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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea,' Marion Harland showcases her expertise in domestic science, presenting a comprehensive guide to meal planning and etiquette for the vital social events of the day. The book combines practical recipes with thoughtful considerations of presentation and timing, illustrating the importance of culinary artistry in social gatherings. Harland's prose is imbued with a warm, conversational tone, reflecting the 19th-century American emphasis on hospitality and the evolving role of women in the domestic sphere. This work is situated within the larger context of American literature that explores the intersection of social customs and culinary practices, making it a significant contribution to both domestic literature and culinary arts. Marion Harland, a prominent figure in 19th-century American literature, was an advocate for women's rights and education. Her own experiences as a matron and social hostess informed her writing, allowing her to seamlessly blend practical advice with reflections on the social values of her time. Harland's literary accomplishments, alongside her commitment to enhancing women's roles in society, propelled her to write this essential guide, which emphasizes not only what to serve but how to cultivate the intimacy of shared meals. For readers interested in the historical intricacies of dining and social interaction, 'Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea' is an invaluable resource. Whether you are a culinary novice or an experienced host, Harland's insights on the art of meal presentation, combined with her reflections on the significance of shared meals, will enhance your domestic repertoire and provide inspiration for creating memorable gatherings. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea
Table of Contents
Introduction
In Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea, everyday meals become a stage where thrift, comfort, and sociability work together to shape domestic life. Marion Harland writes not for spectacle but for the steady pleasures of a well-run household, guiding readers toward food that nourishes, welcomes, and makes sense within real constraints of time and means. Her emphasis is practical rather than ornamental, yet she never loses sight of the table’s power to create community. The result is a book that treats cooking as both craft and care, marrying habit with hospitality and encouraging confidence through orderly methods and thoughtful choices.
This volume belongs to the tradition of nineteenth-century American cookery and household guidance, written by Marion Harland—the pen name of Mary Virginia Terhune—and first published in the United States during the late nineteenth century. It is a cookbook and domestic manual focused on the meals its title names, and it reflects the period’s growing market for reliable, readable instruction aimed at homekeepers. Situated between Victorian ideals of gentility and the emerging rhetoric of kitchen efficiency, the book participates in a broader movement to codify everyday practices, turning experience at the stove and sideboard into a body of useful, accessible knowledge.
The premise is straightforward: provide home cooks with dependable counsel for planning and preparing morning, midday, and afternoon fare. Readers encounter a systematic approach to meals rather than a scatter of recipes—menus, methods, and practical suggestions that emphasize what is feasible for ordinary households. The voice is firm, companionable, and lucid, the mood encouraging rather than severe. Harland’s prose privileges clarity over ornament, and her instructions aim to demystify rather than impress. The experience she offers is one of steady guidance: how to think about a meal’s shape, how to manage timing, and how to maintain standards without undue fuss.
Harland’s method balances economy with pleasure. She attends to planning ahead, to making sensible choices at market, and to using what one has wisely, all while preserving the dignity and enjoyment of the table. She treats breakfast as the day’s foundation, luncheon as a practical interlude, and tea as an occasion for light refreshment and sociable grace. Throughout, there is an insistence on order—on routines that reduce waste, anxiety, and excess. The practical focus is complemented by a hospitable spirit: feeding others becomes a deliberate expression of care, where modest means and thoughtful preparation can yield satisfying, gracious results.
Themes of thrift, adaptability, and the social meaning of food run through the book. Harland writes with the assumption that domestic labor deserves intelligence and respect, a stance that dignifies the everyday while acknowledging its demands. She addresses readers navigating varied circumstances, offering strategies that accommodate different levels of skill, time, and resources. In doing so, the book reflects broader cultural currents: the alignment of stewardship with character; the value placed on regularity and restraint; and the aspiration to make a home that is orderly without being austere. The kitchen appears as a site of both constraint and genuine creativity.
For contemporary readers, the book’s relevance lies in its durable principles. Its attention to planning, seasonality, and economy speaks to current concerns about food costs, sustainability, and reducing waste. Its clear, measured tone models a calm approach to decision-making under everyday pressures. As a historical document, it illuminates the textures of late nineteenth-century domestic life—the expectations placed upon home cooks, the rhythms of the day, and the social codes attached to hospitality. As a practical resource, it still offers frameworks for menu-building and time management that can be adapted to modern pantries, appliances, and schedules without losing their original spirit.
Approached today, Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea rewards both purposeful and curious reading. One can mine it for methods that simplify routine cooking, or read it as a window onto a world that shaped American home life for generations. Harland’s steady counsel invites readers to treat the ordinary meal as meaningful work—a small, repeatable achievement grounded in care. In an age crowded with novelty, her emphasis on consistency, planning, and good sense feels bracingly relevant. The book’s lasting appeal is its union of practicality and grace: an insistence that the everyday table, thoughtfully prepared, is a place where nourishment and fellowship naturally converge.
Synopsis
Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea presents a practical manual for planning and preparing the day’s lighter meals, with clear directions and an emphasis on order, thrift, and reliability. Addressed to household managers and home cooks, it arranges guidance by meal and by dish type, balancing principles with specific instructions. The opening sets expectations for neat service, punctuality, and economical use of ingredients, linking good results to careful timing and method rather than extravagance. Throughout, recipes are paired with notes on proportions, heat, and handling, so that everyday fare can be produced consistently. The book’s sequence moves from breakfast through luncheon to tea, concluding with menus and household management advice.
