Midsummer Housekeeping--The End of the Holiday
As summer went on the weather turned extremely hot, and the problem of
keeping the little house cool and doing the work easily became a real
study to the sisters. It was such a simple matter to allow the cooking
to stretch itself out over so much of the morning that before they
realized it they were tired out for the rest of the day.
In order to make things easier, they decided to rise a trifle earlier
than usual, throw open all the doors and windows, and let the cool air
in; then they would breakfast on the porch as usual, wash up the dishes,
and set the house in order and close and darken it for the middle of the
day. There would still be time to go down-town and market and do what
cooking was necessary, and yet before noon everything would be out of
the way. By careful planning they could manage the luncheons and dinner
so that they could be ready in advance and the long afternoons could be
devoted to rest and reading. Then between four and five o'clock the
doors and windows were again thrown open. The dinner table was laid on
the porch, just before the six o'clock train was due, and the dinner
itself was put on in only a moment, thanks to the foresight of the
morning.
One of the things upon which Mrs. Thorne laid great emphasis was the
delightfulness of cold meals on hot days. When one rose jaded from a
sultry night she felt it was not the time for codfish cakes or scrambled
eggs. When luncheon was to be set out, things from the refrigerator were
what one wished for, cold and comfortable. Even at dinner, the food on a
blisteringly hot evening was cold; cold and appetizing, and quite as
nourishing as though it had been heated.
They arranged these meals in this way: for breakfast, they cooked
oatmeal or farina or some other cereal in the fireless stove all day,
till it was a jelly; toward night they put this into a mould, cooled it,
and then set it on the ice. In the morning they had first a pretty form
of this cereal surrounded by red raspberries or sliced peaches, with
sugar and cream; this, with toast and hot coffee, was all they wished
for. Sometimes, when they tired of the cereal, they had a chilled salad
of sliced tomatoes on lettuce, with a light French dressing, a curious
breakfast dish, but one they found very refreshing in the heat.
On cooler mornings they had a first course of little melons, followed by
eggs, muffins and coffee, or fried tomatoes in the place of the eggs.
For luncheon they had all sorts of things from the garden. Often the
main dish was a vegetable salad,--string-beans or stuffed tomatoes, or
cucumbers and tomatoes,--with freshly made cottage cheese bought from a
neighbor, and bread and butter and iced tea, coffee or chocolate. Or, if
the day was cool, they had the vegetable hot,--baked corn, or creamed
peas, or tomatoes, baked, filled with crumbs and seasoning,--and for a
second course there was usually fruit. Luncheons such as these were
nothing to get up. The vegetables were prepared directly after
breakfast. If they were to be served as salads, they were cooked, cooled
and set on the ice; if hot, they were made all ready to put in the oven
at the last moment.
Their cold dinners, however, were their pride. They found so many good
things to have that they fairly hesitated which to choose for any
particular night. Sometimes they began with clear soup. This, of course,
was made the day before in the tireless stove, and only strained and put
on ice the next morning for the second evening. On very hot days
sometimes they put it in a small pail, and set this in another and
larger one, with ice between, and put it back in the stove for the
afternoon; then it came out full of splinters of ice, a most
delightfully cool affair. Fruit soups they experimented with, but found
they did not care for, so they clung to this clear bouillon when they
had soup at all.
Usually, however, their dinner began with meat. This was made ready
either the day before it was needed, or else it was prepared early in
the morning. They had veal loaf sometimes, surrounded with sliced
tomatoes and French dressing; or slices of cold mutton with peas in
mayonnaise; or occasionally, as a treat, jellied chicken with the peas.
Sometimes they had bits of lamb, cooked very tender with a knuckle-bone,
and then made exactly like the jellied chicken, the meat turning out set
in an aspic. Often peas were mixed with the lamb in the mould, and then
a little gelatine was added to ensure its setting firmly. Usually, with
the dish, they had dressed lettuce.
After this combination course of meat and salad, came dessert. They
often had an ice or sherbet made from the fruit in the garden, costing
nothing but the small amount of sugar used in making it and the ice used
in freezing. This was alternated with some sort of mousse made in the
fireless stove. Sometimes there was fruit jelly, raspberries, possibly,
set with lemon jelly, moulded in a circle with whipped cream in the
middle. Or there would be a chilled rice pudding; or peaches, cut up,
sugared, and put in a pail with ice around them and set away till they
were half frozen. These things, too, could all be prepared early in the
day.
Usually, even when the weather was hot, the one exception to the
cold-food rule was the coffee, which they liked best hot at night as
well as morning, but when they had had any mousse or ice-cream for
dinner, part of this was sometimes saved, and late in the evening there
came in tall glasses of iced coffee or chocolate with a spoonful of the
cream in the bottom of each; a sort of ice-cream-soda they particularly
fancied.
