of the barnyard where a few strokes of the spade will break through ice and snow down into loose soil, black, rich and warm. Our flat-dweller must buy earth for filling flower pots and jardinieres. It will be brought to her in a stout paper parcel, as if it where so much moist sugar. Even then the business of filling pots and boxes with dirt in the bathroom or kitchen is not a pleasant task. It is a relief in such circumstances to recollect that spring flowers may be brought into healthy bloom by substituting water for soil.

Easy to Grow.

Hyacinths take obligingly to this method of window gardening. If you have fruit jars that are not too wide at the mouth to support large-sized bulbs above the surface of the water, you need not go to the expense of hyacinth glasses. The latter are not costly, however, and make a better show in the window than the homelier substitute. Select some blubs of uniform size; fill the glasses with pure water and set the bulb in the mouth so that the bottom rests in the liquid. To submerge would rot it and ruin all. Be sure that the circle containing the foot-gterms is under water, and examine every few days to see that evaporation has not expose the same. When the bulbs are thus arranged set the glasses in the cellar, if you have one; if not, in a dark, rather cool closet.

All this while the water must be kept at the right level. Replenish the supply gingerly from above, stirring the blubs as little as possible, and with water suited to the temperature, of the place in which the plants are kept. Cold would check the growth temporarily.

Once in the sunlight, your nurselings require little more attention. See that water is added before the roots begin to dry out and turn the glasses daily, that the light may visit all parts of the plants impartially, and you will not have to wait long for satisfactory flowering.

Narcissus and jonquils may be brought to blossoming in water, but under different treatment. Have ready enough clean pebbles or broken bits of marble, picked up at a stonecutter’s, to half fill a wide, rather shallow bowl. Dispose the bulbs judiciously among these, so that they will not crowd one another, and that all will stand firmly upright. This done, pour in water until the root central circles are well covered. Lay a piece of lace set over the top of the bowl, fastening it at the bottom, that it may not dip into the yater. This will keep the inevitable dust from coasting and befouling it. Now, put the bowl away in the cellar or closet, as I have directed you to proceed with the hyacinths, and follow these directions exactly in further treatment until the sprouting bulbs are sufficiently advanced to be set in the window. When there they must have sunlight for several hours of each day. Reflected sunshine will not induce blossoming. Replenish the supply of water as it sink below the level in evaporating.

A Water Plant.

The Chinese sacred lily grows better in water than in earth. Indeed, the only experiment I ever made in cultivating them in the latter direction was unfortunate in result. I had brought the comparatively new plants to such beautiful perfection in water, that I reasoned in favor of setting them in the bosom of their mother earth. I knew that hyacinths, tulips, narcissus, freesias, jonquils, etc., accepted water as a makeshift for the nourishing soil. Why should the celestial bulbs be of a different mind? Therefore, I planted them in a box of rich garden mould; left them in the cellar for the prescribed four weeks, brought them by prudent stages into the light, and awaited developments in sanguine calmness. The leaves grew rapidly and rankly, and never a single bloom blessed my sight the season through. Next winter I meekly set the blubs between the pebbles, as of old, and took no risks.

If you can get a china jardinière—an oblong box made for the window garden—it will be more slightly than the bowl, and accommodate itself more gracefully to the dimensions and shape of the shelf which is the improvised conservatory of hundred of thousands of flower lovers.

For those who are poor (or rich) enough to command all the garden and forest mold they want, I add a few simple rules for the cultivation of Easter bulbs. Set those I have named in earth, instead of in water (always excepting the Chinese specimen!) Fill with soil that covers the bulb. Not too deep, as that will give the leaves unnecessary trouble in reaching the light. Half an inch of earth is sufficient to shield the upper part of the bulb from dust and draughts.

The upper stratum should be crumbled fine, and laid in loosely. Keep the pots in the cellar or dark closet until the shoots above the surface are from wo to three inches in height, then bring them gradually to the sunlight. During the weeks of seclusion, water sparingly—not oftener than once a week; and not then unless the earth is dry to the tip of the finger thrust three inches into the mold. The philosophy of this is clear—what you want to accomplish by darkness and quiet is vigorous root growth. The fibers which are to draw nutriment through the sap for the growing plant must strike deeply into the earth in order to extract it. If the surface be kept wet, the rootlets are attracted to the top of the earth, making what we know as “lateral roots,” which depend entirely upon frequent watering and get little sustenance from the soil below.

