is taken from this closet except by myself. Each pile has place and
meaning. Each set of towels belongs to an especial apartment. Heavy
bath towels; soft damask for the leastest baby’s use; big, rough
huckaback for the boys’ lake baths, and the orderly heaps of different
styles and textures, every one marked with embroidered letter or
monogram designating chamber or owner—are known familiarly to but one
person in the family.
I modestly commend this rule to each housemother. Let the linen shelves
be the especial charge of some one particular keeper. If not yourself,
one of your daughters. This is rendered almost necessary by the system
of rotation that should regulate the use of sheets, pillow-cases,
counterpanes and towels. Those which come from the wash this week
should be kept by themselves. In laying out clothes for the beds, and
towels for the various rooms, select from the bottom of the pile of
those laundered one, two or four weeks ago, working gradually upward,
week by week, until all have gone through the wash and consequently,
all are evenly worn. Never make up a bed with freshly washed linen, no
matter how well aired it may seem to be.
Sheets, pillow-cases, towels, table-cloths—all folded linens—should be
laid upon the shelves with the open and hemmed ends toward the wall,
the round folds outward. The effect is neater to the eye, and articles
are more easily taken out.
There should be no smell in this airy closet except the indescribable
sweet sense of freshly laundered linen—not strong enough to be called
an odor. Lavender, scented grasses, and dried rose leaves are poetical
in the writing and the hearing thereof, but the sleeper between smooth
cotton or linen sheets sickens of artificial smells. They are neither
“goodly,” nor wholesome.
THE CHILDREN
Our forefathers and foremothers were dressed, in infancy, precisely
like their fathers and mothers. As we see by the portraits treasured
among our curios, they were abridged copies of the adults of a hundred
years ago. Parents were then consistent in feeding their progeny with
food they considered convenient for themselves.
When the royal father ate fermenty for breakfast it is upon record
that a baby prince, suffering from marasmus, was nourished (!) upon
barley, boiled soft with raisins. They sat up to late functions—those
wretchedly dissipated princelings—and the cotter’s children went to bed
at the same time with himself.
He who doubts whether or not our times are better than the former would
be converted to steadfastness of conviction by patient study of the
nursery habits of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
We have children’s outfitters nowadays, who fashion garments utterly
unlike those worn by be-corseted, be-trained, and be-pantalooned
grown people. The cotter’s wife clothes her boys in knickerbockers
and blouses, her girls in loose waists and brief skirts, all designed
expressly—although she does not know it—to allow free and healthful
growth of the immature creatures.
I wish I could add that reform as radical and commonsensible had been
wrought in children’s diet, and children’s hours of rest and sleep.
Mothers who have thought deeply upon these matters and acted upon
meditation, appreciate the hygienic law that children require sleep
to promote growth, as well as to repair the waste of waking—which are
working—hours. If an adult needs seven hours’ slumber, the infant of
days—under seven years of age—requires ten to satisfy wants his
senior has outgrown. Up to the age when the child ceases to add inches,
if not cubits, to his stature yearly, provision must be made for the
steady drain upon vital and nerve forces.
The aforesaid canny mothers call in the little ones from play before
sundown in summer, bathe them, endue them in nightgowns and pajamas,
put dressing-gowns over these, and loose slippers upon the tired feet,
then set them down to a supper of bread and milk, or buttered bread
with a dash of jam or jelly, and good, sweet milk, with once in a while
a plain cooky as an afterthought. Supper over and prayers said, the
darlings are laid in bed by the time the west begins to blush at the
sun’s nearer approach. In winter, the six o’clock supper is served in
the nursery or dining-room, and the bairnies disposed of comfortably to
themselves and to the rest of the household before “grown-uppers” sit
down to the “hearty” supper or dinner dividing the working day from an
evening as busy, and sometimes almost as long.
To borrow from the slang dictionary—the child needs the ten or twelve
hours’ sleep in his business of growing tall and robust, steady of
nerve and sane of mind. Furthermore, he needs food adapted to his
needs. Plenty of cereals; plenty of milk; plenty of ripe fruit in the
season thereof; meat once a day; nourishing broths and a few green
vegetables. No fried things whatsoever; neither tea nor coffee. No
pastry; no mince pie nor plum pudding, nor highly seasoned _entrées_.
