Tag: 1905

Emergency Luncheon for the Unexpected Guests

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This is the fourth article in January of the School for Housewives 1905 series published on Jan 22, 1905, and is a longer article in Marion’s series called Familiar Talks with Cottagers and Flat-Dwellers on what you can do when you have unexpected visitors and your maid is away or sick.

School for Housewives – Emergency Luncheon for the Unexpected Guests

Let that most trying of all times come around, the time when your maid, who has been with you for years, and knows your every like and dislike, has been taken up sick and is obliged to give up, and immediately a score of friends and relatives descend upon you, each with the laudable intention of “spending the day” with you! Perhaps four or five at once (your table can’t possibly seat more than three additional guests) drop in, and bring a couple of children along, by way of adding to the general turmoil.

Now, it’s an understood thing that you’re hospitable, but no one can blame you, if the first feeling you have is the blankest kind of dismay or a wild desire to fall dead on the spot.

But you “come to,” and the dear old aunt and uncle who’ve come up from the country to visit a few days, and who have counted largely on having a day with you in your home, never know how near a little thing came to upsetting an honest welcome.

You make them comfortable with books and things, and then fly to inspect the kitchen and dining room. The table is your first anxiety; no matter how you contrive, you can’t possibly seat all those people around it. Then a bright idea strikes you; you rush frantically up the back stairs (or “Trip lightly” up the front, humming a careless little song, your very manner calculated to show your guests how extremely well at ease you are), seize your sewing table, and, with a carver’s doily, transform it to a miniature of the big one.

There you put your “little china” – coffee cups instead of tea cups (thank fortune, you’ve enough tea cups for the big table), fruit plates instead of dinner plates, “piecing out” whatever you run short of with the odd gift plates you’ve kept before for decoration.

All these things brighten the picnic air of the little table, and set off the more careful arrangement of the big table.

AN ODD CONTRIVANCE

Chairs, next, to suit that little table – you’ve enough for the big without robbing every bedroom, or asking your guests to each bring his own chair from your parlor. But nothing is low enough for the other table – you bring in your shirt-waist boxes, and fling over them a gay slumber blanket, or an afghan. It’s a trifle bizarre, but only adds to the picnic character.

By this time you look at the clock – you’ve only been fifteen minutes getting this much done, and your rapid resolving of chaos into order is an inspiration in itself. On to the kitchen and victory, although you seem to have to wrest it from defeat!

Your heart sinks again – you’ve plenty of cold roast lamb and quantities of bread, but the bread’s none too fresh and they seem to be the most extensive things your larder boasts. But you make a brave beginning, slice the meat daintily, arrange it upon you pretties platter and then study the bread question. While you’re studying it you’re busy whisking together quick biscuits, and by the time you’ve cut out the last one and popped it in the oven you’ve solved your problem, and decided to turn that bread into tomato toast, to be eaten with the cold meat.

You pare the crusts from the slices, toast and dip it in boiling milk, salted. Then pack it in layers in a pudding dish, salt and butter each layer, and pour over it a few spoonfuls of tomato sauce, strained and seasoned with sugar, butter, pepper, salt and a few drops of onion juice. When the dish is full, you turn more sauce over all; cover and set for ten minutes in a quick oven. You should have enough tomato sauce to make the toast very wet.

Then you discover a lot of cheese, and Welsh rabbit flashes in your mind – it will “make” your luncheon, and needn’t keep you from you guess, because it can be made at the table. But grate your cheese, and see that the lamp to your chafing dish is filled before you go to the table, that there may not me the incessant jumping up and down that is the most annoying habit a woman, whose maid is away, can acquire.

MAKE WELSH RABBIT AT THE TABLE

And when you are all seated, put a cupful of milk and one of cream into your saucepan, with a bit of soda the size of a pea. When the boil begins add two cupfuls of soft, mild cheese (American) with a teaspoonful of made mustard, a saltspoonful of paprika, and a well-whipped egg. Pour upon rounds of buttered toast, each of which has been moistened with a teaspoonful of hot cream, or upon crackers.

This is a very simple form of “rabbit,” but perhaps you’re such a master hand at evolving things that you’re ambitious – prefer to make a more elaborate sort, a “buck.”