Calla lilies (which botanists tell us, are not lilies at all, but “Richardia Africana”) require larger pots than do the bulbous plan e have already spoken of. They, too, must be set in the dark until the roots have taken hold of the lower soil and the green blades appear above ground. I have seen them growing in artificial ponds, the bulbs having been set among stones. I think, however, that they must have a foundation of earth to bring them into vigorous growth. I have raised them successfully in flower pots and jardinieres. They hold their bloom longer than they hyacinths and jonquils and have a stately grace that peculiarly adapts them for Easer decorations.

Marion Harland

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Window Gardening and House Plants

January 3, 2019 KailaLeave a comment

This is the first article in January of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on January 13, 1909.

For this article, Marion spends time on the topic of window gardening and specifically on her Wardian case. I had never heard of a Wardian case before and needed to look it up before continuing the article. As found on Wikipedia, a Wardian case is an early type of terrarium used to protect plants first invented by Dr. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward (1791–1868) in the late 1820s.

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

Window Gardening and House Plants

The author of “St. Cuthbert’s,” a charming story of Scotch-Canadian life, says:

“I do contend that the watering can and the spade and the pruning knife are a means of grace.”

My contention may not take that form, but I know, and am persuaded by actual and personal experience and by wide and close observation, that the care of green and growing things is a cure of ennui and a wholesome diversion of thought from the perplexities and vexations which make workaday life a weariness to flesh and spirit.

I hope each of my readers has made acquaintance at one time or another with “Picciola.” For those who have not read the book, in the original French or in translations I will say that it is a biography of a plant that sprang up between the stones in the courtyard of a prison, in which was confined a nobleman accused of conspiracy against the government. His study of the flower saved him from madness and suicide. Bunner tells of the mission to the “little sick child in the basement,” of

The pot of mignonette
In the attic window set.

The ministry of flowers is an exhaustless theme. It is appreciated in all its fullness and beauty by none who do not love to plant, tend and watch the making of these—God’s angels of healing and His teachers in the knowledge of the “real things” which have to do with the invisible and the eternal.

The owners of winter gardens and conservatories that are tended by salaried gardeners and visited by the nominal possessors are not learners in our school. I et hundred of letters of inquiry touching the cultivation of house plants, but they do not come from rich women or from girls who can afford to buy cut flowers whenever they like. My correspondents wish to know how to make house plants grow and bloom in living rooms in the dining room that looks out upon an apartment court; in the family parlor that has a sunny exposure, and, most pathetic of all, how to set a window shelf of ferns, palms, tradescantia and ivies n the sight of a shut-in, whose glimpses of the outer world of life and light are confined to the section—sometimes a mere slice—of wintry sky discernible through her window.

For my army of shut-ins, and for the housemother tied to the toilful routine of domestic tasks from year’s end to year’s end, I am telling the story of my own window gardening and the dear Wardian case, alias fernery, now in the 30th year of beneficent life.

It took me some years to find out the disabilities of house-plants—in other words, how not to do it. During one happy winter spent in my country house I had hyacinths in fragrant bloom before Easter, big fluffy globose chrysanthemums early in December and roses all winter. By inclosing a southern veranda with glass and running steam pipes and radiators into the improvised conservatory we secured these treasures and a glory of geranium bloom, which were the admiration of visitors and a continual joy to ourselves. The suburbanite may do this at a comparatively small outlay of money and time. A bay window that has a southern exposure, freedom from gas light and hot-air furnaces, together with loving and intelligent care, are all that are needed to insure success.

In the city the chief foe to budding and blossoming is the fine, impalpable black dust that coats our books, furniture, food and skins, the stuff we draw into our lungs with every breath, which changes new-fallen snow to gray and black within a day after it has left the sky.

Began with Greenery.

The impossibility of keeping my plants free from it, and the certainty that it clogs the forming buds into barrenness, first led me to confine my window-gardening to greenery alone. Ferns of all sorts thrive even in sunless windows. Geraniums grow and make leaves, but they do not blossom. I have brought freesias and hyacinths into flower, but the result was sickly miniatures of the real blooms that made my heart ache.

