Tag: 1909

Family Meals for a Week

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

Sunday.

Breakfast.
Berries, farmina and cream, fried porgies, corn dodgers, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Jellied chicken, lettuce and tomato salad, English muffins (toasted), coffee ring and Swiss cheese, junket and cake, iced tea.

Dinner.
Cream of sago soup, fried chicken (Virginia style), with cream gravy; asparagus, young onions, strawberry float, sponge cake, black coffee.

Monday.

Breakfast.
Berries, cereal and cream, salmon strips (salt) broiled, with lemon sauce; French rolls, baked potatoes, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Cold meat, baked Welsh rabbit, egg salad, cheese biscuits, thin bread and butter, custard and cookies, tea.

Dinner.
Onion soup (a left-over), stewed chicken and dumplings (a left-over), rice with tomato sauce, young turnips, bread and butter pudding, black coffee.

Tuesday.

Breakfast.
Oranges, cereal and cream, bacon, boiled eggs, brown bread, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Anchovies on toast, baked rice (from yesterday), potatoes a la lyonnaise, cream puffs.

Dinner.
Spring vegetable soup, mutton chops, breaded; spinach, green peas, strawberries and cream, cake, black coffee.

Wednesday.

Breakfast.
Grapefruit, cracked wheat with cream, baked eggs, biscuits, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Mince of mutton with sippets of toast (a left-over), soufflé of green peas (a left-over), lettuce salad, crackers and cheese.

Dinner.
Yesterday’s soup, rolled beefsteak, leeks, asparagus, date and fig pudding, black coffee.

Thursday.

Breakfast.
Berries, cereal and cream, bacon and green sweet peppers (fried), hominy muffins, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Stew of beef, savory (a left-over), in which use the leeks from yesterday; fried French potatoes, asparagus a la vinaigrette (a left-over), hot gingerbread and American cheese, cocoa.

Dinner.
Spinach soup (a left-over), veal cutlets, new potatoes, string beans, bananas, sliced, with cream and cake; black coffee.

Friday.

Breakfast.
Oranges, cereal and cream, clam fritters, hot rolls, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Salt mackerel (creamed), stewed potatoes, quick biscuits, toast, tea and coffee.

Dinner.
Fish bisque, Spanish omelet and green peas, baked bananas, asparagus, strawberry shortcake, and black coffee.

Saturday.

Breakfast.
Berries, cereal and cream, bacon, fried mush, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Ragout of veal (a left-over), asparagus rolls (a left-over), cream toast (baked), floating island, tea.

Dinner.
Green-pea soup, corned beef, turnips, Brussel sports, cocoanut pudding, black coffee.

“At Moving Time”

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This is the third article in May of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on May 16, 1909, and is an article on how to properly pack and move to a new or summer home.

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

“At Moving Time”

“YOU have a disagreeable duty to do at 12 o’clock. Do not blacken 9 and 10 and 11, and all in between, with the color of 12. Do the work of each and reap the reward in peace. * * * The best preparation is the present well seen to—the last duty done.”

Thus said George Macdonald, the apostle of the present; whom common place people heard gladly.

I borrow the bit of practical, “commonsensible” wisdom as the starting point of our chat upon the crucial period of springtime to the housemother who must migrate to other quarters just when the birds have come back for the summer and are chirping—it may be merrily, perchance peevishly—over nest-building. Blessed among women is she to whom the vernal breezes bring no sinking of heart in the anticipation of the ordeal the old adage declares to be equal in destructiveness to three fires. Those who own the homes in which they live, or who are settled for a term of years in leased lodgings made so pleasant by long residence that one forgets they are not one’s very own possession, may enjoy the opening of the bud and blossom season. Their less fortunate neighbor, who has known ever since Christmas that April or May will be written “exodus” in her calendar, is the parishioner in George Macdonald’s world-wide parish to whom I address motherly counsel.

Every Corner and Crevice.

You may be about to exchange a rented flat for what my wee granddaughter describes as “a real, whole house of your own.” Or improved financial status may justify you in transferring family and furniture to more commodious quarters that those you now occupy. Nevertheless, the idea of the process is an abiding shadow. You think of it as your first awakening in the spring morning that comes so much sooner daily as to curtail the few hours of sleep that is haunted by foreboding and forecasting the ways and means of work that must be done and worries that may not be avoided.