Time enough for these delicacies when the inches (and feet) are all in,
the muscles in splendid working order, the gray matter of the brain
“all there,” and ready to do the duties of a man’s brain for fifty
years to come.
One branch of a child’s education, sorely neglected in tens of
thousands of homes, is mastication. As soon as he cuts his teeth teach
him why they were given him. Make him chew everything he takes into
his mouth. Able dieticians are proclaiming boldly that milk should
be chewed, a mouthful at a time, if one would not have it change to
curd about the diaphragm. The child’s meat should be finely minced for
him until he can cut it up for himself, and bolting be reckoned as a
breach of decent behavior. He may forget the truism that “gentlemen
eat slowly” after he joins in the great American rush for fortune.
Obedience to it for a term of years will lay the foundation of sound
digestion. He will have a better chance of long life and no dyspepsia,
than if he had been allowed to gulp down milk by the glassful without
drawing breath, and to gobble steaks and chops in two-inch chunks.
Insist that the child shall behave decorously at the table, as well as
eat properly, from the time he can comprehend an order conveyed in the
simplest language. Do not let him make porridge of his soup by crumbing
bread into it, or churn crackers into mush in his milk, or dip toast
into his cocoa, or work vegetables and gravy into a mound, using the
knife as a trowel. He should be reproved for sipping soup and other
liquids audibly, and for loud inspirations after drinking. Line upon
line and precept upon precept, gently but regularly enforced, will make
a well-bred boy of him. And right habits learned in childhood last a
lifetime.
There is common sense in each of the conventions at which vulgarians
scoff.
DIET AND DIGESTION
The second depends upon the first. The two make up a whole which is
Health.
“Food values” is so emphatically a technical term that I would not
employ it here if it did not express just what I mean, when used
untechnically.
What we eat has many and differing values. It is possible, without
degenerating into dietetic cranks, to appraise them properly and to
apply the knowledge thus gained to the building up of these bodies of
ours and the consequent up-building of the immortal better part they
encase.
Digestions are so many and so diverse, the one from the other, that
it is rank folly to prescribe bills-of-fare warranted to agree with
everybody.
Take, for example, milk. It has won from the ablest writers on
dietetics the title of the One Perfect Food for the human race.
Specialists on dyspepsia prescribe an almost exclusive milk diet for
obstinate cases. In typhoid fevers it is the specific regimen. One
man consumes inordinate quantities, by advice, to increase adipose
tissue. A woman lives upon skim milk, swallowed very slowly, to reduce
her flesh. And so on through multifarious cases—all acting upon the
recommendation of experts.
All the time, as each of us knows, certain stomachs can not digest
milk, or even retain it long enough to test its nutritive properties,
while in others it causes intense heartburn and engenders bile.
Toast and tea are the stock invalid diet, the civilized world over. Yet
Medical Daniels (M. D.’s) are rising up by the score to protest against
ruining stomachs with tannic acid and burdening digestive organs by
forcing what is no better than dry sawdust upon them.
Chocolate is freely prescribed as digestible, and so nutritious that
one could live and not lose flesh, eating nothing else, for weeks
together.
I am acquainted personally with ten people at least, to whom any form
of chocolate is poisonous and abhorrent to every sense.
Natives of the land where the cocoa palm grows virtually subsist upon
the nuts, and many in other lands devour the imported cocoanut with
impunity. The fatty flesh acts upon some stomachs with the virulence of
glass filings, producing terrible cramps and even convulsions.
A noted teacher of culinary lore strenuously recommends our native
nuts, walnuts, filberts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, and so forth, raw, and
cooked in various ways as a substitute for meat. The innovation is
daring, and opposed to the conclusion based upon the observation and
experience of scores of other writers, to the effect that nuts are
hurtful to six people out of ten, the oils, and the cells which contain
the oils, difficult of digestion by any save the strongest stomach.
It is much the fashion with writers upon domestic economy to extol fish
as more economical and more easily digested than flesh, besides being
rich in the phosphates needed to repair the waste of brain force.
Some people who would scout the imputation of invalidism can not eat
even fresh fish without experiencing symptoms not unlike ptomaine
poisoning. I recall the case of one woman who was extremely fond of
oysters, yet dared not touch them for fear of fatal consequences. I
once saw her faint away an hour after she had eaten half a dozen.