If you do, see that the bread is toasted, and the milk heated in a double boiler in the kitchen before you announce luncheon, and soak the cracker crumbs in it. At the table, heat together a tablespoonful of butter, a saltspoonful, each, of dry mustard and of salt, with a pinch of cayenne. When well mixed and boiling add a cupful of hot milk (heated with a bit of soda no larger than a pea) in which have been soaked a half cupful of cracker crumbs and a cupful of grated cheese. Cook all together three minutes, or until smoking hot; add two well-beaten eggs, stir one minute – no more – and heap upon rounds of buttered toast.

Then, if you’ve lettuce, get out your prettiest bowl, and arrange the crisp, fresh leaves prettily in it, and make a simple salad dressing at the table, according to directions given last week. You won’t have much time for your own luncheon, but you can congratulate yourself on the appetites of your guests, which seem whetted by your skillful preparing of good things before them.

For dessert, if you’ve oranges and bananas in the house, cut them up together, and serve them in your lemonade glasses, moistening them well with the orange juice, and sprinkling them with powdered sugar. With coffee, and your warm biscuits and butter, you’ve a delicious luncheon, and one sure to be well appreciated.

At the children’s table, for, of course, that was why you took such pains to make it gay, intending to put them (and your own family’s overflow to look after them) there, such things as Welsh rabbit and coffee won’t be allowed.

Cold meat they may have, and the tomato toast, although, if you had time to make the some baked toast, they’ll probably like it much better. If you have time, make it this way: Toast the bread; have ready in a double boiler a quart of hot milk, slightly salted and with a tablespoonful of butter stirred into it. Butter a deep dish, dip each slice of the heated toast in hot milk and pack in the back dish, salting and buttering each layer. When all are in, pour the boiling milk over the toast, cover and bake for ten minutes. Uncover and brown lightly. Serve in the bake-dish.

WHAT THE CHILDREN SHOULD HAVE

Serve the salad to the children, too, and give them something sweet – honey, preferably, or some of the jam or preserves you put up last summer. Have that as a special dish for them, just as the Welsh rabbit is for the grown-ups, and they’re less likely to create a disturbance (if they’re not overly well trained) by asking for things they can’t have.

Give them milk to drink, or, if your milk supply has given out under he generous demands you’ve made on it, give them some of the grape juice you bottled yourself – they’ll feel that they are having a real party. Instead of cutting up their fruit, have a bowl of fruit in the centre of their table – it will save you work and time, and they’d rather have their oranges or bananas – or both – separately.

Your luncheon will have taken you a good while to prepare, yet no one dish will be troublesome and everything will be homely and restful as you could wish. You will have succeeded in “making a mighty lot out of a mighty little,” which is a tribute to your ingenuity, and proves you worthy to rank with a dozen other inventors.

After luncheon shut your mental eyes resolutely to visions of washing dishes and clearing up, and shut your door upon those same dishes. Give yourself over to your guests for the rest of their stay, and, if possible, forget all about the work that must be done later.

And then, when everybody has gone, proceed leisurely to set everything in order again. You’re very tired, and a little bit bewildered, but secretly rather proud of the way you got through, and glad, too, that you gave a hearty welcome instead of the half-hearted one you felt inclined to give at first.

Marion Harland

Familiar Talks with Cottagers and Flat-Dwellers – Some Suggestions concerning Salads, Their Hygienic Value and Their Preparation

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This is the third article in January of the School for Housewives 1905 series published on Jan 15, 1905, and is a longer article in Marion’s series called Familiar Talks with Cottagers and Flat-Dwellers on the treatment of servants.

School for Housewives – Familiar Talks with Cottagers and Flat-Dwellers

Some Suggestions concerning Salads, Their Hygienic Value and Their Preparation

Across the water a dinner without a salad is condemned as a gastronomic solecism. We Americans would do well to copy this one foreign fashion and relax in some measure our devotion to “fries” and “pies.” As winter strengthens her hold with the lengthening days, our torpid systems require the cooling and purifying juices of fruits and esculents. In unconscious recognition of this hygienic fact our markets teem with green stuffs – celery, cabbage and lettuce – from October to April. Lettuce, the most valuable of them all, is in season all the year round.

In the United States alone salads are, by common consent, accounted the rich man’s luxury. When scarcest, they are never dear by comparison with meats and pastries. And thanks in part to the absurd fallacy aforesaid, a salad, deftly concocted, gives a touch of elegance to the plainest dinner or supper.