Early in the autumn I set—in a window that gets none but reflected sunshine for nine months of the year—a pot of asparagus fern. It took kindly to the situation, and by November—when the picture that heads this page was taken—it made a graceful loop upon itself (encouraged by me) of “lacy” foliations, the growth of which was a ceaseless joy. As I write, the loop is thick with verdure and tall shoots have darted up from the roots that rival the parent stock. Once a week the pot is set in the bath tub and water is run from both faucets up to the top of the pot, so that it gently overflows the surface of the earth. The whole plant is prayed from a watering pot until all the dust is washed off and the foliage drips with moisture. I then draw off the water, leaving the pot in the tub for half an hour. Beside the tall-looped fern stand a broad, low pot of asparagus vetch that was a wee plant when I brought it indoors. It is now a living fountain of delicate, feathery verdure and grows by the hour. Pots of other and broader-leaved ferns flank the asparagus varieties. All have the weekly bath, and should the earth become very dry, intermediate sprinklings. The rooms are steam-heated and lighted by electricity and lamps.

The Wardian case (named for the inventor) was a Christmas gift to me 30 years back. The frame is of black walnut; it is mounted upon stout and easy-running casters; the glass top is hinged. In the autumn the water-tight bottom is covered with broken pottery three inches deep. Upon this substratum are spread four inches of good mould. I get from the country a store of wildings, principally ferns; but partridge berries and other low-creeping plants work in well. They are set out in the earth, wood mosses are snugly packed about them to make them feel at home and they are left to grow.

All winter long they get the reflected sunlight. If the sun shone directly upon the glass it would be necessary to raise the top of the fernery, or to cover it with a cloth. The hot rays would scald the tender things within. In the center is a Jerusalem cherry three begemmed with scarlet fruit. It has held its own all winter, and gives a gorgeous touch of color to the jungle below—a jungle which has been preacher, companion and solace to me for months.

Each morning the cover is propped open for an hour, and the air is changed by five minutes’ vigorous fanning. Once a week the plants are sprayed with tepid water.

The beauties require no other care. And how they grow! Tradescantia runs riot over the moss; from roots of the hardy ferns I every day descry soft gray-green upstarts like shepherd’s crooks or bishop’s croziers, emulous to reach the light. Little anonymous shoots, that would be weeds in their native wood—each of which is a “picciola” to me—peep up daily from the kindly moss beds. Here and there a souvenir ivy, brought from storied places overseas, nestles and gleams contentedly—all growing toward the light!

At Christmas I had a simpler and much smaller fernery built upon the sample principle as the Wardian, as a gift to a small granddaughter, whose loving admiration for mine is almost painful to behold. It is made of four panes of glass set in a wooden frame; the bottom is of zinc; the cover is hinged. A cheap affair, but no casket of jewels could afford so much pure pleasure as the tiny girl extracts from it.

When summer comes the contents may be removed to some shady corner and left to rest until mid-October.

On very cold nights, if the room in which the fernery stand be a bed-chamber, and the windows must be left open, a thick rug thrown over the closed case will be all that is needed to guard the plants from injury.

May I suggest to one who would brighten the loneliness of the bedridden woman or crippled child the gift of an indoor garden, such as I have described? In the sickroom it may stand in summer as in winter. And the glass makes it absolutely harmless in cases where growing plants would be forbidden by physicians.

If I linger over the story of what my window gardens and the conservatory in petto are to me it is because I owe so much to both that I have a heart-thrill at the mention of either. The Wardian case is to me a garden of sweets, a cabinet of memories, a reliquary, such as our forbears used to stock with rare and precious mementos.

In the far corner lurks a bit of climbing vine I picked from the mossy wall of the garden about Dove Cote cottage, the home of Wordsworth in Grasmere. A trail of ivy sprang from a spray that had crept into the open window of the little church, under the chancel of which gentle George Herbert lies, awaiting the resurrection of the just and the crown of them who true many to righteousness. The spreading Jerusalem cherry tree is in the successor of one that grew in the same place that Christmas morning 30 years agone, when the fernery first greeted my enraptured sight. Tradescantia and variegated geraniums were taken from the Sunnybank greenhouse on the southern slope, overlooking the hill-girt lake, one bland day in October. Distant mountains and nearer hills were veiled in blue haziness—Bryant’s “smoky light.”

The sound of dropping nuts was head
Through all the woods was still.

and in a leafless apple tree a belated song sparrow was thrilling a farewell to summer. English Robert, who has tended my shrubs and flowers for ten years with paternal affection, selected and potted ivy, and silver geranium, and sundry other lowly garden darlings he warranted to thrive under glass. He had ready maiden-hair fern and mosses brought from the woods. It is always a wrench to the heartstrings to leave our country home for city quarters. The faithful fellow comprehends, as I can never tell him, the consolation wrapped up tenderly and packed away carefully in the great box he expresses to town by the train that takes me back to miles of brick and mortar.

