"We will have it semi-occasionally," laughed her sister. "Cream, whites
of eggs, and flavoring all cost money; but still we do and will have it
at convenient periods. That is one of the things I keep a bank for; you
will be surprised when you see how much I accumulate there from week to
week."
"I certainly shall be surprised if it turns out there is anything at all
in it," declared the skeptical pupil, who had yet to learn economy.
"Now see my third stove; no well-regulated family can manage without
three. This thing that looks like a big square tin cracker-box is what
is called an Aladdin oven. Perhaps you think I do not need it; but wait
a minute. Suppose you want to have baked beans--"
"Fred simply adores baked beans," Dolly murmured, parenthetically,
hanging on her sister's words.
"You can't afford to bake them in the gas-oven, because it takes a whole
day or night; and of course you can't well bake things in the fireless
stove. At least, you cannot make them crisp and brown there, though you
can cook them in it. So you put this stove on the zinc table, light the
Rochester burner which is attached to a lamp underneath, and then let it
go on and bake for you without any attention. It will bake the beans a
beautiful and artistic brown, and the kerosene in the lamp will cost you
about two cents. Now are not my stoves worth their weight in gold? And
if you are too poor to buy them, one of their greatest attractions is
you can make two of them yourself. Take a wooden pail with a cover, and
make hay-pads for your fireless stove, and get a real tin cracker-box
and put a lamp under it for the Aladdin oven, and you will have good
substitutes for both these."
"Well, they are truly wonderful," said Dolly, with conviction, "and far
be it from me to throw cold water. But suppose I live in a country
village where there is no gas and where the kitchen is unheated. I don't
see but that I shall have to have a real old-fashioned stove, and burn
plain coal or wood in it, to heat the kitchen, nevertheless."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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