The preparation of this adjunct to family or company meal should devolve upon the hostess, by rights, unless she can afford a butler and assistants competent to the task. And this series of Talks is not written for the rich woman. Our flat-dweller’s maid-of-all-work is exceptionally clever if she can be trusted to dress a salad in the precise nick of time, in addition to the rest of her work.

It is such pretty business – the mixing and stirring and turning! It shows off a slim hand and well-turned wrist to such adventure that few young housewives object to the performance of the duty. Most of them take honest pride in their skill in what is justly considered an accomplishment.

If our tyro would acquire the fine art, she should, at the outset, comprehend what some so-called good housekeepers never learn, to wit, the difference between a heavy and a light salad, and the occasions on which each is to be served.

A few hints should suffice to guard her against blunders. A French dressing, to be described presently, is always the accompaniment of plain lettuce or endive. A mayonnaise is not in harmony with the crisp succulence of the tender leaves, and out of keeping with the idea of an impromptu delicacy. Such is a fresh young salad prepared before the eyes of the prospective eaters, between courses – in advertising lingo, “done while you wait.” A better reason for the rule is that lettuce and its sister, endive, wilt within a few minutes after they are touched by the condiments, and the flavor suffers sensibly under the thick coating of mayonnaise.

The simplest form, then, of the salad that follows the meat course of a family dinner, or is a pleasing accompaniment of cold meat at the Sunday might supper (which will be the subject of our next Talk) is this:

The lettuce-leaves which have lain for at least an hour in very cold water are brought to the table in a salad dish and set before the hostess. At the same time another dish and a finger-bowl are given to her. She dips her fingers in the latter, dries them on her napkin, and, daintily using the tips of them in the work, breaks the lettuce into bits, without bruising it, dropping the pieces into the second dish as she goes on. Both dishes should be chilled beforehand. If the dressing has been prepared before dinner, she now pours it over the lettuce, tossing and stirring thoroughly, but always lightly, and when the salad is well-coated serves it. Should the dressing be compounded at the table, she does it before breaking up the green leaves, and thus:

HOW IT IS MADE

Into the bowl of a large spoon she puts a half teaspoonful of salt, half as much pepper, and – should she or her family like to temper the vinegar somewhat – as much sugar as she has salt. Upon this she pours two tablespoonfuls of vinegar, stirs the mixture with a silver fork until salt, etc., are dissolved, turns this into a small bowl and adds five tablespoonfuls of the best salad oil. Then she proceeds to work the dressing into an “emulsion” with the fork, tossing and stirring rapidly until the ingredients are smoothly blended. After breaking the cool lettuce-leaves into bits, she gives the dressing a final stir before pouring it over them. A pleasant flavor is imparted to the salad if the bowl in which it is to be served be rubbed with a cut clove of garlic before it is brought to table. Or a teaspoonful of minced chives may be blended with the dressing.

Warmed crackers, and cream or “Cottage” or any kind of fancy cheese, are passed with the salad.

A clever young housekeeper with whom I lunched unpremeditatedly yesterday, treated me to a delightful modification of lettuce salad. I pass it on to other flat-dwellers.

In the centre of the lettuce, broken into “forkable” bits before it was brought in, was a hard-boiled egg, peeled and ice-cold. Before dressing the salad, my friend cut this up with a sharp silver knife, mixed it so well with the lettuce that we often tasted rather than saw the tiny morsels of egg, and incorporated the dressing – which had the “smack” of a garlic-clove – with the rest.

A simple lettuce-salad with French dressing is the frequent accompaniment of roast and boiled chicken and game.

The universally popular mayonnaise-dressing is a far more serious affair, and in application is almost catholic.

Break into a soup-plate the yolk of one egg, and squeeze a few drops of lemon juice over it. Then, with a silver fork, begin to stir – not beat – the egg around and around. Add the oil, a drop at a time, until the mixture begins to thicken, when it may be put it in larger quantities. To one egg nearly a pint of oil is used. When very thick, thin the mixture by stirring in gradually the juice of a lemon. This done, add again, little by little, the remainder of the it, and continue the stirring until once more very thick.