My children smile and visitors marvel when I am detected hanging above the opened fernery and loitering about the window shelf, noting the appearance of new leaves, the budding of geraniums and cyclamen. These last are among the very few plants that bloom in the reflected sunshine. It was a triumph of faith over science when, in defiance of florist and botanist, I set a clump of tailing arbutus in the “Wardian” four years ago and coaxed it into bloom in early march. The scarlet globes on the cherry tree will give place to white flowers by and by.

On the windowsill stand two recent acquisitions—gifts from a dear kinswoman and fellow-flower lover in my far Southern home. They are an exotic evergreen—a Norfolk island pine, symmetrical and erect—and a North Carolina holly that bears tiny white flowers of delicate and exquisite fragrance.

I envy no millionaire his glasshouses and graperies while my miniature parterre smiles up into loving eyes.

Marion Harland

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Family Meals for a Week

December 27, 2018February 14, 2020 KailaLeave a comment

Transcribed from the Sunday edition of the The Buffalo Sunday Morning News from December 27, 1908.

Sunday.

Breakfast.
Grapefruit, oatmeal porridge and cream, sausages and fried apples, corn bread, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Beef loaf, Boston brown bread (steamed), thin bread and butter, celery and orange salad, cream cheese and crackers, floating island, tea.

Dinner.
Cream of celery soup, roast veal, cranberry sauce, stewed carrots, shredded oyster plant sauce, pumpkin pie and American cheese, black coffee.

Monday.

Breakfast.
Oranges, cornmeal mush and cream, bacon, boiled eggs, French rolls (reheated), graham bread, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Tomato omelet with Parmesan cheese strewed over it, fried mush (a left-over), peanut butter sandwiches, brown bread and butter, canned fruit and cake, cocoa.

Dinner.
Noodle soup, veal loaf (a left-over) garnished with link sausages, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, stewed Spanish chestnuts, apple pie and cream, black coffee.

Tuesday.

Breakfast.
Baked apples and cream, bacon and fried sweet peppers, English muffins (toasted), toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Scalloped oysters, cream cheese and graham bread sandwiches, tea biscuits, potato salad, crackers, baked custards, tea.

Dinner.
Potato cream soup (a left-over), lamb’s liver en casserole, stewed tomatoes, spaghetti, sweet potato pudding, black coffee.

Wednesday.

Breakfast.
Oranges, cereal and cream, fried smelts, stewed potatoes, brown and white bread toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Eggs a la Beauregard, celery salad, baked cream toast, potatoes au naturel, cream puffs, tea.

Dinner.
Ox-tail soup, pork tenderloins, apple sauce, scalloped sweet potatoes, mashed turnips, suet dumplings, baked wine sauce, black coffee.

Thursday.

Breakfast.
Cereal and dates with cream, bacon and eggs, quick biscuits, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Mince of liver on toast, souffle of turnips (a left-over), lettuce salad with French dressing, crackers and cheese, cookies and canned fruit with cream tea.

Dinner.
Yesterday’s soup, fresh beef’s tongue, braised, with vegetables; rice croquettes, spinach a la crème, raisin and fig pudding with hard sauce, black coffee.

Friday.

Breakfast.
Oranges, hominy and cream, egg croquettes, graham gems, toast, tea and coffee.

New Year’s Dinner.
Tomato bisque baked bluefish, braised ducks, sacked potatoes, stewed celery, green peas, apple sauce, tomato salad, café mousse, mixed nus, coffee.

Saturday.

Breakfast.
Oranges, cereal and cream, clam fritters, rice muffins and honey, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Creamed bluefish (a left-over), stewed tomatoes (a left-over), apple and celery salad with mayonnaise dressing, thin graham bread and butter, crackers and cheese, rice pudding, tea.

Dinner.
Cream potato soup (without meat), salmi of duck (a left-over), souffle of spinach (a left-over), brussels sprouts, prune pudding with whipped cream, black coffee.

The Picnic Basket

August 30, 2018 KailaLeave a comment

This is the final article in August of the School for Housewives 1908 series published on August 30, 1908, and is an article on what to take on a picnic, especially sandwich fillings.

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

The Picnic Basket

Where to have a picnic party, whom to ask to it and what to do at it are usually questions of minor importance or are answered by circumstances. The really vital point to be considered as, What shall be taken in the picnic basket?

Here again circumstance comes in and lends a hand. The connoisseur in picnics knows that one picnic bill of fare is not suitable to all. If the party is to be made up of healthy boys and girls, with robust appetites, substantial food is to be provided, and a plentiful supply is the chief object in view. More sophisticated young people demand greater delicacy and variety, and if older persons are included in the company their tastes are even more exacting. Plain boiled eggs, ham sandwiches and doughnuts will not full their requirements for an al fresco repast.