Turn back to sainted George’s simple counsel and write is upon the tablet of your heart. Then begin in good time to “tackle” singly the inevitable disagreeables. Get ahead of the task instead of letting it drive you. Begin operations at the top of the house, if you have an attic. If not, commence with the closets and corners and cuddies that stand for the garret of better-lodged folk. Get together all the unmistakable rubbish.

No Time for Sentiment.

Despite your best efforts and yearly clearances of whatever may be catalogued as “trash,” you will be surprised and shamed at the result of exploration into the aforesaid corners. Letters that you ought to have torn across and consigned to the waste basket as soon as they were read; Christmas, visiting and postcards, there was even less excuse for keeping; backless books and back numbers of magazines you should have passed on to me, or to some other circulating medium, months ago, tattered music, and the miscellaneous mass of trifles that once seemed too good to throw away and which you confess loathingly were always too worthless to keep over night, prominent among them being broken china you meant to have mended, and children’s toys you “just couldn’t bear to” toss into the scavenger’s cart, the while you recognized the absurdity of putting them away—I need not prolong the list. We “have all of us been there!” Leave the obvious lesson they teach for another day’s consideration and make short work in righteousness of the uncomely debris. While you are about it, think of nothing else.

Of course there may be worse to come but do not blacken the present tribulation with the color of tomorrow. And don’t sentimentalize over the rubbish. The “loan exhibitions” of today night be less crowded with hoards nobody cares to look at except the lenders thereof, if our foremothers had been less romantic in their attachments to fractured china and dried flowers, samplers and rice-paper pictures worn in the back of the watches of Strephon and Corydon. Let us have an eye to possible embarrassments on the part of our great-granddaughters and sternly resist similar temptations. Cremation is (or ought to be) “the destined end and way” of perishables that have no intrinsic value.

Decently and In Order.

Having cleared decks for the real business of moving, fall to work upon china and glass, reserving just enough to enable you to carry on the daily living that must go forward in the few days intervening before the actual flitting. For many years it was my wont to put this delicate bit of work into the hands of the “profession” in our transits from town to country and vice versa. After watching the methods of the men who were sent from china shops for the purpose, and keeping a close account of breakage, I came to the conclusion that I could handle my fragile properties as well as they do, and if glass and porcelain were to be wracked, preferred to do it myself. For the past decade nobody, save a careful handmaiden working under and with me and I myself, has packed crockery, china and cut glass. And I record, more thankfully than boastfully, that thus far not one piece has come to grief during this period.

First, we have six, eight or ten barrels, bought for a small sum from the grocer. Next, we lay in a large quantity of newspapers, having begun to save them for weeks beforehand. For very fine and thin ware we have tissue paper for the inner wrapper, inclosing it with the newspaper, rubbed soft between the hands. Plenty of paper is used upon each article. All that belongs to each set of china or glass is put into one barrel, which is then carefully marked. If more than one barrel is required for the set, the second barrel is marked in the like manner. This saves time and confusion in unpacking and resettling the content. A thick layer of excelsior is put into the bottom of the barrel and lines the sides. The same goes between the layers of paper-enveloped pieces. If one bit of “fragile” touches another, breakage is inevitable. Cushion all thickly and pack closely. Fit a cover on the barrel, that the content may not work loose in the transit.

We pack our linens, blankets, etc., next in order. Old packing trunks are used here when we can spare them. If not, we buy drygoods boxes for linens and for books. These last are laid close together in the cases. Several thickness of papers line the vases, and each bound book is wrapped with paper to avoid abrasion.

Books are uncanny things to pack. One might fancy that they disdain intimate association with others of their kind. The sharp edges of the bindings have a trick of punching the backs of one’s handsome volumes, and the sides rub crossly into those of their neighbors, bruising and scratching them unless the strata are separated by a double fold of paper. Here, again, put each family of books together and mark the box with a list of contents. Sheets and pillow cases, napkins and tablecloths, blankets and coverlets hunt in couples, and need stouter cases than china. Books are even heavier. If they are to be transported to another town or to the country, the cases should be banded with iron or wooden hoops.