TAKE NO LIBERTIES

All the ingredients, including the bowl, should be set in ice for several hours that they may be chilled through. The colder the materials the greater are the chances of the sauce being a thorough success. But the directions must be exactly followed. A mayonnaise is one of the subjects with which no liberties are to be taken. In spite of all precautions, the egg will occasionally curdle; but there is a remedy even for this misfortune. Take another yolk and begin again, from the beginning, as at first. When this mixture is very thick, the first dressing may be added, little by little, and very cautiously. If done carefully and slowly the result ill be a smooth, uncurdled mayonnaise, only there will be twice as much as you intended to make. You will, however, have the consolation of knowing that any of the mixture that is left over many be kept until next day on the ice, and will then be as good as ever. The household will be only too happy to have one of the endless varieties of salads for tomorrow’s lunch.

One egg and a pint of oil will make enough dressing for a family of ordinary size.

In the Recipe, Column will be found some of the “endless varieties” alluded to just now. All have been tried and found worthy of housewifely confidence.

Marion Harland

Familiar Talks with Cottagers and Flat-Dwellers – Our Maid’s Outings

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This is the second article in January of the School for Housewives 1905 series published on Jan 8, 1905, and is a longer article in Marion’s series called Familiar Talks with Cottagers and Flat-Dwellers on the treatment of servants.

School for Housewives – Familiar Talks with Cottagers and Flat-Dwellers

Our Maid’s Outings

A young housewife writes: Do not, I beseech you, dismiss the subject of Bridget Thekla before giving us novices in domestic management a few helpful words as to our ‘girls’ afternoons and evenings ‘out.’ Now, here am I, who keep but one maid. We boarded for two years, and did not begin housekeeping until my baby was nearly a year old. Our flat has six rooms and a bath. I have a woman to wash on Monday, my maid of all work doing the ironing and housework, including cooking. She manages it well, and is generally satisfactory. But she wants every other Thursday afternoon and evening out, and every other Sunday afternoon and evening. That means I am to get up dinner and wash up dishes once a fortnight, alternately with the same work on Sunday, with the difference that we have a simple supper on Sunday, having dined at 1 ‘clock.

“My John says it is an imposition upon me – and I must say it does not seem quite fair to my way of thinking. Annie Hagan, who represents Bridget Thekla in my modest establishment, says ‘these are the privileges every gurrel looks to get where there’s but was gurrel kept.”

“Please enlighten me, with a host of others, upon this point. M.E.R.”

There is but one rule that holds good always, everywhere, and in all circumstances. I need not repeat it here – that Golden Rule which ranges all human creatures, of whatever blood and breeding, upon one equal plane.

Put yourself for half an hour, while we two reason together, in Annie Hagan’s place. She has never read Shakespeare, and her theatergoing does not take in Irving and Terry. But you will comprehend why I thought of Shylock as I read your letter. As that much-vilified Jew said of himself, Annie Hagan “has hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions. If you tickle her she will laugh; if you poison her she will die.”

ONLY HER WORKSHOP

I am as sure as if I had taken afternoon tea with you yesterday hat your flat is comfortable and prettily furnished. I hope that Annie Hagan’s niche in ??? clean, decently appointed, and as airy as in consistent with flat architecture. Her food is the same that is served for yourself and for John. You do not complain when a nice girl “acquaintance” drops in to call upon her in the evening. In fine, you wish Annie Hagan to feel at home in the steam-heated, gas-lighted six-rooms-and-a-bather.

The fact (one of several) remains that it is not her home. She has had a series of such – some worse, some better – in the five or ten years she has spent “in the country.” The roots of her local attachments are slender and lateral. There is no tap root running down from the heart into the new soil; and this is well and merciful. Your slice of a house is nine-tenths of the world to you, because John and the baby and all your best treasures are there. Annie Hagan’s friends, congeners, and blood kindred lie outside of your sphere. Your flat is her factory – her workshop. Cooking, cleaning, and ironing – even her turn at tending baby when you have your “outing” – are her spindles and loom.

TAKE HER VIEW OF IT

Her cousins, the Flanagan sisters, are shop girls, and never tire of taunting her for “taking service” and having but one evening a week to herself. They are free after 6 o’clock every afternoon – as free as any lady in the land. They can walk the streets until midnight, if they like, and have “followers” galore, to say nothing of dressing in colors never flaunted by any bow in the cloud since the first was appointed unto Noah for reassurance.

