Motherly talks with young housekeepers: embracing eighty-seven brief articles on topics of home interest, and about five hundred choice receipts for cooking, etc.Beecher, H. W., Mrs.
General
Motherly talks with young housekeepers: embracing eighty-seven brief articles on topics of home interest, and about five hundred choice receipts for cooking, etc.
Beecher, H. W., Mrs.
Cooking; Home economics
Look at it on the score of the host’s convenience. Even with an
abundant income, an ample supply of well-trained servants, every
housekeeper knows that one is liable to have on the table what may be
sufficient for “the family,”--the last of the bread, and only enough
meat. The new bread may be almost ready for the oven, but not for the
table. The butcher may have been delayed, or forgotten your order, and
you have no more supplies on hand. Who does not know the anxiety and
annoyance of “improvising” a dinner for unexpected guests, when the
larder is not well filled? (By the way, dear young housekeeper, keep
watch that you are not often caught with short “rations.”) Then, you
often have engagements that demand your attention immediately after you
have finished your dinner, and failing to meet such engagements may
cause you much trouble, and subject you to very great annoyance. And
for whom must you allow all these arrangements, connected with your own
or your family’s interests, to be deranged? For almost a stranger,--a
mere passing acquaintance, in nowise congenial, who finds your house
more pleasant and convenient, and certainly more _economical_, than a
public hotel. There are mischievous, roguish boys in most families,
who have a very emphatic nomenclature of their own by which they would
designate such liberties; but as we very gravely rebuke all “slang”
phrases in our own family, we dare not venture to use their terms,
however appropriate, and can simply say, that it is the coolest and
most unpardonable kind of unwarrantable familiarity.
There is another trouble connected with _convenient and economical
visiting_, which our friend has not noticed. We trust she has never
experienced it. We have, many times; and in former years, with young
children to care for, it was the hardest to bear of all the vexations
caused by these unwelcome guests. We refer to the disturbance and
dissatisfaction which such unexpected increase of labor causes among
our servants. If these visits are not like those of the angels, “few
and far between,” (and such _hotels_, once found, are not often
left quiet,) your “help” will be very likely to appear before you,
carpet-bag in hand, saying, “Please, mem, I must leave you; I did
not hire out to a _boarding-house_.” Ah, what blessed independence!
They can give notice to leave, but you cannot. You cannot quit your
post, but must stay by, and silently endure. So custom ordains. But
if custom enacts unjust laws, lays upon weary shoulders heavy burdens
most grievous to be borne, is not a revolt justifiable? We think it is,
and, in mercy to patient workers, the sooner it begins and the more
unflinchingly it is sustained the better.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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