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LIVING ON A LITTLE
by
CAROLINE FRENCH BENTON
Author of "A Little Cook Book for a Little Girl,"
"Margaret's Saturday Mornings," etc
[Illustration]
Boston * Dana Estes &
Company * Publishers
Copyright, 1908
By Dana Estes & Company
To all those housekeepers, young and old,
who are engaged in the delightful
task of making one dollar do
the work of two
Thanks are due the editor of _Good Housekeeping_ for permission to
reprint the greater part of this book from that magazine.
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
I. At the Very Beginning--Dividing the Income 11
II. Saving for Staples--The Kitchen--Buying--Linen 28
III. Arranging the Meals--Cooking-Dresses--The Table--The Dinner 48
IV. Soups and Meats 68
V. Vegetables, Salads, Desserts 90
VI. Breakfast, Luncheon, Supper--Odds and Ends 110
VII. The Emergency Closet--Winter Preserves--Cake 129
VIII. The Game of Menus 148
IX. Two Dinner Parties 165
X. Reducing Expenses 183
XI. Luncheons for a Little 201
XII. In the Country 221
XIII. Midsummer Housekeeping--The End of the Holiday 245
CHAPTER I
At the Very Beginning--Dividing the Income
Mrs. Thorne laid down the letter she was reading and looked across the
table to her husband, who, as he was industriously engaged in buttering
a muffin, paid scant attention to her for the moment. Presently,
however, as he became aware of something portentous in the air, he
looked up and inquired:
"My dear, you alarm me. What's the matter? Has the bank suspended and
are you considering how best to break the news to me, or has Dolly
eloped with the ice-man?"
His wife did not relax her important expression as she replied, "Dolly's
engaged."
"Engaged!" Mr. Thorne assumed an overwhelming surprise. "You don't say
so! Now who in the world can she possibly be engaged to?"
Mrs. Thorne regarded him with scorn.
"Just as though you did not know perfectly well! Who could she possibly
be engaged to but Fred Mason? I told you a month ago she was certain to
be."
"So you did," was the soothing reply, "but I strive to please, and I
thought from your manner that you hoped to astonish me with the news. So
she's really and truly engaged. Well, I'm glad of it. Fred's a good
fellow in spite of the fact that he has arranged to be a brother-in-law
to me when he knows that I hate brothers-in-law; and Dolly's a great
girl."
"Dolly's a dear, and I only hope he's half good enough for her. But that
is only part of the news in the letter."
Her husband took another muffin and looked interested.
"She wants to come and spend a year with us; if we can take her, father
and mother will go abroad. Her idea is to learn how to keep house.
Listen to what she says:
"'Dearest Mary:--
"'I don't suppose you will be exactly amazed when I tell you that
Fred and I are engaged, for when I wrote you last I realized that
you must know what was in the air. And I don't suppose I need say
that we are the two happiest people in the world and that Fred is
the dearest--'"
"Skip all that," pleaded Mr. Thorne.
"Well, I will; but she goes on to say that the firm Fred is with has
offered him a better salary than he has now, provided he will go to
South America for a year and really learn the business. I'll begin
there:
"'That means that we can get married as soon as he comes back, for
then he will have as much as eighteen hundred a year, certainly.
But even so, with rents so high and food going up daily as the
papers say it is, I am sure we shall find it not too easy to make
both ends meet, especially as I strongly suspect that years in an
expensive apartment hotel do not exactly fit one for living on a
little.
"'All this brings me to the point of my letter, which is: won't
you please let me come and live with you for a year and learn how
to manage? That would be a cool proposition, I am aware, but for
certain mitigating circumstances which I hasten to mention.
"'You said in your last letter that Delia was leaving you to be
married; I suppose by now she is only a memory. You also said that
you dreaded getting a new somebody in her place because you were
confident that Fate had in store for you a high-priced,
high-spirited and extravagant person who would smash your things
and possibly order you out of the kitchen, not to mention putting
whole loaves of bread in the garbage pail daily. Now if that
remorseless being has not yet arrived, won't you consider me in
the light of an applicant for a place as general housework maid in
her stead? I'll do anything and everything. I'll take the place of
a butler, a cook, a house-maid, a waitress, anything you can
mention except a laundress, and you can order me around all you
like and I'll never, never answer back. My aprons shall be clean,
my hair tidy and my kitchen immaculate. I won't ask for a
latch-key, and for only occasional afternoons out in cases of
great emergency, such as matinees or afternoon teas and such
things. And I'll solemnly promise not to have a single follower.
"'It won't cost any more for you to board me than it would a
second edition of Delia, and what you save on wages you can turn
in toward the dishes I break and the ingredients I waste in my
apprenticeship. Please, please let me come! And send a telegram,
for this suspense is wearing me to a thread.