The breakfast section begins with fundamentals that underpin successful results: the right handling of beverages, hot breads, and simple hot dishes. Directions for making coffee, tea, and chocolate stress water quality, proper steeping or boiling, and keeping service hot without over-extraction. Notes on yeast, baking powder, and quick batters introduce leavening and mixing, connecting technique to texture. Practical remarks on stoves, ovens, griddles, and the order of work outline how to coordinate multiple dishes within a short morning window. Cleanliness, measured quantities, and attentive heat management are presented as indispensable tools, forming a foundation before individual recipes and variations are detailed.
Breakfast breads receive extensive treatment, reflecting their central place in the morning meal. Plain and enriched breads, quick biscuits, muffins, and griddle cakes are organized by method, distinguishing doughs from batters and yeast-raised from chemically leavened preparations. Instructions cover mixing, kneading, proofing, and the test for doneness, with cautions against overworking or underbaking. Corn-based breads and hominy accompaniments appear alongside wheat preparations, offering economical and regional options. Waffles, pancakes, and toast are included with guidance on batter consistency, heated irons or pans, and immediate serving. Variations are suggested through additions of fruit, spice, or alternate flours, while maintaining straightforward, repeatable procedures.
Savory breakfast dishes follow, emphasizing simple, nourishing fare prepared quickly and served hot. Eggs are presented in multiple forms—boiled to precise times, scrambled, poached, and in omelets—each tied to pan heat and stirring. Fish suitable for the morning table, both fresh and salted, include methods for soaking, broiling, and frying, with sauces and accompaniments to balance salinity. Meats such as bacon, ham, and sausages are handled with attention to trimming and crispness. Cereals and porridges, including oatmeal and other grains, are treated as economical staples requiring steady heat and thorough cooking. Potatoes, fruits, and plain sauces round out plates, with suggestions for arranging modest variety without excess.
Luncheon is framed as a flexible, less formal meal that repurposes resources and offers light comfort between breakfast and the evening table. The book introduces soups suitable for mid-day service, favoring quickly prepared broths and purees. Cold meats and poultry are sliced neatly or transformed into made dishes—hashes, croquettes, and simple pies—linking thrift to palatability. Eggs reappear as omelets and salads, and cheese-based preparations provide substance without long cooking. Sandwiches and rolls are addressed as portable options for home or outing. The guidance underscores neat serving, moderate portions, and variety achieved through seasoning and arrangement rather than costly ingredients.
Accompaniments central to luncheon—salads, dressings, relishes, and pickles—receive focused instruction. Leaf and composed salads are built from well-washed greens, carefully cut vegetables, and plainly cooked meats or fish, finished with simple oil-and-vinegar or richer emulsion dressings. The text outlines the sequence for combining and the importance of cool service. Pickles, chutneys, and spiced fruits are prepared in advance to enliven cold dishes, with notes on vinegar strength, sugar balance, and storage. Sauces for reheated meats and fish emphasize quick pan techniques and consistency. Breads for luncheon, from rolls to thin slices of loaf bread, are paired thoughtfully to complete plates without crowding the table.
The tea section addresses both the family evening meal and social afternoon tea, distinguishing their service while unifying their requirements for delicacy and punctuality. Tea is brewed with attention to water just off the boil, correct infusion time, and a warmed pot; coffee and chocolate directions are adapted for evening taste. A range of tea-breads, light cakes, and simple pastries is provided, alongside buttered toast and crisp biscuits. Jellies, preserves, and compotes appear as modest sweets. Instructions for laying the tea table, using the tray, and managing a small service ensure ease for hostess and guests. The tone favors simplicity, tidiness, and pleasant variety over display.
To help the household plan, the book offers sample menus suited to season and budget, arranging courses to balance hot and cold items and to distribute labor sensibly. Time-tables guide the order of preparation so dishes reach the table together. Notes on marketing and pantry management advise selecting sound staples, buying in economical quantities, and storing safely. Directions for using leftovers prioritize prompt cooling, careful trimming, and transformations that conceal staleness while preserving nutrition. Brief sections address children’s meals and simple invalid cookery, focusing on digestibility and mild seasoning. The overall advice links foresight and routine to reduced waste and consistent quality.
Concluding themes reinforce the central message: well-conducted breakfasts, luncheons, and teas depend less on expense than on method, timing, and thoughtful service. The book’s progression from basic techniques to applied recipes, then to menus and management, is designed to build competence step by step. Cleanliness, accurate measurement, and quiet punctuality are repeatedly emphasized. Seasonal adaptation, use of local resources, and prudent economy shape choices without sacrificing comfort. By integrating practical instruction with planning and presentation, the work frames these everyday meals as achievable standards for the home, offering reliable patterns that can be adjusted to household size, means, and occasion.