Do not try to crate furniture with your own hands. Leave that to the handy man of the family, or, failing such a one, send for a regular workman in that line. Old cloths, carpets and rugs may be utilized in this work to protect fine furniture from rubbing and from dust.

Throughout the task “keep a quiet mind.” And do one thing at a time. Hold the thoughts steadily to the idea that you are moving out. Moving in is one of the discoloring “to-comes” against which our preacher warns you. Let each hour and day take care of itself, and the weeks of readjustment and toil will look after themselves in the order appointed.

One frequent cause of discomfort and subsequent illness attendant upon moving-time is the too common practice of living from hand-to-mouth for days together. No regular meals are cooked or served. The delicatessen shops and bakeries supply food that mother and maids are too busy to get ready. Set your face like a benignant flint against this violence of health laws. Now, if ever, you and your helpers need nourishing, quiet meals, eaten at stated times and as leisurely as if the abhorrent business of removal were not—literally as figuratively—on the carpet. Talk of other matters while at table. If, at the bitterest end of the ordeal, you cannot contrive a table, use a packing case in lieu thereof. See that a real tablecloth is reserved to give a semblance of decency and order to the ceremony of a family meal. Picnics are well enough in their way, but at this crisis, body and mind should have support and the domestic routine be maintained.

“In the suds,” is an expression handed down from a day when the housemother bent her own back and plunged her arms up to her elbows in Monday’s washtub. It has come to mean much more to us, namely, a state of slatternly disorganization and discomfort incompatible with self-respect and orderliness of mind and action.

Keep out of the suds in moving time.

Marion Harland

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

Family Meals for a Week

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

Sunday.

Breakfast.
Oranges, rice, jelly with cream, broiled chicken, cornmeal muffins, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Beef loaf, cheese sandwiches, toasted; celery and grapefruit salad, thin brown bread and butter, Saratoga chips, “heavenly hash” in banana skins upon crisp lettuce, blanc mange and cake, tea.

Dinner.
Green pea soup, calf’s liver, larded and baked en casserole; string beans, asparagus, strawberry shortcake; black coffee.

Monday.

Breakfast.
Tangerines, cereal and cream, bacon and eggs, French rolls, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Cold liver (a left-over), string beans and lettuce salad (a left-over), baked tomato toast, crackers and cream cheese, strawberries and cream, cookies, tea.

Dinner.
Asparagus soup (partly a left-over), made of the woody stalks of yesterday’s asparagus and a few left-over tips; chicken and mushroom pates (a left-over), new potatoes, baked rice (a left-over), tapioca custard, black coffee.

Tuesday.

Breakfast.
Strawberries, cracked wheat and cream, bacon, boiled eggs, graham bread, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Cold ham, stewed potatoes, peanut butter sandwiches, pulled bread, gingerbread and American cheese, cocoa.

Dinner.
Pea and tomato soup (a left-over), breaded mutton chops, spinach, mashed young turnips, gooseberry tarts, black coffee.

Wednesday.

Breakfast.
Oranges, cereal and cream, fried pan fish, potato biscuits, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Ham omelet (a left-over), French fried potatoes, tomato salad, crackers and cheese, loppered milk and cake, tea.

Dinner.
Browned potato soup, stuffed breast of veal, spinach soufflé (a left-over), mashed potatoes, marmalade pudding, black coffee.

Thursday.

Breakfast.
Strawberries, cereal and cream, fried frogs’ legs, quick biscuits, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Hamburger steaks, potato croquets (a left-over), cress and sweet pepper salad, toasted crackers with Swiss cheese, hermits and jam, tea.

Dinner.
Scotch broth, vol-au-vent of veal and asparagus tips (a left-over), young beets, string beans, orange fritters, black coffee.

Friday.

Breakfast.
Berries, cereal and cream, poached eggs on toast, shortcake, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Sardine sandwiches, thin bread and butter, beet and bean salad with mayonnaise, oatmeal crackers and cheese, bananas and cream, cake, tea.

