American Woman's Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science;: Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian HomesStowe, Harriet Beecher
Religion
American Woman's Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science;: Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Home economics
But the writer has managed the stove herself in all the details of
cooking, and is confident that any housekeeper of common sense, who
is instructed properly, and who also aims to have her kitchen affairs
managed with strict economy, can easily train any servant who is willing
to learn, so as to gain the full advantages offered. And even without
any instructions at all, except the printed directions sent with the
stove, an intelligent woman can, by due attention, though not without,
both manage it, and teach her children and servants to do likewise.
And whenever this stove has failed to give the highest satisfaction,
it has been, either because the housekeeper was not apprized of its
peculiarities, or because she did not give sufficient attention to the
matter, or was not able or willing to superintend and direct its
management.
The consequence has been that, in families where this stove has been
understood and managed aright, it has saved nearly one half of the
fuel that would be used in ordinary stoves, constructed with the usual
disregard of scientific and economic laws. And it is because we know
this particular stove to be convenient, reliable, and economically
efficient beyond ordinary experience, in the important housekeeping
element of kitchen labor, that we devote to it so much space and pains
to describe its advantageous points.
CHIMNEYS.
One of the most serious evils in domestic life is often found in
chimneys that will not properly draw the smoke of a fire or stove.
Although chimneys have been building for a thousand years, the artisans
of the present day seem strangely ignorant of the true method of
constructing them so as always to carry smoke upward instead of
downward. It is rarely the case that a large house is built in which
there is not some flue or chimney which "will not draw." One of the
reasons why the stove described as excelling all others is sometimes
cast aside for a poorer one is, that it requires a properly constructed
chimney, and multitudes of women do not know how to secure it. The
writer in early life shed many a bitter tear, drawn forth by smoke
from an ill-constructed kitchen-chimney, and thousands all over the
land can report the same experience.
The following are some of the causes and the remedies for this evil.
The most common cause of poor chimney draughts is too large an opening
for the fireplace, either too wide or too high in front, or having too
large a throat for the smoke. In a lower story, the fireplace should
not be larger than thirty inches wide, twenty-five inches high, and
fifteen deep. In the story above, it should be eighteen inches square
and fifteen inches deep.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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