Historical Context
Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea appeared in the United States in 1875, when postbellum urban life and the expanding middle class reshaped household routines. Marion Harland (Mary Virginia Hawes Terhune), a Virginian who had moved to Newark, New Jersey, and later New York City, wrote from the vantage of a Northern, urban, Protestant, middle-class home influenced by Southern culinary memory. The book presumes coal or wood ranges, iceboxes supplied by the urban ice trade, and access to grocers linked by rail to national markets. Its prescriptions mirror metropolitan schedules—breakfast before work, luncheon as a lighter mid-day meal, and tea as a social ritual—within a country undergoing Reconstruction, industrial growth, and rapid consumer change.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) and Reconstruction (1865–1877) decisively shaped the milieu in which Harland wrote. The war destroyed Southern infrastructure and ended slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), followed by the Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments. The Freedmen’s Bureau (est. 1865) and Reconstruction Acts attempted to reorder labor and citizenship amid persistent violence and scarcity. Harland, born in Virginia in 1830 and married in 1856 before relocating North, mediated Southern culinary techniques—cornbread, biscuits, gravies—into a national repertoire. The book’s practical tone and economy reflect wartime and postwar lessons in substitution and thrift, while its menus and entertaining advice model reconciliation-era civility across sectional lines.
The Panic of 1873 and the ensuing Long Depression (in the United States, c. 1873–1879) form the most immediate economic backdrop to Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea. Triggered by the collapse of the investment house Jay Cooke & Co. on 18 September 1873 after overextended railroad finance, the crisis cascaded through banks and railroads, producing deflation, high unemployment, and wage cuts. The Coinage Act of 1873’s effective embrace of the gold standard tightened credit; labor unrest culminated in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, which paralyzed lines from Baltimore to St. Louis. Households faced volatile prices for staples such as flour, sugar, and meat, and an uncertain cash wage environment for domestic labor. In response, domestic advice literature stressed economy, planning, and the intelligent use of leftovers. Harland’s book advances precisely these strategies: menus that repurpose roasts into hashes or croquettes; instructions for preserving and canning to smooth seasonal costs; recommendations for cheaper cuts made tender by long simmering; and counsel on shopping by weight and season to avoid paying premiums. The insistence on predictable breakfast routines buttressed wage earners’ punctuality, while the encouragement to maintain respectable tea tables with modest means addressed middle-class anxieties about status during contraction. By translating macroeconomic shock into kitchen-scale techniques—accurate measurement, batch preparation, and strategic substitution—the book models household resilience. It thus records, at the level of recipes and schedules, how the crash of 1873 reorganized middle-class domestic practice and taste, and how women’s managerial labor stabilized families through one of the nineteenth century’s most severe downturns.
Industrialization and the national market transformed ingredients and methods. The completion of the first transcontinental railroad (1869) and dense Midwestern networks fed coastal cities with wheat, pork, and dairy. Roller milling adopted in Minneapolis in the 1870s yielded whiter, finer flour; the Washburn A Mill explosion in 1878 highlighted the new industry’s scale. Chemical leaveners matured: Royal Baking Powder (1866) and Rumford (refined by E. N. Horsford, 1869) enabled reliable quick breads and cakes. Canning (Mason jar, 1858) and the urban ice trade broadened preservation; refrigerated railcars entered regular service in the late 1870s. Harland’s recipes assume these technologies—precise oven work on coal ranges, baking-powder biscuits, canned fruits—exemplifying the domestication of industrial science.
Women’s organized reform rose alongside domestic authority. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) formed in Cleveland in 1874, with Frances Willard leading from 1879, framed sobriety as a household and civic imperative. Suffrage organizations—the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association, both founded in 1869—pressed complementary claims about women’s public reason and managerial competence, later merging into NAWSA (1890). Harland’s attention to disciplined hospitality and her privileging of tea, coffee, and temperate refreshments reflect a moral economy congruent with temperance. By codifying household management as rational, measurable, and socially consequential, the book supports contemporary arguments that women’s domestic expertise bore political weight in shaping citizens’ health and character.
Global commodity chains underpin the book’s titular beverages. The Suez Canal (opened 1869) shortened routes between Asian plantations and Atlantic ports, while British imperial cultivation shifted tea supply from China to India (Assam, Darjeeling) and, after coffee rust devastated Ceylon in 1869, to Ceylon tea in the 1870s–1880s. American grocers in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia increasingly stocked Indian and Ceylon varieties alongside Chinese greens and oolongs. Coffee for American breakfasts flowed largely from Brazil’s São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro provinces, with U.S. imports climbing through the 1870s. Harland’s protocols for tea service, blend selection, and coffee preparation register these shifts, translating imperial logistics and hemispheric agriculture into everyday rituals of respectable sociability.
Public health and the emerging pure food movement shaped household vigilance. Scandals such as New York’s swill-milk crisis (exposed in 1858) and recurrent reports of adulterated tea, spices, and sugar spurred municipal oversight, including the Metropolitan Board of Health (1866). Pasteur’s germ theory (1860s) gradually influenced sanitation practices, though federal regulation lagged until 1906. In the 1870s, families relied on boiling, careful storage, and trusted suppliers. Harland’s emphasis on kitchen cleanliness, thorough cooking of meats, safe water, and home preserving reflects this environment. Her insistence on verifying ingredients and on methods that minimize spoilage foreshadows later standards, positioning the domestic kitchen as a frontline institution of consumer protection before comprehensive statute.