Dinner.
Lettuce cream soup, boiled cod with egg sauce, whipped and browned potatoes, stuffed tomatoes, queen of puddings, black coffee.

Saturday.

Breakfast.
Strawberries, oatmeal jelly and cream, bacon, scrambled eggs, rice cakes, toast, tea and coffee.

Luncheon.
Creamed fish baked in scallop shells (a left-over), potatoes boiled whole with butter and parsley sauce, anchovy toast, jelly roll, cocoa.

Dinner.
Scotch broth, fresh beef’s tongue braised with vegetables; green stuffed peppers, broccoli, strawberry ice cream and cake, black coffee.

Spring Vegetables

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This is the second article in May of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on May 9, 1909, and is a talk on vegetables.

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

Spring Vegetables

IT IS a strong argument in favor of the theory of the “survival of the fittest” in each generation hat such a respectable percentage of our ancestors lived to a reasonably old age, when one reflects upon what they ate. True, recent publications embodying he results of the latest reports of scientific men convey the gratifying fact we have, as a race, gained nearly 10 years upon what was the average of human life 75 years ago. The gain, we are told, is largely due to improved medical and surgical methods, but yet more to sanitary conditions unknown to our grandsires and to intelligent observance of dietetic laws.

The fact remains that those hale old forbears lived, labored and died in a good old age (some of them) in circumstances we now consider as well-neigh fatal to mortal creatures. They slept on feather beds in chambers the windows of which were sealed up early in the winter by tacking list or pasting paper along the edges of the sashes and not reopened until the first of May. They ate salt pork and buckwheat cakes for six months of the year of the year; and from Nov. 1 to the middle of May subsisted upon what we now term “coarse vegetables,” to wit: Potatoes, cabbages, onions, turnips and, when they could get them, beets. Even these gave out for the most part before the winter was over, and what remained was rank, pithy and stale generally.

Longevity.

With all these odds against them, one granddame of my own is set down in the family genealogy as having died at 104 years of age, and for 10 succeeding generations her descendants had an average age of 75 years. In each generation one-fourth of them lived to be over 80.

Early hours, quiet lives and an abundance of fresh air they could not wholly excluded from their sleeping and living rooms had much to do with the longevity of the sturdy pioneers. Still, we marvel how they did it!

What has all this to do with “spring vegetables?” Much, every way. Chiefly because it is undoubtedly true that we owe the increased length of days and our better preservation into the prolonged period to the conditions I enumerated in the earlier sentences of our “talk.” Cereals and fruits as breakfast foods were unknown in those olden days, and the green vegetables that never leave our markets and tables from year’s end to year’s end were eaten by our forefathers in the short season that allowed them to grow in badly tended country gardens. With the first frost they vanished and were no more until the next summer.

Green Things.

Recollect well when celery was a rare delicacy even on the tables of well-to-do people. Now it is a daily visitor to the dinner tables of all who wish to have it. It should have a prominent place in our springtime menu. As a nervine it is of high value upon the dietary of those who have made nature’s “simples” a study. Women—also children—who have grown “unaccountably” (?) cross and sleepless after the winter’s double term of schooling should be encouraged to eat freely of celery. A tea made of the roots and outer leaves, and sweetened to taste, will act gratefully upon those troubled with insomnia. Celery is likewise beneficial to sufferers from nervous dyspepsia, gout and rheumatism.

Every bit of the bunch for which you pay 25 cents may be utilized. The heart-stalks are laid in ice water until served as an accompaniment—which is also a corrective—of meat. The outer and coarse parts are stewed or fried. They are good in either way. The tea I spoke of may be brewed from the roots and leaves.

Lettuce has cooling and soporific virtues. Seasoned as a salad and eaten with brown bread and butter, it acts directly upon the blood heated by “spring fever,” and when dipped into mayonnaise and laid between thin slices of buttered brown or white bread forms a delicious and wholesome sandwich.

The coarser outer leaves may go into the composition of the delicate and toothsome cream of lettuce soup that should be better known to our average housemother. “We” utilize the inferior qualities of lettuce by cooking them as we would spinach. This makes a popular and seasonable variety in spring dinners.