Another circumstance which determines the contents of the lunch basket is the locality of the picnic. If it is a spot to which one goes in carriages or by boat, and there is little or no walking to be done, a broad field of food is opened. I have been to picnic where salads, ice cream and sherbets were served as they would have been at a home reception. The ice cream was packed and transported in the back of a wagon to the picnic place, or carried in one end of a boat, and the salad stowed in a basket and intrusted to some one who would carry it steadily. Until one has tried this sort of thing one has little idea of what fields of experiment are open. The uninitiated make a great mistake when they confine their picnic provisions to the hackneyed old standbys every one has eaten for years.

As a matter of course, when there is a good deal of walking to be done to reach the lunching place, heavy baskets are undesirable. In any case, it is as well to study a certain amount of simplicity and in a measure to differentiate the picnic meal from the refreshments which would be served at an indoor party.

After all, the sandwich is the most useful vehicle in which one can take picnic food. Cold meats are unhandy, since they require a knife and fork. Even cold chicken demands a handling which results in greasy fingers and the need of soap and water. In the sandwich one may find a variety by the introduction of different sorts of filling, and the sandwich may be either dainty or substantial, as the inclination moves or the party desires.

The plain chicken, tongue or ham sandwich was our piece de resistance in my young picnic days, but many are the changes which have come since then in sandwiches as well as in other things. Sandwiches of minced meats or fish—chicken, ham, tongue, veal, lamb, beef, salt or fresh; of sardines, salmon, lobster, crab; of nuts; of cheese; of lettuce, cress, cucumbers and tomatoes; of jelly, jam, fruit—show me anything which cannot be made into a sandwich, with mayonnaise or without! With all these to draw from, what need is there of further novelty?

Yet variations still may be found. Granted the use of a fork and the possibility of transportation, and galantines or meat loaf, or meats or fish in aspic, may be served, to say nothing of salads of any sort. Then there is always the stuffed or deviled egg, with its never-waning popularity. The plain hard-boiled egg still holds its charm for some simple souls and will fill odd corners of the picnic basket.

Sweets are not usually much considered in filling the picnic basket or in emptying it afterward. The occupation of making the sandwiches, in the first place, and of eating them, in the second, is filling, and leaves little inclination for further exercise along either line. Ice cream one may always find room for, but I never found that there was much demand for other dessert than this, unless it might be a piece of cake or a little fruit. These are easily procured, and a box of candy to be taken at stray moments during the evening wll be well received.

What to drink at the picnic is of fully as much importance as what to eat, and unless one has unlimited carrying capacity for bottles of beverages, a good well or spring must be a sine qua non in the choice of a picnic place. Tramping or exercising out of doors is always thirsty work, and eating sandwiches is even more provocative of thirst. If there is a good spring, lemon juice and sugar may be carried in jars and diluted as occasion requires. Raspberry shrub, or raspberry vinegar, or currant shrub or any other of the good old syrups made at home are also excellent beverages for a picnic. Best of all, perhaps, are iced coffee and tea—when ice may be obtained. If not, it is a delight to build a fire, boil the kettle and either make your drinks fresh or heat those brought from home. The bottle of coffee may be uncorked, put into a pan or pot of boiling water and brought thus to the desired temperature.

Food alone is not the only requisite for the picnic basket. A tablecloth and napkins, either linen or paper, must be carried, a nest of wooden plates, such as are used for butter and the like by grocers, drinking cups or glasses, spoons—and perhaps—knives and forks. The necessity for these is determined by the character of the provisions carried. With sandwiches, cake and fruit they will not be needed, but will elaboration in the bill of fare additional utensils will be required.

I may add that when salads are part of the feast they may be taken in wooden or tin receptacles, ad the mayonnaise may be carried separately in a wide-mouthed bottle. Lettuce toughens when left too long in the dressing, and the salad will be improved if mixed just before it is to be eaten. Sandwiches must be put up in waxed paper, three or four together, while tissue paper may be used for wrapping the stuffed eggs, and the ends of the paper after being twisted may be fringed. No means to make the provisions present a dainty appearance should be neglected.

A Few Sandwich Fillings.

1. Cop fine a cup of cold boiled ham and two cups of coil boiled or roast chicken, make to a paste with mayonnaise dressing and spread on buttered white or graham bread.

Chicken and tongue sandwiches may be prepared by using the meat in the same proportions.