As a social document, the book converts cookery into a critique of the period’s inequities and instabilities. Its relentless attention to thrift challenges the speculative excess and credit fragility revealed in 1873, valorizing steady household economies over boom-time display. By elevating domestic management to a disciplined, quasi-scientific practice, it contests the marginalization of women’s labor and implies claims for civic authority consonant with temperance and reform. Its courteous, inclusive menus suturing Southern and Northern tastes suggest a program of postwar reconciliation while tacitly exposing class tensions in access to ingredients and equipment. The work’s preference for temperate hospitality and safe food implicitly rebukes regulatory laxity and the social costs of intemperance.
Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea
FAMILIAR TALKS. ————————
FAMILIAR TALK WITH THE READER. ————————
I should be indeed flattered could I believe that you hail with as much pleasure as I do the renewal of the “Common-Sense Talks[1],” to which I first invited you four years ago. For I have much to say to you in the same free-masonic, free-and-easy strain in which you indulged me then.
It is a wild March night. Winter and Summer, Spring-time and Autumn, the wind sings, or plains at my sitting-room window. To-night its shout is less fierce than jocund to my ear, for it says, between the castanet passages of hail and sleet, that neither friend nor bore will interrupt our conference. Shutters and curtains are closed; the room is still, bright, and warm, and we are no longer strangers.
The poorest man of my acquaintance counts his money by the million, has a superb mansion he calls “home,” a wife and beautiful children who call him “husband” and “father.” He has friends by the score, and admirers by the hundred, for human nature has not abated one jot in prudential sycophancy since the Psalmist summed up a volume of satirical truth in the pretended “aside”—“and men will praise thee when thou doest well unto thyself.” For all that, he of whom I write is a pauper, inasmuch as he makes his boast that he never experienced the emotion of gratitude. He has worked his own way in the world, he is wont to say: has never had helping hand from mortal man or woman. It is a part of his religion to pay for all he gets, and never to ask a favor. Nevertheless, he confesses, with a complacent smirk that would be amusing were it not so pitiable an exhibition of his real beggary—“that he would like to know what it feels like to be grateful,—just for the sake of the novel sensation!”
Poor wretch! I am sorry I introduced him here and now. There is a savage growl in the wind; our snuggery is a trifle less pleasant since I began to talk of him. Although I only used him as a means of “leading up” to the expression of my own exceeding and abundant wealth of gratitude to you, dear Reader and Friend. If I had only time and strength enough to bear me through the full relation of the riches and happiness you have conferred upon me! There are letters in that desk over there between the windows that have caused me to look down with a sense of compassionate superiority upon Nathan Rothschild[2] and the Duke of Brunswick. I am too modest (or miserly) to show them; but now and then, when threatened with a fit of self-depreciation, I come in here, lock the door, stop the keyhole, get them out and read them anew. For three days thereafter I walk on air. For the refrain of all is the same. “You have been a help to me!” And only He who knows the depths, sad and silent, or rich and glad, of the human heart can understand how much I wanted to help you. Verily, I have in this matter had my reward. Again, I say, I am grateful. Had I “helped” you a hundred times as well as I have, I should still be your debtor.
May I read you somewhat copious extracts from a letter I received, the other day, from a wide-awake New England girl? Not only wide-awake, but refined, original and sprightly; a girl whom though I have never seen her face, I know to be a worker in life as well as a thinker. She says some things much better than I could have put them, and others as noteworthy, which I wish to answer,—or, try to answer—since I recognize in her a representative of a class, not very large, perhaps, but certainly one of the most respectable and honored of all those for whom I write the “Common-Sense Series.” I should like to give the letter in full, from the graphic touches with which she sketches herself, “sitting upon the kitchen-table, reading ‘Common Sense in the Household,’” one bright morning, when herself and sisters had taken possession of the kitchen to make preparation for “an old New England tea-party,” at which their only assistant was to be “a small maiden we keep to have the privilege of waiting upon, and doing our own work into the bargain; who, in waiting at table, was never known to pass anything on the right side, and has an invincible objection to learning how”—to the conclusion, over against which she has, like the frank woman she is, set her name and address in full.
But the modesty (or miserliness) aforesaid rises in sudden arms to forbid the reproduction at my hand of certain portions of the epistle, and it would be neither kind nor honorable to set down in prospective print her pictures of home life and dramatis personæ. Steering clear, when possible, of these visible rocks and sunken reefs, I will indulge you and myself with a part of that which has added sensibly to my treasures—not debt—mind you! of gratitude.
“I want to tell you how much your compilation does for those poor mortals whom it rescues from the usual class of cook-books.”
A reef, you see, before we are out of harbor! We will skip two pages to get at one of the well-said things I spoke of just now.
“You speak of ‘company china[3]’ and ‘company manners.’ I detest company anything! This longing for show and display is the curse and failing of Americans. I abhor the phrase ‘Anything will do for us.’ I do not believe that a person can be true clear through and without affectations who can put on her politeness with her company china any more than a real lady can deliberately put on stockings with holes in them. I seriously think that, so far from its being self-sacrifice to put up with the meanest every day, and hospitality to use the best for company, it is a positive damage to one’s sense of moral fitness. I knew a woman once who used to surprise me with the deceptions in which she unconsciously and needlessly indulged. This ceased to be a surprise when I saw her wear a twenty-dollar hat and a pair of unmended hose, and not seem to know that it was not quite the proper thing.”