Spinach takes rank with dietitians among the most valuable of our esculents. It is a gentle purgative to the blood, clearing out the febrile deposits of the winter’s sluggishness and introducing new and vital elements. It improves the complexion, I remark incidentally, and containing, as it does, iron and salts of potassium, stimulates the jaded appetite. It is prepared for the table by boiling in a double kettle, adding no water except that which clings to the leaves after washing. When tender it is drained of the juices that would make it too watery, chopped fine and seasoned with butter, pepper and salt, a good tablespoonful of sugar, a dash of nutmeg, and at the last with a few spoonfuls of cream beaten well into the mass.

A Medicine.

Rhubarb, alias pie plant, is a good second to spinach in the work of making over the system for the coming season by ridding it of the accretions and secretions of the winter that clog blood and brain like the stagnant residuum of a freshet that has converted the banks and meadows of the stream into breeding places of miasma. Scrape the stalks of the plant; cut into short lengths and put over the fire in a double boiler, with no water in the inner vessel. As with spinach, the generous juices of the stalk will supply all the needed moisture. Do not sweeten until it has boiled tender. Take, then, from the fire, add plenty of sugar while the rhubarb is hot, and set aside to cool. To cook the sugar in the vegetable is to convert it into a preserve, injuring the flavor and lessening the beneficial effect of the fresh esculent. The specific action of rhubarb is upon the blood and kidneys.

It is highly recommended to persons suffering from an excess of uric acid in the system.

“A New Broom.”

Young onions are many degrees higher in the social scale of the vegetable tribe than the full grown, highly flavored elder of the same name. We have them gathered from our country cold frames as soon as they are as large as the end of a man’s thumb. As dear Charles Lamb says of his suckling pig on the spit: “He is a weakling; he is a flower.” The baby onion should be handled as tenderly. Boil it in two waters, drain, butter and smother affectionately with cream sauce. Elsewhere I have written: “For bilious complexions, influenza, insomnia and muddy complexions the value of the onion as a steady diet can hardly be overrated.”

Asparagus is another fine standby these early spring days, being a gentle sudorific; hence an accessory in the business of improving the skin and inciting the escape of bilious and feverish humors.

Tomatoes, cooked and raw, should, have driven the old-fashioned and always dangerous mineral drug out of the field of domestic practice. The fruit-vegetable contains a vegetable calomel that does the work of the drug, with none of the risks attendant upon the use of the older blood and stomach purifier which practitioners of the ancient school of healing leaned upon with all the weight gathered from tradition and faith. My memory runs back to the time when “a course of calomel” was part of the spring cleansing. Sometimes it was regarded as especially beneficial if succeeded by “salvation.” That diabolical result is, happily, unknown to this age. It involved a sore mouth, excess of saliva and, oftener than not, loosening of sound teeth. And this was healing!

Let us reckon among our causes for thanksgiving in the blessed, budding, bountiful springtime that we take our course of calomel in the guise of luscious red tomatoes, spicy pie plant, young onions that melt in the mouth, juicy asparagus and spinach—“the broom” that maketh clean the human system and without friction.

Marion Harland

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

Our Boots and Shoes

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This is the first article in May of the School for Housewives 1909 series published on May 2, 1909, and is an article on how to treat boots, shoes, and callououses.

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

Our Boots and Shoes

THE caption suggests to readers of popular literature that of the interesting history of army life, written by the widow of Gen. Custer—“Boots and Saddles.” The three words translate the trumpet call for mounted drill preparatory to the day’s march, maneuvers or fighting.

The association of ideas is not inapt. In putting on our boots and shoes were gird up our loins, figuratively, for the business of the day. No working man comes down to breakfast in his slippers or in his stocking feet, no matter how warm the weather.

Do our careful mothers ever ponder seriously the question as to the share easy and well-fitted foot covering has upon the temper the children bring to the breakfast table and take to school? It is a hard task to study when the shoe really and literally pinches the tender foot. It is as hard to keep in a good humor during the painful hours that must pass before the hot and fevered toes are released from bondage. The indifference of the average boy to the appearance of his lower extremities, his positive dislike to brushing his shoes and his avowed hatred of a new pair, in the face of the fact that the old boots are shabby beyond even his power of denial, seldom have the weight their importance demands in the parental counsels.

