American Thumb-prints: Mettle of Our Men and WomenStephens, Kate
History
American Thumb-prints: Mettle of Our Men and Women
Stephens, Kate
National characteristics, American; University of Kansas; Women -- Social conditions
Since making this foregoing suggestion I find this point similarly
touched by the man who dissertated on roast pig. “It is a
desideratum,” says Lamb, “in works that treat de re culinaria, that we
have no rationale of sauces, or theory of mixed flavours: as to show
why cabbage is reprehensible with roast beef, laudable with bacon; why
the haunch of mutton seeks the alliance of currant jelly, the shoulder
civilly declineth it; why loin of veal (a pretty problem), being itself
unctious, seeketh the adventitious lubricity of melted butter--and why
the same part in pork, not more oleaginous, abhorreth from it; why the
French bean sympathizes with the flesh of deer; why salt fish points
to parsnips.... We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery.
We feed ignorantly, and want to be able to give a reason of the relish
that is in us.”
In speaking of modern household books one cannot have done without
adding still one word more about the use of the word “servant” as
these books seem to speak of it. Owing to an attempted Europeanizing
of our ideas, and also to the fact that many of our domestics are of
foreign birth and habits of thought--or of the lowly, velvet-voiced,
unassertive suavity of the most loyal negro--the term has gradually
crept to a quasi acceptance in this country. It is a word not
infrequently obnoxious to Americans--employers--of the old stock, and
trained in the spirit which wrote the Declaration of Independence and
fought its sequent War. “From the time of the Revolution,” says Miss
Salmon in her “Domestic Service,” “until about 1850 the word ‘servant’
does not seem to have been generally applied in either section [north
or south] to white persons of American birth.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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