Who shall decide when dietists and individual digestions disagree so
radically as is indicated by these and hundreds of other examples? And
by what standard of gastronomic morality shall we gage personal conduct
in the government of appetite? Since man must eat to live, and an
unimpaired digestion is wealth inestimable—what shall we eat?
Certain combinations of materials are manifestly iniquitous. Cooked
fats, fried fats in particular; soggy bread, especially when fresh
from the oven; hot cakes, (“sinkers”), viscid with griddle grease
and swimming in butter; tough doughnuts, reeking with lard; leathery
pie-crust; underdone fish and rare pork and veal; cabbage that has been
cooked in but one water; turnips that have been left in the ground
until they are stringy pith; tough meats of all kinds that resist
mastication; unripe fruits—none of these should ever enter human
mouths, or be imposed upon the long-suffering digestive apparatus.
The housemother who studies wisely the properties of the fare she puts
before her family will adjust food-values to the several needs of those
to whom she ministers. The child of weak intestines must have neither
oatmeal, hominy, nor mush for his breakfast cereal. Rice, rightly
cooked, thickened milk, well boiled, and arrowroot porridge, will heal
irritation, and, as it were, tighten the tension of the machine. He may
not indulge in the apple-sauce and cracked wheat which are better than
laxative drugs to his hale brother.
A bilious girl should not drink milk unqualified by a dash of lime
water, and never take coffee. Her languid, appetiteless mother will
be refreshed in nerve, stimulated in brain, by a demi-tasse of strong
coffee taken without cream after her dinner. It is doubtful whether
or not creamed coffee is a wholesome beverage for any one. It is an
established fact that the addition of cream works a chemical change,
and for the worse, in that which, taken clear, is a valuable digestive
agent.
An important branch of the mother’s profession is to acquaint herself
with the stomachic idiosyncrasies of each member of her household.
Certain compounds and some simples do not agree with one person,
while others thrive upon them. To be cognizant of the peculiarities
of each constitution is to be forewarned of the danger of gastronomic
experiments. Lay down as a positive law that it is wrong—a sin against
the body given by God—to eat what one is sure will disagree with one.
Tabulate for your own convenience a code of “kitchen physic.”
To wit, that Indian meal is laxative; oatmeal, heating; wheat-flour,
binding; that tea is slightly astringent, and coffee, creamed, a gentle
aperient; that sweets and rare beef engender gouty acid in those
disposed to rheumatism and constitutional headache; that candies
and other confectionery ferment into sharp acid in an empty stomach,
and should, therefore, never be eaten unless as a dessert. The same
is true of pickles. Except when eaten in combination with meats and
other oily foods, they are actively unwholesome. The schoolgirl habit
of champing pickled cucumbers and pickled limes, as a starving pauper
might gnaw a crust, is pernicious and disgusting. The skins of raisins
and grapes are indigestible. Figs are a well-known cathartic, a fact
the housemother should avail herself of where a doctor, if summoned,
would prescribe a drug. It is always better to control digestive
irregularities by diet than by medicines, each of which is a poison
which cures one ill by creating another.
Pears dispose one to constipation. Ripe peaches and ripe apples
regulate the bowels in a vast majority of cases; an orange, eaten at
bed time, is a gentler agent than Rochelle salts, and does as good work.
The veteran practitioner who insisted fifty years ago that “cupboard
cures” were safer and surer than those wrought by materia medica was
in advance of his age. The twentieth century is just growing up to his
standard.
I have spoken of qualifying milk with lime water for bilious people.
Other articles of food unwholesome to some constitutions may be
modified with wholesomeness by the use of certain condiments which act
as correctives to hurtful qualities.
For example, nuts may be eaten freely when salted. Thus treated they
are introduced at dinner as digestive agents and appetizers. When
accompanied by fruits, nut-oils are readily assimilated by the gastric
juices. Hence, nuts and raisins go naturally together upon the menu.
Cayenne pepper makes oysters and fish a safe enjoyment for those with
whom they disagree actively if this be not used, and lemon-juice
further counteracts the evil effects of fish-oil and the dreaded
ptomaine.