Orthodox, you perceive, thus far, is our New England correspondent. Honest and outspoken in her hatred of shams and “dodges” of all kinds; quick to see analogies and deduce conclusions. Now comes the pith of the communication:—
“I wish you could set me right on one point that often perplexes me. Is housekeeping worth while? I do not despise the necessary work. On the contrary, I hold that anything well done is worth doing. But with the materials this country affords, can housekeeping be well done? Is it worth while for a woman to neglect the talents she has, and can use to her own and her friends’ advantage, in order to have a perfectly appointed house? to wear herself out chasing around after servants and children that things may be always done well, and at the stated time? I have seen so many women of brains wear out and die in harness, trying to do their self-imposed duty; to see that the large establishments their husbands’ wealth, position and wishes place in their care shall be perfect in detail. And these women could have been so happy and enjoyed the life they threw away, if they had only known how not to keep house. While, on the other hand, with a small income and one servant the matter is so much worse. I should not mind if one could ever say ‘It is a well-finished thing!’ But you only finish one thing to begin over again, and so on, until you die and have nothing to show for your life’s work. It looks hopeless to me, I confess. I wish you would show me the wisdom—or the folly of it all.”
Now, I do not propose to show the folly of anything such as a girl that writes. She is a sincere inquirer after truth. When her letter came I tucked it under my inkstand, and said, “There is a text ready-written, and in clerkly hand, for my next ‘Familiar Talk!’” She is altogether too sensible and has too true a sense of humor to be offended when I tell her, as I shall, that her lament over unfinished work reminded me comically of the story of the poor fellow who cut his throat, because, as he stated in his letter of explanation and farewell—“He was tired of buttoning and unbuttoning!” There is a deal that is specious in the threadbare adage set forth in dolesome rhyme:—
Nothing in this world, or in all time, is finished.[1q] Or, if finished, it is not well with it. We hear this truth reiterated in every stroke of the artisan’s hammer, employed—from the day he enters upon his apprenticeship to that on which the withered hand can no longer, by reason of age, lift the ponderous emblem of his craft—in beating upon what looks to the observer of to-day like that which engaged him yesterday; which to the spectator of twenty to-morrows will seem the same as that which calls out the full strength of the brawny arm this hour. When he dies, who will care to chronicle the circumstance that he made, in the course of a long and busy life, forty thousand horseshoes, or assisted in the manufacture of one thousand engine-boilers? We learn the same lesson from the patient eyes of the teacher while drilling one generation after another in the details that are the tedious forging of the wards of the key of knowledge;—the rudiments of “the three R’s,” which, laugh or groan as we may, must be committed to memories more or less reluctant. They were never, I am sure, “learned by heart.” It is well, so far as they are concerned, that the old phrase has gone out of fashion. We read the like tale of ever-renewed endeavor in the bent brows and whitening locks of brain-toilers, the world over. Nature were a false teacher were this otherwise. Birth, maturity, death; first, the blade then the ear, and, after the full corn in the ear, ripening and destruction for the good of man or beast, or decay in the earth that resurrection may come to the buried seed. Seed-time and harvest, summer and winter,—none of these are “finished things.” God hold our eyes from seeing many things that are!
A life, the major part of which is spent in sweeping, that the dust may re-settle; in washing, that clothes may be again worn and soiled; in cooking, that the food prepared may be consumed; in cleansing plates and dishes, to put back upon the table that they may return, in grease and stickiness, to the hardly-dried pan and towel, does seem to the superficial spectator, ignoble even for the wife of a struggling mechanic or ill-paid clerk. But I insist that the fault is not that Providence has made her a woman, but that Providence has made and kept her poor. Her husband at his bench, or, rounding his shoulders over his ledger, has as valid cause of complaint of never done work. Is there any reason why he should stand more patiently in his lot, waiting to see what God the Lord will do, than she?
But—“Is it worth while for a woman to neglect the talents she has, and can use to her own and her friends’ advantage, in order to have a perfectly-appointed house, etc.?”
Certain visions that stir me to reverential admiration, arise before me, at that query. I see Emily Bronté reading German while she kneads the batch of home-made bread; Charlotte, laying down the pen upon an unfinished page of Shirley, to steal into the kitchen when poor blind Tabby’s back is turned, and bear off the potatoes the superannuated servant insists upon peeling every day, that the “dainty fingers” may extract the black “eyes” the faithful old creature cannot see. I see the Greek grammar fixed open in the rack above Elihu Burritt’s forge; and Sherman, reciting to himself by day over his lapstone and last, the lessons he learned at night after work-hours were over. I recollect that the biographer of the “marvellous boy” has written of him—“Twelve hours he was chained to the office; i.e., from eight in the morning until eight at night, the dinner-hour only excepted; and in the house he was confined to the kitchen; slept with the foot-boy, and was subjected to indignities of a like nature. Yet here it was, during this life of base humiliation, that Thomas Chatterton worked out the splendid creations of his imagination. In less than three years of the life of a poor attorney’s apprentice, fed in the kitchen and lodged with the foot-boy, did he here achieve an immortality such as the whole life of not one in millions is sufficient to create.”
Note here, too, that Chatterton died of a broken heart; was not driven to suicide by hard work.