Annie Hagan has a steady head and right principles. Nevertheless, these things have weight with her, as they would have with you were you “in her place.” Keep these in imagination while we are talking. She may like cooking. She probably does if she cooks well. She may enjoy “redding up” for the pleasure of seeing things look clean and bright when all is done. She may “Take intrust” in baby. There are no better nurses in the world than Irish girls of the best sort. Her livelier and larger interest are in the sphere in which she was born and in which, please Providence and Larry Moran, she hopes to end her days. The same Larry fills as large a space in her dreams as John filled in yours three years agone.

In consideration of all this, she is right in calling the few hours she spends weekly in that world where she lives in heart and in thought, and has her real being, her “privileges.” She may not pronounce the word right, but she enters into its meaning more truly than can you, who make it a point of hygienic conscience to get the fresh air every day.

Why, let a mature manager ask don’t you have supper instead of dinner on Thursday, as well as on Sunday night? What country people know as a “hearty tea?” one John I know looks forward with zest to “the girl’s” evening out, because he always has Sally Lunn for supper.

Sally Lunn, such as you will find described in a recent recipe in our column. The maid set it at noon. All the mistress has to do with it is to put it into the oven and oversee the baking. Baked potatoes and baked beans (baked that forenoon and warmed over in the evening) reconcile this John to cold meat, a salad dressed on the table, crackers and cheese. A pudding or a pie and coffee fill him up satisfactorily.

If your sense of fitness rebels at the thought of washing up your dishes when you are dressed for the evening pile them in the sink, pour hot water, with a liberal dash of ammonia, over them, and leave until nearly bedtime, when you can slip on a wrapper and get them out of the way. Or Annie Hagan – if she be exceptionally appreciative of a good mistress – will ask you to “lave them be” for her to wash early in the morning.

Respect our maid’s “privileges” as you respect your own engagements. Decline invitations for her evenings out steadily. Unless you have mother or sister who can take your place in the home now and then when John has tickets for something he is not wiling to have you miss.

In addition to the outings nominated in the bond between you and Annie Hagan, contrive that she shall go regularly to church. If she is conscientious in the discharge of religious duties – and this from principle, not out of custom or superstition – the more likely will she be to be faithful in her obligations to you.

Once in a while give her an extra outing – a “treat” such as you relish when John gets those tickets unexpectedly. An uncovenanted mercy which belongs to the same category with Alice in Wonderland’s “unbirthday gifts.”

Annie Hagan may not be effusively grateful. Some people do not know how to say “Thank you.” She may even disappoint you by taking the uncovenanted grace as a matter of course and her rightful due. “Some do.” Do it next time as heartily as if she had felt and said the proper thing, and let conscious obedience to the Golden Rule be your rich reward.

Marion Harland

A New Year’s Preachment for the Council

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This is the first written article in January of the School for Housewives 1905 series published on Jan 1, 1905, and is one of Marion’s yearly messages.

School for Housewives – A New Year’s Preachment for the Council

Start Right at the Beginning of This Practical Rather than Sentimentally Reminiscent Conferences

When we were young and green in judgment we were not afraid of “big contracts.”

Much that passes with youth for courage, and which is condemned by elders as “foolhardiness,” is rashness born of ignorance. The skater who has never broken through thin ice, and never heard of “breathing holes,” strikes out fearlessly.

When we were young we reviewed the year behind us, and made good resolutions for that before us – all on New Year’s Day. The retrospect was a moonlighted track, where memory blended sorrow and joy into a kind of gentle pensiveness. The prospect was bright with the sunlight of hope.

Ah, well! we all know what came of the New York exercise enjoined by custom and conscience; how surely the thin ice cracked under our stride; how good resolves were drowned in the black breathing holes.

Now that the years, in flying, have dropped white down upon our heads, if their “multitude” have taught us it should, we take short views of life. We go to school to the coral builders, to the ants, the bees and the flowers of the field, with their perpetual parable of, first, the blade, then the stalk, the bud, the blossom – the seed. We form letter by letter, set stitch by stitch and draw one breath at a time.

A PRACTICAL CONFERENCE

This is our New Year’s talk, a cozy four-feet-on-a-fender conference between reader and editor on the threshold of 1905. A conference I would make practical rather than sentimentally reminiscent.