THE IMPROMPTU LARDER
Some of her friends call it “The Emergency Pantry.” The owner objects
to the term because it conveys an idea of bandages and styptics.
Whereas, the cozy closet devoted to the comfort of possible guests—to
be welcomed and fed, although unexpected—contains substantial food and
appetizing delicacies.
She belongs to the great and growing host of suburbanites dependent
upon peripatetic butcher and baker, and the nearest “general store.”
The keeper of the typical general store never orders so much as one jar
of marmalade or a pound of fancy biscuits until the last is sold, and
has never a twinge of mortification in saying: “Just out! Expect new
lot next week.”
So our hospitable housewife stocks and keeps filled her reserve shelves.
John has a way of bringing home a chance guest to dinner when the
notion strikes him, and Mrs. Notable’s town friends have their way of
happening to be in dear Mary’s neighborhood about lunch time, and,
having come all the way out from town, it is hardly worth while to
go home when there are afternoon calls to be paid in the suburbs.
When one of these calls chances to be upon Mrs. Notable, afternoon
tea must be served. Mrs. Notable’s daughters join theater and concert
parties, going early into the city and coming out late and hungry.
Iced lemonade, ginger ale, cake and sandwiches refresh them and their
attendants in summer, and on winter nights something hot and savory
from “mother’s chafing dish.”
Back of all this stands mother’s Impromptu Larder. One shelf holds the
best brand of canned soups, chicken, tongue and boned ham; another
sardines, anchovies in oil, anchovy paste and _pâté de foie gras_,
soused mackerel, and mackerel with tomato sauce. Baked beans, plain,
and baked beans with tomato sauce, have honorable place among potted
foods; also dainty jars of fancy cheeses, ready for use at a second’s
notice, and bottles of grated Parmesan. Olives, including pimolas,
stand in line with “pin-money pickles” and catsups. There is a brave
array of homemade jellies, marmalades, brandied and pickled peaches; a
case of imported ginger ale, bottles of domestic liqueurs, and glass
cans of apple-sauce and tomatoes, put up in Mrs. Notable’s own kitchen.
A fair proportion of each kind of pickle and preserve is set aside for
the Impromptu Larder and not touched for family consumption.
Fancy biscuits of many sorts have several shelves for their own;
sweet and unsweetened cheese biscuits, sea-foams and snowflakes and
_zwieback_; hard crackers and soft crackers; plain wafers, fruit wafers
and cream wafers; lady-fingers and ginger-snaps—make a goodly show
to the eye and stay the mistress’s surprised soul when the impromptu
luncheon or supper must be more sudden and abundant than usual.
“My strong tower!” she once called this pantry, laughingly.
In winter she finds room for nuts, raisins, apples and oranges;
in autumn, for baskets of grapes. These last named may be called
“transients,” the supply being renewed frequently.
Mrs. Notable is not a rich woman. She is obliged to make each dollar do
the full work of one hundred cents. To this end she keeps an “expense
book,” setting down every article purchased and the cost thereof.
In the account of necessary outlays that for replenishing the stores in
the strong tower is registered under the head of “HOSPITALITY.”
FAMILIAR TALK
BREAKFAST
Common sense would decide that we should begin the day with the glad
alertness with which the sun smiles at us over horizon, or housetops.
He rejoices as a strong man ready—that is, rubbed down, supple and
light—to run a race.
There are still writers of “goody” books and works on hygiene who extol
the morning mood. According to them, the whole human machine is then at
its best. The head is clear, the stomach is vigorous, the spirits are
buoyant, life is a joy.
In reality—the reality of the every-day life of respectable people
who have not tarried long at the wine, or eaten Welsh rarebits over
night—the hard pull of the day is at the beginning.
The head of the average man or woman _ought_ to be clear, the digestive
organs active, limbs and joints in excellent working order. There
should not be what one comedian describes as a “dark-brown, fuzzy
taste” in the mouth, or the feeling that the cranium is stuffed with
cotton wool, and the diaphragm should not loathe all manner of food.