Please be patient with me while I tell you of an incident that seems to me pretty, and comes in patly just at this point.
I have a friend—my heart bounds with prideful pleasure while I call her such!—who is the most scholarly woman, and also the best housekeeper I know. She is, moreover, one of the sweetest of our native poets—one to whose genius and true womanhood even royalty has done grateful honor; a woman who ‘has used her’ every ‘talent to her own and her friends’ advantage’ in more ways than one. She had a call one day from a neighbor, an eminent professor, learned in dead and spoken tongues. In the passage of the conversation from trifles to weightier matters, it chanced that she differed in opinion from him upon two points. He refused to believe that potatoes could ever be made into a palatable sweet by any ingenuity of the culinary art, and he took exception to her rendering of a certain passage of Virgil. In the course of the afternoon he received from his fair neighbor a folded paper and a covered dish. Opening the former, he read a metrical translation of the disputed passage, so beautiful and striking he could no longer doubt that she had discovered the poet’s meaning more truly than had he. The dish contained a delicious potato custard.
A foolscap page of rhymed thanks went back with the empty pudding-dish. It was mere doggerel, for the pundit was no poet, and meant his note for nothing more than jingle and fun, but his tribute of admiration was sincere. I forget the form of its expression, except that the concluding lines ran somewhat thus:—
Am I harsh and unsympathetic when I say, that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, if a woman has genuine talent, she will find time to improve it even amid the clatter of household machinery? I could multiply instances by the thousand to prove this, did time permit.
But what of the poor rich woman who throws away her life in the vain endeavor to bring servants and children “up to time?” Two things. First, she dies of worry, not of work—a distinction with a difference.
Second, if she possess one-half enough strength of mind and strength of purpose to have made herself mistress of a single art or science, or sufficient tact to sustain her as a successful leader in society, or the degree of administrative ability requisite to enable her to conduct rightly a public enterprise of any note, be it benevolent, literary, or social, she ought to be competent to the government of her household; to administer domestic affairs with such wise energy as should insure order and punctuality without self-immolation.
“If they have run with the footmen and they have wearied them, how shall they contend with horses?”
Let us look at this matter fairly, and without prejudice on either side. I should contradict other of my written and spoken opinions; stultify myself beyond the recovery of your respect or my own, were I to deny that more and wider avenues of occupation should be opened to woman than are now conceded as their right by the popular verdict. But not because the duties of the housewife are overburdensome or degrading. On the contrary, I would have forty trained cooks where there is now one; would make her who looketh diligently to the ways of her household worthy, as in Solomon’s day, of double honor. Of co-operative laundries I have much hope. I would have washing-day become a tradition of the past to be shuddered over by every emancipated family in the land. In “co-operative housekeeping,” in the sense in which it is generally understood, I have scanty faith as a cure for the general untowardness of what my sprightly correspondent styles “the materials this country affords.” Somebody must get the dinners and somebody superintend the getting-up of these. I honestly believe that the best method of reforming American domestic service and American cookery is by making the mistress of every home proficient in the art and a capable instructress of others. I know—no one better—how women who have never cared to beautify their own tables, or to study elegant variety in their bills of fare, who have railed at soups as “slops,” and entrées as “trash,” talk, after the year’s travel in foreign lands their husband’s earnings and their own pinching have gained for them. How they groan over native cookery and the bondage of native mistresses, and tell how cheaply and luxuriously one can live in dear Paris.
“Will the time ever come,” they cry, “when we, too, can sit at ease in our frescoed saloons surrounded by no end of artificial flowers and mirrors, and order our meals from a restaurant?”
To which I, from the depths of my home-loving heart, reply, “Heaven forbid!”
Have you ever thought how large a share the kitchen and dining-room have in forming the distinctive characteristics of the home? It is no marvel that the man who has had his dinners from an eating-house all his life should lack a word to describe that which symbolizes to the Anglo-Saxon all that is dearest and most sacred on earth. I avow, without a tinge of shame, that I soon tire, then sicken of restaurant and hotel dainties. I like the genuine wholesomeness of home-fare.
“Madame,” said a Frenchman whom I once met at an American watering-place, “one of my compatriots could produce one grand repast—one that should not want for the beautiful effects, with the contents of that pail—tub—bucket—of what the peoples here call the svill,” pointing to a mass of dinner débris set just without a side door.
“Monsieur,” I rejoined, with a grimace that matched his, “moi, je n’aime pas le svill!”
He was right, without doubt, in the implication that very much is thrown away as refuse which could be reproduced upon the table to the satisfaction and advantage of host and guest. Perhaps my imagination was more to blame than he for my unlucky recollection of his countrywoman’s recommendation of a mayonnaise to a doubting guest:
“You need not fear to partake, madame. The fish has been preserved from putrefaction by a process of vinegar and charcoal!”
It is a substantial comfort to the Anglo-Saxon stomach for its owner to know what he is eating. Call it prejudice, if you like, but it may have something to do with making one “true clear through,” as my Yankee girl puts it.
“But such poetic repasts!” sighs my travelled acquaintance. “Such heavenly garnishes, and flowers everywhere, and the loveliest side-dishes, and everything so exquisitely served! When I think of them, I abominate our great, vulgar joints and stiff dinner-tables!”