When the weather grew cooler these cold dinners gave way to hot ones.
Then they had cream soups first, made with any vegetable they happened
to have ready cooked from the night before; a spoonful of spinach, or a
handful of beans, or the outer leaves of lettuce, all were used.
Afterward came meat and vegetables, and then perhaps a berry tart or a
custard or shortcake. However, whatever they had, they were certain to
prepare it to the last possible spoonful in the morning.
The meat course at dinner was too often a problem, for the butcher
continued all summer to exercise them in the virtue of patience. In the
early part of their stay his shop was so far from sanitarily clean that
they were obliged to tell him they could not trade with him unless he
improved his ways. This he good-naturedly consented to do as far as in
him lay. He put his meat in the ice-box instead of leaving it exposed on
the counter; what there was out he covered with a mosquito-netting. But
as his ice-box was small, this meant that the meat could not hang long
enough to make it tender; it was brought in one day by the farmers and
put out for sale the next. All the beef was tough and stringy; the veal
was apt to be far too young, and the chickens far too old. There was
seldom any lamb to be had, and the mutton often had a curious flavor
decidedly suggestive of wool.
To offset these difficulties, however, there were some advantages,
advantages over the city market, even. By watching the calves brought
in, Mary could select the largest one and insist that her meat must be
cut from that. Then she would also secure the liver for almost nothing,
and the sweetbreads and brains for a song; as she predicted in the
winter she would find, the farming community did not appreciate these
things as she did. The liver she roasted after larding it, and it made a
delicious dinner, while the left-over appeared the next night as mock
terrapin and was equally good. The sweetbreads and brains were of course
among their choicest dishes. Sometimes on a Sunday night they had a
salad of them served on lettuce with mayonnaise.
The mutton she bought occasionally, for it was cheap, too, but she
always parboiled it before roasting it, and put considerable seasoning
in the dish to disguise the woolly flavor she perhaps imagined she
noticed. Once cold, however, this disappeared, and the meat was a
welcome change from the other things she could get.
Though the beef was really almost worthless in the condition in which it
appeared in the shop, as it was coarse and tough and not ready to eat,
this Mary also made palatable. She would buy a piece off the round, and
put it through her own meat-chopper to ensure having it clean. This then
appeared as Hamburg steak, surrounded by all sorts of vegetables, small
piles of tiny carrots, little beans and fresh peas setting the brown
meat off by their alternating colors. Or she cut the beef up into finger
lengths and stewed it long and slowly in the tireless stove, putting in
barley and tomatoes and other good things till it came out a delicious,
rich, and nourishing stew. When she could get a beef's tongue, she
always rejoiced, for one night it was braised with vegetables, and
another the slices left over were set in an aspic jelly, and a third the
rest was chopped, creamed and slightly baked, and the whole cost little
as compared to what she would have had to pay in town, where tongue was
an extravagant meat.
When a chicken could be found which promised to be tender, that was
purchased, not at twenty-two cents or thereabouts, as it would have been
in the city, but for fifteen cents. This was usually split up the back
and panned for Sunday dinner. When an old fowl was purchased for jellied
chicken for hot nights, it was first stewed to rags, then imbedded in
its own stock, strained and set with gelatine, and it came out tender in
spite of itself.
As to fish, once in awhile they could get something from the river. A
fish-man drove a wagon past the door, but as he asked city prices for
what he had, and as there was always some doubt as to just what day the
fish had originally appeared on sale, these they never purchased. The
little perch and sunfish small boys brought straight from the water,
strung on twigs and still dripping, they did buy, and found them
excellent for a change, though after the skin and bones were removed
there was little left of the fish.
As to groceries, there had been a good deal of trouble at first. The
coffee and tea at the post-office-shop were too poor to use; the spices
were distinctly stale; crackers were to be had only in broken bits from
the common barrel. Butter was almost as expensive as in town, and not
very good even so; too often it was pale, and the buttermilk exuded in
tiny drops here and there. Eggs were a constant source of anxiety; they
were not only much more expensive than they should have been, according
to Mrs. Thorne's ideas, but they were of all ages, and so mixed at the
store that it was impossible to decide which would do for breakfast and
which would not, until, by breaking several, one after the other, it was
found that all were about equally stale.
To make housekeeping easy, it was necessary to hunt up a farmer's wife
who made really good butter and would promise to deliver it weekly. This
arrangement proved the solution of that difficulty. Sometimes, when the
weather was cool, Dolly would take the cream-whipper, and using the
sweet cream she could occasionally get for a small sum, she would turn
out enough delicious unsalted butter to make the next day's meals a
delight.