But such things are. Where one man tells you that breakfast is the best
meal of the day, fifty account the ceremony of the earliest meal of
each new day as a hollow mockery. A celebrated judge left upon record
the saying: “No man should be hanged for a murder committed before
breakfast.” Another, almost as famous, openly and officially declared
his unwillingness to condemn a prisoner convicted of manslaughter of
whom his physician had testified that he was a chronic dyspeptic. “A
dyspeptic,” urged the judge, whose own diet had consisted of mush and
milk for ten years, “is never quite sane.”
Not one of his three daily meals is “comfortable” to him whose
alimentary apparatus is out of order. To one in tolerable health the
business of “stoking” the engine for the drive of the forenoon should
not be irksome.
Thus common sense and hygienic general principles. Now for facts.
A brilliant woman summed up the popular judgment on the subject
in an after-luncheon speech before other literary women, in the
assertion that “the human machine needs to be wound up and lubricated
and regulated by bath and breakfast before it is fit to work with
other machines, or, indeed, to go at all. Breakfast, partaken of in
the company of one’s nearest and dearest, is a blunder of modern
civilization. It is an ordeal over which each should mourn apart.”
A young man of education and breeding, who lives in bachelor chambers
with three other “good fellows,” confesses that, while the seven
o’clock dinner hour is always full of cheer and good-will, the four
friends seldom exchange a syllable at the breakfast table beyond a
brief salutation at entering the room, and a curt “good day,” in
separating to their various places of business.
“Thanks to this sensible silence, we have lived together three years
without quarreling,” he wound up the story by saying. “Every man is a
brute until he has had his morning coffee.”
Much of this is talk for talk’s sake, and some of it is Temper. It is
not easy for one to get full command of oneself before the relaxed
nerves are braced by tea or coffee, and the long-empty stomach is
brought up to concert pitch by food. If we have slept too heavily, we
are stupid; if too little, irritable.
I admit that the American’s first meal of the crude day, with the
accompaniment of the rush for car, or boat, or train, that turns
out—or in—dyspeptics by the hundred thousand yearly, is not conducive
to domestic happiness, or the preservation of table etiquette. The
householder, devouring porridge, two cups of scalding coffee, rolls,
steak and fried potatoes, at discretion, with one eye on the clock, and
both feet braced for the jump and run he knows are imminent if he would
catch the train, is in the first or fortieth stage of what a witty
essayist diagnoses as “Americanitis.” His children’s railroad speed
of deglutition and the scurry for school are along the same lines of
discomfort and disease.
Upon the mother’s hands and head rests the responsibility of “getting
them off for the day,”—a battle renewed with each morning until she
“fairly loathes the name and the thought of breakfast.”
The remedy for the domestic disgrace—for it is nothing if not that—is
so simple that I have little hope it will be respected, much less
accepted.
It is, get up fifteen minutes earlier in the morning!
The plain truth is that your system is not “ready for breakfast,” when
you announce that _you_ are. The racer, to whom Scripture compares
the smiling God of Day, never takes the first lap at a rush. He warms
gradually to his work, having at the outset paid as diligent heed to
the “Make ready!” as to the “Go!”
If you rise usually at seven, have the hot water and cleaned boots
brought to the door at a quarter before seven, and get up when you are
called. A brisk bath and a smart rubbing with a crash towel, preceded
by fifty gymnastic strokes, such as arm-swinging and general flexing of
the muscles; twenty-five deep breaths that pump the morning air down
to the bottomest well of your lungs and clear the respiratory passages
of effete matter lodged there during the night—these, with a general
disposition to speak charitably toward, and to speak civilly _to_
companions and competitors in the race, correspond to “make ready.”
Clean, supple, and in good heart, come to the table as to preliminary
refreshment you have time and appetite to enjoy.
At least seven-tenths of the twaddle over the horrors of the family
breakfast are affectation and indolence. Breakfasting in bed is an
imported fashion, and to my notion, is not a clean practice. The tray
brought to an unaired room, a tumbled bed and an unwashed body, looks
well in French engravings, but is a solecism in an age of hygienic
principles, much ventilation and matutinal baths. The inability to be
in charity with one’s fellow mortals, to smile genially and to speak
gently before the world is well started upon its diurnal swing, and the
complainant’s physical system is toned and tuned and oiled by eating,
is degrading in itself. The confession of it is puerile.
[Illustration: BREAKFAST EQUIPAGE]