Yet Mrs. Nouveau Riche dawdles all the forenoon over a piece of tasteless embroidery, and gives the afternoon to gossip; while Bridget or Dinah prepares dinner, and serves it in accordance with her peculiar ideas of right and fitness.
“Train American servants?” she says, in a transport of contemptuous incredulity at my suggestion that here is good missionary ground, “I have had enough of that! Just as soon as I teach them the rudiments of decent cookery they carry off their knowledge to somebody else, trade for double wages from my neighbor upon what they have gained from me!”
“But,” I remark, argumentatively, “do you not see, my dear lady, that so surely as ‘ten times one is ten,’ if all your neighbors were, in like manner, to instruct the servants who come to them and desert, so soon as they are taught their trade, the great work of securing wholesome and palatable cookery and tasteful serving would soon be an accomplished fact in your community? and, by the natural spread of the leaven, the race of incompetent cooks and clumsy waiters would before long become extinct? Would it not be worth while for housekeepers to co-operate in the attempt to secure excellence in these departments instead of ‘getting along somehow’ with ‘the materials’—i. e., servants—‘this country affords?’ Why not compel the country—wrong-headed abstraction that it is!—to afford us what we want? Would not the demand, thus enforced and persisted in, create a supply?”
“Not in my day,” she retorts, illogically. “I don’t care to wear myself out for the benefit of posterity.”
I do not gainsay the latter remark. If she had any desire that the days to come should be better than these, she would see to it that her daughters are rendered comparatively independent of the ungrateful caprices of the coming Celt or Teuton, or the ambitious vagaries of “the Nation’s Ward,” by a practical knowledge of housewifery. Perhaps she is deterred from undertaking their instruction by the forecast shadow of their desertion of the maternal abode for homes of their own.
The prettiest thing that has ever been said of the informal “talks” I had with you, my Reader, in former days, was the too-flattering remark of a Syracuse (N. Y.) editor, that they were “like a breath of fresh air blowing across the ‘heated term’ of the cook.”
I quote it, partly that I may thank the author, principally that I may borrow the illustration. The heavenly airs that really temper the torrid heats of the kitchen are loving thoughts of those for whom the house-mother makes the home. There is a wealth of meaning in the homely old saying about “putting one’s name in the pot.” It is one thing, I submit to the advocates of co-operative housekeeping, whether big John’s and little John’s and Mamie’s and Susie’s and Tommy’s meals are prepared according to the prescriptions of a salaried chef, in the mammoth boilers, steamers and bakers of an “establishment” along with the sustenance of fifty other families, or whether the tender mother, in her “order of the day,” remembers that while Papa likes smart, tingling dashes of cayenne, garlic, and curry, the baby-tongues of her brood would cry out at the same; that Mamie has an aversion to a dish much liked by her brothers and sisters; that Susie is delicate, and cannot digest the strong meat that is the gift of flesh and brains to the rest. So Papa gets his spiced ragoût under a tiny cover—hot-and-hot—and the plainer “stew,” which was its base, nourishes the bairns. Mamie is not forced to fast while the rest feast, and by pale Susie’s plate is set the savory “surprise,” which is the visible expression of loving kindness, always wise and unforgetting.
You remember the legend that tells how Elizabeth of Hungary, having been forbidden by her lord to carry food to the poor, was met one day by him outside the castle walls, as she was bearing a lapful of meat and bread to her pensioners. Louis demanding sternly what she carried in her robe, she was obliged to show him the forbidden burden. “Whereupon,” says the chronicler, “the food was miraculously changed, for his eyes, to a lapful of roses, red-and-white, and, his mind disabused of suspicion, he graciously bade her pass on whithersoever she would.”
I have bethought me many times of the legend when I have seen upon very modest tables such proofs of thoughtful recollection of the peculiar tastes and needs of the flock to which the home caterer ministered as made my heart warm and eyes fill, and threw, to my imagination, chaplets lovelier than Elizabeth’s roses around the platter and bowl. This is the true poetry of serving, and the loving appreciation of it is the reward, rich and all-sufficient, of thought, care, and toil.
A few words more before we proceed, in due order, to business. This volume is not an amendment to “General Receipts, No. 1 of the Common-Sense Series.” Still less is it intended as a substitute for it. I have carefully avoided the repetition, in this volume, of a single receipt which appeared in that. This is designed to be the second story in the edifice of domestic economy, the materials of which I have accumulated since the first was completed. As money makes money, and a snow-ball gathers snow, so receipts, new, valuable, and curious, flowed in upon me after “No. 1” was given to the world. Some of the earliest to reach me were so good that I began a fresh compilation by the time that book was fairly off the press.
Let me say here what you may find useful in your own researches and collections. My best ally in the classification and preservation of the materials for this undertaking has been the “The Household Treasury,” published by Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, Philadelphia, and arranged by a lady of that city. It is a pretty volume of blank pages, a certain number of which are devoted to each department of cookery, beginning with soups, and running through the various kinds of sweets, pickles, etc. Each is introduced by a handsome vignette and appropriate motto, with a title at the top of every page. The paper is excellent and distinctly ruled. I wish I could put a copy into the hands of every housekeeper who believes in system of details, and development of her individual capabilities. It has so far simplified and lightened the task of preparing “Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea” for my public, that I cannot withhold this recommendation of it to others.