"'Fred sends you his love and says he will be perfectly easy in
his mind about me if I am with you while he is away. And he thinks
it such a good idea for me to learn to cook!
"'Affectionately yours,
"'Dolly.
"'P. S. Isn't it too perfectly dreadful that he has to go away at
all! I'm just in despair.'"
Mrs. Thorne laid down the letter and looked eagerly at her husband. He
was smiling broadly.
"Let her come," he said as he rose from his chair. "Poor, heart-broken
young thing, it would be cruel to refuse her. Let her divert herself
cooking up messes; if we can't eat them we can always invite company,
who can't refuse. I'll send her a telegram as I go down town, and
congratulate and condole with her, and incidentally include the
invitation she wants."
So for a week preparations for the coming of the new maid absorbed her
sister's attention. Delia had been a treasure, and there was little
cleaning up to follow her departure, but on general principles the
pantry shelves were scrubbed and some new saucepans purchased to replace
the burned ones bestowed on the ash-man; the dish-towels were done up
with extra attention to their folds, and the kitchen window had a fresh
curtain.
Dolly arrived presently; rather a pensive Dolly too, for Fred had just
sailed and life for the next year seemed scarcely worth living. But
after she had unpacked and settled herself in her pretty room her
spirits revived, and she was able to look forward to her stay at her
sister's with some degree of resignation, if not enjoyment.
When the work was all out of the way the very next morning she produced
a blank book and pencil.
"Now sit down close by me," she began importantly, "and let us begin
this very minute with my lessons. You see, I am going to do this thing
in a really systematic fashion. You had to learn as you went along, I
remember, and I dare say you made a lot of mistakes and wasted a lot of
time; my plan is to take everything up in order and to write down all
you teach me, and then I shall have it ready to use at a moment's
notice.
"I have got a nice ruled book, and Fred and I talked over some things,
and he put down some columns for me to fill out. See--first comes
Income; then Food; then Rent; then Fuel, and Clothes, and so on. Mary,
you have no idea what a practical mind he has! So you see we can take up
these things and get some sort of view as to what it will cost us to
live; then we shall know where we are. Later on, in the book, I will
write down other things, such as suggestions on How to Save Money, and
things like that, you see."
Her sister regarded her admiringly. "My dear, I didn't give you credit
for so much forethought. How I wish I had had anybody to start me right!
When I think of my struggles and of what a time it took me to learn how
to manage on a small income I wonder I have survived. I did make such
blunders, and then I cried,--I cried bucketfuls of tears, and most of
them at least could have been saved for other and important occasions if
only I had been taught more practically. I do think it is too difficult
for a girl who has always lived on a liberal income, and never had to
think twice about expenses, to suddenly have to get along on a tiny
amount of money all by herself. I certainly will promise to save you
some of my mistakes."
"I really scarcely know where to begin," said Dolly, as she brushed back
her hair, "but perhaps we had better give my book a title; I shall call
it 'Living on a Little.'"
"Then the first question to settle is this: 'What is a little?' and that
has about a hundred possible answers. You can easily see that to a
couple brought up 'in marble halls, with servants and serfs to command,'
five thousand a year might seem a pittance, while other people would
cheerfully begin housekeeping on five hundred dollars and think it
plenty; it all depends on the point of view, of course.
"But this is the way I reason about an income: to live with any real
comfort on whatever is to you a little, you must be a good manager; when
you have arrived at that desirable point, the actual amount of your
income does not matter so much as you would think, because, you see, you
know how to get out of it all that there is there, and it is enough for
your needs.
"Do you remember that friend of mother's, Mrs. Grant, who had that
perfect palace of a house and an income of fifty thousand dollars a
year? Well, I have never forgotten that one day I heard her say that for
the first six years of her married life she and her husband lived on a
salary of six hundred dollars, 'and,' she said in the most complacent
way, 'I could do it again, too, if I had to!' You see, she was a good
manager and she realized it. She had learned just how much to buy at a
time, and where to buy it, and what to pay for it, and how to make a
small amount of money do as much as twice that.
"Now I have been married only six years, but I have learned a lot in
that time, because we have had to move from one place to another and our
income has varied so much; then you know all one winter Dick was ill and
we had nothing to live on but what we had saved, and so we had to be
very, very careful. I really feel that I have mastered the problem of
living on a little."
"Then I'll begin my book with the result of your experience in a
nutshell, or in an epigram, or something, please, if you can put it that
way."