Whether or not Thomas Carlyle obeyed his own injunction to “do the duty which lieth nearest thee, which thou knowest to be a duty,” it is certain that the utterance is instinct with sound wisdom.

Turning the pages of the book, my eye falls upon another pregnant paragraph:

“Don’t object that your duties are ‘so insignificant.’ They are to be reckoned of infinite significance and alone important to you. Were it but the more perfect regulation of your apartment, the sorting away of your clothes and trinkets, the arranging of your papers – ‘Whatsoever they hand findeth to do, do it with they might,’ and all thy worth and constancy.”

After dwelling upon “duties that have a higher, wider scope” – those done to kindred and kind – our author adds a sentence I would like to engrave upon the fleshy tablets of every heart:

“That is the sure and steady disconnection and extinction of whatsoever miseries one has in this world.”

If I could, as our boys (and some of our girls) would phrase it, “put you next” to that “sure and steady disconnection and extinction,” I should deserve your everlasting gratitude and a niche in the Temple of Fame.

THE DUTIES NEAREST US

“Don’t trample on the gentians while you are hunting for the edelweiss, which, after all, may not be up there!” cried one Alpine traveler to another, who, on tiptoe at the edge of a glacier, was searching eagerly every crevice that might hold the coveted snow flower.

Beneath her feet, in the very drip of the melting mass of ice, July suns had spread a carpet of gentians as blue as the heavens – as brave as he everlasting hill they draped.

Take we, then, our “nexts” the duty nearest us – the everyday tasks we rate as humble – to be our gentians, and stoop to gather them. They grow thick, and they grow fast for each of us. Who has not his or her edelweiss to win which would be honor, and, we think, happiness? We mothers have our ambitions. Yours may be music, it may be literature, it may be travel and all the good it implies.

You have so dove-tailed your takes – the must-be-dones – that make the necessary routine of the day so wisely that you have two hours for the piano, or one hour for the book you have longed for a month to read, or you wish to attend a concert, or to visit a friend whose society would be a spiritual and mental uplift.

Just as the dear joy is within your reach the cook taps at the door with the tale of a happening – to you a catastrophe – which upsets the cherished plan. Or a visitor – always a bore, now a nuisance – “shakes all your buds from blowing.” Or John comes home with one of his nasty headaches and you cannot leave him. Or Johnny has examples to prepare for tomorrow’s session that terrify him almost to tears. Or Susie asks permission to bring a few of the girls and a boy or two in for an evening’s innocent frolic. Or the report of a charitable society must be written by you because the regular officer, whose business it is, has neglected it. Or the twins have been afield and torn their trousers so horribly that your work basket is hurried to the front, and the reading the review, the companionship for which you are athirst and a-hungered, must be postponed indefinitely.

GRAND PRACTICES IN PATIENCE

Trifles? Yes! To the masculine philosopher who has no household hindrances, and whose time is his own because he “will not submit to interruptions.” So are toothache, and a boil upon the tip of one’s nose, and gravel in one’s shoe, and the loss of one’s dinner. We women know which class of these miseries is the lighter.

Plainly, there is but one salve for disappointment in any or all of these cases, and in a hundred others of daily occurrence. That is, to force oneself to hold out a friendly hand to the hindrance, accepting it as a duty, and, since it is done for another, as a privilege. This is a “disconnection” of the chain of small “miseries.” When recognition of duty as a privilege becomes habitual, “disconnection” becomes “extinction.”

It is grand practice in patience – this brave conversion of an enemy into a friend. In the days when there were giants of oratory upon the earth I heard Wendell Phillips define Patience as “that passion of noble souls.” We rise to the sublime height of that passion step by step. Whenever, n the yea to come, we crush back the irritable retort; when we smile when we would rather frown; when we esteem another’s happiness or comfort a worthier object than our own personal ease; when we beat down pride, envy, unworthy ambitions – whatsoever means our brother to stumble – in short, by so much as the Mind of the Master in use prevails above self-love – we climb!

Shall we begin the ascent together, dearly beloved, the Great Family with whom I have walked in peace and mutual affection all these years?

God keep our feet in the upward way, granting us by this sure, if arduous, pass a happy New Year!

Marion Harland