Measured Versus Ready-Made.

In my early youth nobody wore ready-made shoes. We children were taken to the shoemaker as regularly as to the dentist, and much oftener, and fresh measurements were made for each pair of new shoes. In consequence, we never had corns. Grown-uppers, who were seduced by vanity to wear shoes too small for comfort, and to sport pointed toes when square had gone out of fashion, had a monopoly of corns and bunions. I recall with agonized distinctness the growth of the first of the very limited crop of them that I have had the misery of harvesting. The direct cause of the evil was a pair of satin slippers bought in haste to wear to a party, and repented of in wretched leisure. They were the first ready-made shoes I ever owned. Nowadays, nobody but the rich and the fastidious have shoes made to order, ad chiropodists are abroad in the land as a direct and inevitable result. There are no two feet in the world which are exactly alike, as there is not in the forest a leaf that has a perfect fac-simile in another. Yet millions of boots and shoes are turned off from lasts which bear one and the same number.

The cost of shoes made to order puts the comfort, which custom has made a luxury, of covering the feet with gear designed expressly for each particular pair beyond the reach of people of modest means. I do not dispute the assertion. The next best thing is to be exceedingly careful in the selection of what we buy in the stead of these vanished treasures. It is not enough that the mother sends her child’s “size” down to the shop when the boy or girl “cannot possibly wear those old frights a day longer;” not enough that one of the frights accompanies the order, to insure a fit. She should go with the lad or lassie, and see for herself that the shoes do not bind here and bulge there. If Jennie be inclined to plumpness, it is almost certain that the buttons of the boots should be moved nearer to the edge of the flap on the rounded claves. If Jack be a spindling younker, the fastenings of the stout boots should be tightened about ankles and shins, or the shoes will “wobble” into flabbiness, and a shoe that is too loose induces the growth of callosities as surely as one that is tight. There are degrees of fitness even in ready-made boots and shoes. The watchful purchaser is quick to note whether or not those displayed for selection accord with the shape of her child’s foot.

She should not be ignorant, furthermore, that leather has its grades of excellence, irrespective, sometimes, of outward seeming. Morocco should be firm under the fingers, yet pliable; kid, elastic and not flimsy. Practice soon makes her familiar with these points, and her touch more trustworthy than if she had never studied qualities.

And having bought the boots, let her take them home to ripen. One wise woman whom I have the hood fortune to know does not wait until the family stock of shoes gets shabby. When he boots she insists that Jack shall brush nightly, because he is always in a hurry in the morning, begin to wear slightly on the sole and get grayish on the toes she trots him down that very afternoon o be fitted to the successors of the veterans. These secured, she lays them upon the shelf of a cool closet that has no steam pipe near, and leaves them there for a fortnight. When she can compass it, she lets them ripen for a month. Then they are worn for an hour or so a day, increasing the term of service daily until, as the grateful wearer owns with a grin, “They are almost as comfortable as the old.”

Kid gloves stiffen and harden in lying by unused, even when enveloped in oiled silk. Shoes, if the material of which they are made be good, are improved by the waiting.

A Rest Cure.

A “capable” New England housewife in Mrs. Whitney’s “Odd or Even?” declares that “gowns need rest as much as the people.” In proof of which she displays one of her own, that looks so nice as to be mistaken for new, which has had no other treatment than a month’s rest in a dark closet. I have fancied that our boots and shoes are the most sensitive portion of our outer integuments. The period of usefulness of my own footwear is a proverb in the household. I attribute the good looks and longevity of the boots, low shoes and slippers to my practice of removing the first named from my feet as soon as I come home, after walking or driving, and donning either the second or the third. My feet demand the change, and so do the wearied boots. I carry the idea further into practice by never lying down for rest without taking off my shoes and enduing my grateful feet in bedside slippers, and this although I know my siesta or lounge will not exceed 10 minutes in duration. Feet and shoes are the better for the rest and change.