"I don't believe I can do that; but here is the main part of it: Keep
down your table expenses. You see, even if you wear your old clothes and
pay a lower rent than you have been accustomed to pay, and walk instead
of riding, you still must eat, and you must have nourishing, appetizing
food, or you will have doctor's bills which will terrify and impoverish
you. Unless you can set a good table for a small sum of money, you are
lost on a narrow income, and if you know how to accomplish that economic
feat, you are safe. So that is my first great rule for living on a
little: Learn how to have a generous table for a small sum of money.
"You will find you have to study the food question with a will, too, if
you mean to master it in a year so you can work out its problems easily
forward and backward, as you must. You see you begin by learning to
manage with a fixed allowance; then how to buy in places that are not
necessarily the best ones, but the best for you; how to cut down
expenses when you have been extravagant or have to entertain, and how to
lay in supplies when you have a surplus of money on hand; what to get in
quantities and what to get in small amounts; what to do with the
left-overs, and how to eke out one thing with another so as to have
enough when you are short. It is as difficult to be that kind of a
housekeeper as to be a great whist player or a concert artist! It is
easy enough to make a little money go a long way if you are a clever
manager, and fatally easy, too, to drop a little here and there till you
are actually bankrupt, if you don't understand just how to live. So put
your mind on the food question, my dear."
"Then tell me what to put down under Food; that seems to be the next
item after Income; that I put down as $1,800, though of course that is
only a sort of average, because we are not positively certain just what
we shall really have, but it will be about that. Now what will it cost
us a year for our table?"
"We will put down just what Dick and I spend--about a dollar a day; you
can feed a maid or a sister on that, too, so I am sure it is enough."
"It certainly does not seem so," Dolly murmured, but she obediently set
down "Food, $365."
"Then here is my second question: 'Which is the cheaper place to live
in, the city or the country, when you have only a small sum to put into
rent, and such things?'"
Mrs. Thorne considered.
"The fact is I cannot say with any certainty, though we have tried both
places. We found the balance was pretty even. Suppose you live in the
country; there rent would be less than here. We pay forty dollars a
month for this small apartment, and we paid twenty-five for a whole
house there; but to offset that, Dick's commutation ticket used up the
difference. Of course if your home and your husband's business were both
in the one country place, that would be saved and you would be ahead;
but I am supposing the business to be in the city.
"Then in the country we had to burn a great deal of coal in the furnace
and the kitchen range, and that was a decided item, while here we do not
have to consider that at all. In the country we had to hire our walks
cleaned, and here we do not. There I simply had to have a maid, because
I could not do all the work of a whole house, and here I can do without
perfectly well if I like. Really, you see things were about the same in
those ways, so we will waive the question for the present and get at it
later by degrees according to your own needs."
"Then what shall I put down under Rent? Shall I say $40 a month and put
down nothing for fuel? That would be right in both city and country you
see, the rent here more and the fuel less, and there just the reverse."
"Yes, I think that will be fair."
So that item went down: Rent and Fuel, $480.
"Wages come next. Do we settle the servant question here and now,
offhand? I've always understood that was a life-work, and you might even
go to another world no wiser on the subject than when you came into this
one."
"It is a great subject, certainly; anybody who has had an average
experience can testify to that. I scarcely know where to begin to tell
you what to do. But let us see. Suppose you decide to keep a servant, at
least at first. For general housework in the city you will have to pay
$5.00 a week, and you will be lucky if you get any one who will do your
washing for that; probably you will have to pay $5.00 and put the
laundry work out; at least that is what your maid will ask."
"Well, she won't get it, then," said Dolly decidedly. "She may as well
understand first as last that two people who have not much money to
spend cannot pay five dollars a week and still put out the washing. It's
perfectly absurd to expect it." She shook her head indignantly at the
imaginary maid who was supposed to have made the preposterous
suggestion.
"Let us give up having her at all," smiled her sister. "Perhaps, instead
of taking a competent person, you can get a newly landed Finn or German
who will consent to wash and iron, cook and clean, all for $4.00 a week;
you really cannot do much better than that. Then you must teach her
everything, of course, and do all the dainty cooking yourself, beside.
You must also allow a good deal for her food; she will be accustomed to
eat a great deal and of a substantial sort."
"I don't like the idea of an untrained maid, at all," said Dolly
rebelliously.
"It is nice to have somebody, though, especially at first, because no
bride likes to cook in her new clothes, above all at dinner time. Still,
many a clever girl does do all her work and still manages to be always
rested and fresh and prettily dressed; it's a miracle how she does it,
but you must learn the secret if you have to dispense with the maid, my
dear, or risk seeing romance vanish!"
"Well, you know how! I'm convinced Dick thinks you a perfect Queen of
Beauty and a Madame Recamier of cleverness and a female chef and
everything else that is desirable in a wife, all rolled up in one prize
package."