Yet if “General Receipts” was written con amore, its successor has been, in a still higher degree, a work of love and delight. There were times during the preparation of the trial volume when I could not feel quite sure of my audience. There has not been a moment, since I began that which I now offer for your acceptance, in the which I have not been conscious of your full sympathy; have not tasted, in anticipation, your enjoyment of that which I have taken such pleasure in making ready.
Do not think me sentimental when I ask that the Maltese cross, marking, as in the former work, such receipts as I have tested and proved for myself to be reliable, may be to you, dear friend and sister, like the footprint of a fellow-traveler along the humble but honorable pathway of every-day and practical life, bringing comfort and encouragement, even in the “heated term.”
EGGS. ————————
“Give me half-a-dozen eggs, a few spoonfuls of gravy and as much cream, with a spoonful of butter and a handful of bread crumbs, and I can get up a good breakfast or luncheon,” said a housekeeper to me once, in a modest boastfulness that became her well, in my eyes.
For I had sat often at her elegant, but frugal board, and I knew she spoke the truth.
“Elegant and frugal!” I shall have more hope of American housewive[2q]s when they learn to have faith in this combination of adjectives. Nothing has moved me more strongly to the preparation of this work than the desire to convert them to the belief that the two are not incompatible or inharmonious. Under no head can practice in the endeavor to conform these, the one to the other, be more easily and successfully pursued than under that which begins this section.
Eggs at sixty cents per dozen (and they are seldom higher than this price) are the cheapest food for the breakfast or lunch-table of a private family. They are nutritious, popular, and never (if we except the cases of omelettes, thickened with uncooked flour, and fried eggs, drenched with fat) an unelegant or homely dish.
Eggs Sur le Plat.
6 eggs.
1 table-spoonful of butter or nice dripping.
Pepper and salt to taste.
Melt the butter on a stone-china, or tin plate, or shallow baking-dish. Break the eggs carefully into this; dust lightly with pepper and salt, and put in a moderate oven until the whites are well “set.”
Serve in the dish in which they were baked.
Toasted Eggs.
Cover the bottom of an earthenware or stone-china dish with rounds of delicately toasted bread. Or, what is even better, with rounds of stale bread dipped in beaten egg and fried quickly in butter or nice dripping, to a golden-brown. Break an egg carefully upon each, and set the dish immediately in front of, and on a level with a glowing fire. Toast over this as many slices of fat corned pork or ham as there are eggs in the dish, holding the meat so that it will fry very quickly, and all the dripping fall upon the eggs. When these are well “set,” and a crust begins to form upon the top of each, they are done. Turn the dish several times while toasting the meat, that the eggs may be equally cooked.
Do not send the fried pork to table, but pepper the eggs lightly and remove with the toast, to the dish in which they are to go to the table, with a cake-turner or flat ladle, taking care not to break them.
Baked Eggs. (No. 1.)
6 eggs.
4 tablespoonfuls good gravy—veal, beef or poultry. The latter is particularly nice.
1 handful bread-crumbs.
6 rounds buttered toast or fried bread.
Put the gravy into a shallow baking-dish. Break the eggs into this, pepper and salt them, and strew the bread-crumbs over them. Bake for five minutes in a quick oven. Take up the eggs carefully, one by one, and lay upon the toast which must be arranged on a hot, flat dish. Add a little cream, and, if you like, some very finely-chopped parsley and onion, to the gravy left in the baking-dish, and turn it into a saucepan. Boil up once quickly, and pour over the eggs.
Baked Eggs. (No. 2.)
6 eggs.
1 cup of chicken, game, or veal gravy.
1 teaspoonful mixed parsley and onion, chopped fine.
1 handful very fine bread-crumbs.
Pepper and salt to taste.
Pour enough gravy into a neat baking-dish to cover the bottom well, and mix with the rest the parsley and onion. Set the dish in the oven until the gravy begins to hiss and bubble, when break the eggs into it, so that they do not crowd one another. Strew bread-crumbs thickly over them, pepper and salt, and return to the oven for three minutes longer. Then pour the rest of the gravy, which should be hot, over the whole. More bread-crumbs, as fine as dust, and bake until the eggs are “set.”
Send to table in the baking-dish.
This dish will be found very savory.
Fricasseed Eggs.
6 hard-boiled eggs. When cold, slice with a sharp knife, taking care not to break the yolk.
1 cup good broth, well seasoned with pepper, salt, parsley and a suspicion of onion.
Some rounds stale bread, fried to a light-brown in butter or nice dripping.
Put the broth on the fire in a saucepan with the seasoning and let it come to a boil. Rub the slices of egg with melted butter, then roll them in flour. Lay them gently in the gravy and let this become smoking hot upon the side of the range, but do not let it actually boil, lest the eggs should break. They should lie thus in the gravy for at least five minutes. Have ready, upon a platter, the fried bread. Lay the sliced egg evenly upon this, pour the gravy over all, and serve hot.
Egg Cutlets.
6 hard-boiled eggs.
1 raw egg well-beaten.
1 handful very fine, dry bread-crumbs.
Pepper and salt, and a little parsley minced fine.
3 table-spoonfuls butter or dripping.
1 cup broth, or drawn butter, in which a raw egg has been beaten.