“Callosities.”

Judicious care and cobbling will prolong the useful period I have referred to beyond the expectation of one who has been in the habit of letting shoes wear out hopelessly before getting new and then throwing the ancient servitors into the scavenger’s cart. Have boots and shoes half-soled, and recapped at the toes, and set them aside to let the new leather mellow, against the time for going into the country for the summer, or to be worn under rubbers in muddy and snowy weathers. Those same rubbers are a decided injury to shoes. They injure the shape, and, by retaining the heat and perspiration of the feet, rot the leather. Therefore, keep a second best pair for days when rubbers are indispensable.

Patent leather boots are undeniably pretty, and when boots are merely tipped with the glossy material, not unwholesome wear. When the foot covering is composed entirely of it (excepting, of course, the soles) it is most undesirable, particularly for active children. The insensible perspiration upon which the healthy condition of the skin is absolutely dependent is converted into moisture which cannot escape into the air, and must be absorbed by the skin and flesh. The feet are soaked into tenderness that renders the body susceptible to sudden changes of temperature, heightening the risks of taking cold when the air-tight covering is removed. The wearer of patent leathers almost invariably suffers from cold feet.

A word as to the treatment of corns, bunions and callosities on the soles of the feet may not be amiss here. If the feet be properly clothed; if the use of rubbers be confined to seasons when it is really necessary to wear them, and they are taken off as soon as one enters the house; if patent leathers are eschewed and the boots be exchanged for softer low shoes that do not bind the ankles while one sits or stand indoors, the obnoxious crop of excrescences ought not to become an affliction to any one of us. Nevertheless, “it must be that offenses come” to the lower extremities, as everywhere else. If corns and their cousins are with us, they must be cured and banished.

Dozens of remedies, simple some of them, and more of them elaborate, have been offered to us from time to time. The burden of testimony for and against these moves me to suggest, as a safe and marvellously efficient application to the harder callosities on toes and soles, what is confessed by us all to be the most useful of vegetable oils—that extracted from the castor bean. I have known stubborn corns on the ball of the foot and upon the toes to yield in a few weeks to this simple regimen:

Soak and soap the “callosities” night and morning; wipe, and while they are still moist rub for two minutes with the oil. The best quality is clear, colorless and has little odor. Keep up the method for two or three weeks. After a few days you will find the hard places softer. Begin then to scrape off the tough skin very gently before applying the oil. The soreness will be gone by now, and little by little the callous excrescence will come away. There will be no plain and no danger, such as attends upon the use of acids to produce the same end.

Marion Harland

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

Some Old Southern Dishes (continued)

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

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

Some Old Southern Dishes (continued)

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

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

“Ram, Lamb, Sheep and Mutton.”

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

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

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

The Oily Possum.

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

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

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

Fried Chicken.

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

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

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

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

Chicken Batter Pudding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smothered Chicken.

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

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

Barbequed Chicken.

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

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

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

Barbecued “Old Hare.”

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

Transparent Pudding.

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

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

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

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

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

Marion Harland

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Some Old Southern Dishes

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

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

Some Old Southern Dishes

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

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

“Miriam S.D. (Utica, N.Y.)”

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

Abundant Sweets.

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

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

Steamed Ham.

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

Skin when cold and dab with dots of black pepper.

Baked and Glazed Ham.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roast Chine.

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

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

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

Roast Sparerib.

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

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

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

Marion Harland

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How to Entertain the Gift of Flowers

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

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

How to Entertain the Gift of Flowers

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

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

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

Star that in the earth’s firmament do shine—

is, then, a dignified and lovely duty.

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

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

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

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

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

“An appointed time and half disclosure!”

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

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

Street Flowers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bright Flowers.

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

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

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

Marion Harland

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The Bulbs We Planted

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

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

The Bulbs We Planted

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

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

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

Good Luck.

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

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

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

A Showcase Fernery.

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

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

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

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

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

Mainly Rules.

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

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

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

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

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

Marion Harland

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Concerning Oil Cloth

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

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

Concerning Oil Cloth

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

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

Zinc Versus Oilcloth

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

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

Dubious Economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marion Harland

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