2. Rub cream cheese to a paste with sweet cream and spread it on white bread. Lay on each slice a leaf of lettuce which has been dipped in French dressing. Place over it a slice of buttered bread, either white or brown.

3. Prepare cheese as above directed and add to each cheese a half cupful of chopped nuts. Salt to taste. Or you may use minced watercress with the cheese instead of nuts.

4. Boil half a dozen eggs, putting them on in cold water. Cook for 15 minutes after the water reaches the boiling point. Rub the yolks to a powder and stir into them two teaspoonfuls of fish paste or potted ham or tongue, and reduce with melted butter to the consistency of soft cheese. Chop the whites fine; mix with this and spread all on thin bread and butter.

5. Lobster or crab sandwiches are very good and are made by mincing the meat fine and making it to a paste with mayonnaise. Spread on thin white buttered bread.

6. Plain egg sandwiches may be made by chopping hard-boiled eggs fine, the whites and the yolks together, softening with melted butter to a paste, seasoning with salt, pepper, onion juice and a little dry mustard, and spreading on bread. Sardine sandwiches may be made like the lobster or crab sandwiches.

7. Delicious sweet sandwiches are prepared by mixing good jam with cream cheese, softening to a paste with cream and spreading on thin white bread. Jelly sandwiches may be made in the same way, or the jelly may be spread on buttered bread.

Marion Harland

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Transcribed from the Sunday edition of the The Buffalo Sunday Morning News from December 29, 1907.

Sunday.

Breakfast.
Grapefruit, cracked wheat and cream, fishballs popovers, toast, coffee and tea.

Luncheon.
Beef loaf (a left-over), brown bread and butter, cut thin; lettuce and macedoine salad, crackers and cheese, lemon blanc mange and custard, cake, cocoa.

Dinner.
Okra and tomato soup, smothered chickens, boiled rice, Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie and American cheese, black coffee.

Monday.

Breakfast.
Baked quinces and cream, bacon, fried; boiled eggs, brown and white bread, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Beef loaf, sliced, deviled, breaded and fried (a left-over); potato cakes (a left-over), cheese and olive sandwiches, cress salad, cake and canned fruit, homemade; tea.

Dinner.
Oyster bisque, chicken scallop (a left-over), rice croquettes (a left-over), souffle of Brussels sprouts (a left-over), floating island, black coffee.

Tuesday.

Breakfast.
Oranges, oatmeal porridge and cream, sausage and fried apples, corn bread, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Baked cheese omelet, tomato toast (baked), graham rolls, gingerbread and cocoa.

Dinner.
Mutton and barley brota, beefsteak and onions, stuffed potatoes, creamed carrots, bread and raisin pudding, black coffee.

Wednesday.

Breakfast.
Fruit, barley crystals and cream, poached eggs, rice muffins, scalloped potatoes, rolls and coffee.

Luncheon.
Fruit cocktail, celery soup, olives, veal cutlets, French fried potatoes, nut salad, crackers, cheese, angel food, coffee.

Dinner.
Raw oysters, celery, olives, salted nuts, consomme a la royale, turkey, giblet gravy, cranberry jelly, macaroni timbales, mashed potatoes, lettuce, French dressing, mince pie, plum pudding, ice-cream, fancy cakes, coffee, nuts, mints, raisins.

Thursday.

Breakfast.
Oranges, hominy and cream, bacon and green sweet peppers, sally lunn, toast, tea, and coffee.

Luncheon.
Sausage and griddle cakes—in profusion; maple syrup and griddle cakes for the second course, milk and cocoa (a stormy-day luncheon).

Dinner.
Cream of celery soup, curried veal, stewed tomatoes and okra, boiled rice and bananas, to be eaten with the curry; cottage pudding and cream sauce, black coffee.

Friday.

Breakfast.
Baked apples and cream, clam fritters, hominy muffins, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Salt mackerel, boiled and creamed stewed potatoes, souffle of rice (a left-over), lettuce salad, crackers and cheese, freshly baked cookies and marmalade, chocolate.

Dinner.
Beef gravy soup, halibut steaks, with Bearnaise sauce; whipped potatoes, fried hominy, charlotte russe, black coffee.

Saturday.

Breakfast.
Oranges, cereal and cream, scrambled eggs and chopped bacon, muffins, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Creamed halibut (a left-over), potato puff (a left-over), baked toast, baked custards, tea.

Dinner.
Julienne soup, roast mutton, scalloped sweet potatoes, spinach, mince pie, black coffee.