"Well, if he does,--and let us hope he may!--remember how long I've been
in the business of learning how to manage. You must try and get to the
point without wasting the time I have put on my lessons. But to go back
to that perennially interesting question, Concerning Servants; put down
$200 under Service. It really ought to be a little more than that at
$4.00 a week, but as your Finn will certainly never stay a whole year at
a time, you will probably do your own work for some weeks at least, and
so save her wages."
"I have about decided not to have either a Finn or a German or anybody
else. I think I'll do my own work and have a woman in to wash and iron
and clean by the day; that will save something, won't it?"
"Yes; but in town, at least, you will have to pay $1.50 a day, besides
car-fare and meals; that is pretty expensive for you."
"Well, why can't I have a woman just to clean, say a day, or even half a
day at a time, and put out my washing?"
"Laundry work is dreadfully expensive. You must pay, at the very lowest,
fifty cents a dozen, and more for all the fine things, such as white
petticoats and shirt-waists. I don't believe you can afford it. Why not
try this way? Send out all your washing except the finest things and
have it returned rough-dry; that is a rather cheap way of doing, if you
send a whole wash; then have a woman one day to iron and give you
perhaps an hour or more of cleaning, too. There is an economical and a
practical plan, to my thinking, but very likely you may not find it the
best one for you to follow. For that particular one, you must experiment
and study conditions for yourself in the place you live in; what would
do for me here might not suit you at all elsewhere. But anyway, we will
put down $200 for service, for I doubt if it will be less than that
amount, no matter how you manage."
"And the next item I suppose should be Clothes."
"Yes, it ought to be, but here is a difficulty. The first year you are
married the sum will fall way below the average, for your two trousseaux
will supply your needs. Suppose this time you put down $150, just to
have something to go by; it will be at least double that, possibly,
after awhile. Now if you will add up what you have there you can tell
what you will have for the most important item of all, Incidentals,
which we have left for the last."
Dolly added in silence for a moment, and then read:
"Income $1,800
Food $365
Rent and Fuel 480
Service 200
Clothes 150
------
Total $1,195
"Or, say $1,200; that, subtracted from what I hope will be our income,
$1,800, leaves $600 for Incidentals."
"And that is very much like a skeleton in the closet. Incidentals, my
dear Dolly, are the very worst foe of all young housekeepers. I wish I
could impress upon you from the very first to watch that column. It must
cover everything we have not put down, and the name of them is Legion.
Doctor's bills, dentist's bills, church, books, magazines, car-fares,
entertaining, pocket money of every sort, gas bills,--unless you can get
those out of your table allowance, as possibly you can, and perhaps you
can not,--and vacations, and amusements, and two things that ought to
come first of all, and you must never, never forget or treat
lightly--life insurance and the savings bank account."
"Really, Mary, you frighten me!"
"You may well think of these things seriously at least, because they
need that sort of consideration. Six hundred dollars is very little for
all those items, and yet it must cover them. Life insurance is a
necessity; don't ever think you can dispense with that, but keep your
premiums paid up if you have to live on bread and water to do it. And
the savings bank; into that must--must, Dolly--go a small sum every
single month. Nothing makes one feel so at peace with all the world as
to know that there is a small but growing sum laid by for the rainy day
which is absolutely sure to come just when you can least endure it.
Think what it means to have something to fall back on in a great
emergency! It is so fatally easy to forget about that and all these
other things which devour that sum under Incidentals, and then, behold,
the end of July finds one with the next December's money all spent!
Candy and flowers and theatre tickets and other nice but unnecessary
things will behave in just exactly that way; they will simply devour
Incidentals."
"Well, I'll try and keep a stern and watchful eye on the column," said
Dolly, "and when Fred's salary is raised we will go on living at exactly
the same rate as before and spend all the new margin on luxuries; I do
love luxuries!"
"They certainly are pleasant, but if you want a mind at ease, keep your
attention firmly fixed on your account in the savings bank. That in the
long run gives greater satisfaction than candy or violets, though I
don't dispute that they have their place, too. But cheer up!
Housekeeping always gets simpler the farther you get along, and the day
will come when you won't know that you are economizing, it will be so
easy and natural and pleasant."
Dolly sighed heavily as she added Incidentals on to her other items and
made her column under Income come out neatly, $1,800 received, and
$1,800 spent.
"I hope you will hurry up and teach me everything as fast as possible,"
she said. "It does seem rather impossible to me, after all, and I
started off this morning so sure that I could do it offhand! I feel
exactly as though I had a lesson to learn made up of a mixture of
Sanscrit and German philosophy and trigonometry, and all the rest of the
most dreadful things you can think of."