The egg problem had to be solved in the same fashion as the butter
problem. A farmer had to be found who would bring in a dozen eggs or
more a week, provided he had them; too often he came supplied with only
half as many as they wished to have, hens being obdurate at the time.
This meant that they had then to be very economical for awhile, till the
wretched fowls returned to business.
Most of the groceries had to be ordered from town, for their coffee and
tea must be good, and a certain number of packages of crackers and fancy
biscuit, with salmon, olives, spices, chocolate, gelatine, raisins and
some tins of olive oil, were ordered with them. The staples, flour,
sugar, rice, salt, corn-meal and such things, they bought from day to
day, as they were needed, at the local grocery.
Ice continued to arrive on schedule time, but as it was almost as dear
as at home, they had to use it carefully. The water was bottled and put
on it in the refrigerator. Tea and coffee were treated in the same way,
so that they could all be used without adding any ice from the block,
except perhaps a small bit in each glass. They kept the one large piece
carefully wrapped up, to prevent its melting, in defiance of the advice
of most household teachers of housekeeping, who had declared that the
truest economy consisted in letting the ice melt as it would, in order
to best preserve the food. They found that the food still kept from day
to day when the ice was wrapped, and just half as much had to be bought
as when it melted at its own sweet will. When they had ice-cream they
made only a small quantity at a time by having a little freezer, and
breaking only as much ice as they really needed. They made more sherbets
than any other frozen dainty, and for these they used fruit from the
garden; raspberry, cherry and currant ices took little from the family
purse. When cream was used, it was made into mousse, and of course
frozen in the tireless stove. This useful article, by the way, was not
brought from town, but constructed out of a wooden candy-pail with
hay-filled pads; it took only a morning of the sisters' time, and no
money at all to make.
One warm afternoon Dolly roused herself from a reverie in the hammock
and suddenly said to Mary, "This place reminds me of the seashore!"
"Because it's so different, I suppose."
"Exactly; you have guessed it. The reason why I was reminded of the
seashore in the first place, however, was the distant view I get from
here of the fish-man's wagon disappearing down the road, and the thought
of the shore suggested the summer we all spent there together before you
were married. I was wondering whether you knew much about housekeeping
then, and how you found living there compared with living here."
"I really did not do any housekeeping then, but four years ago Dick and
I spent three weeks there visiting a friend, and I learned all about the
way prices ran from her; she was a splendid manager, too."
"Well, what do you think of the difference between it and this place?"
"It's as wide as the sea itself. In the first place, unless you go to a
very primitive spot, you will find the fish is nearly all sent to town,
and you must pay city prices for what you can get. That is the first
great disillusionment you meet with. Bluefish and lobsters and all, even
down to flounders, are no longer cheap if the place is near enough a
railroad to permit an easy shipment to town. Clams are usually an
exception, and if you can live largely on these, you will find they cost
little. We used to ring the changes on chowder, minced clams on toast,
and clam broth."
"Do you mean hard-shelled clams or soft?"
"Hard shell; quahaugs, they are called locally. Soft-shell clams you can
dig yourself in many places; and if you go to the seashore, do try and
find out in advance how the supply is, for freshly dug clams that cost
nothing, and can be steamed or made into clam fritters and other good
dishes, are indeed a boon to those who must live on a little by the
sea."
"And how about groceries and such things?"
"They are all high; city prices again. You must really take down some
good dry things yourself to help out, just as we do here. And butter and
eggs are very expensive, for the climate at the seaside never seems to
agree with either cows or hens; they are scarce. So eggs and butter and
milk are all costly."
"And meat, I suppose, is, too."
"Meat is frightfully dear if you go to any place where it is sent down
from the city. If it is not, but is bought at a butcher shop at the
nearest place, it is the same sort of thing we get here--poor,
distinctly poor, my dear."
"On the whole, then, you do not recommend the seashore as an economical
place to spend the summer in."
"Not unless you go to an unfashionable place a long way off. Then if you
get a furnished cottage, and can get clams by digging them and fish by
catching it, or getting it of a fisherman who does not find it in demand
elsewhere, you can really live on a little. Of course you will not have
milk, nor eggs, nor vegetables nor fruit, except in homoeopathic
doses, but then, it will be cool and refreshing as to climate, and the
rest will doubtless do your weary brain a great deal of good."
"Doubtless. But I think, as long as I am poor, I shall take my vacations
among the hills; it must be cheap there."
"Then you must rent your apartment in town or board in the country, for
you can't well rent two places at the same time. You can get a cheap
place in certain farmhouses in the hills not too near the city, but
often they are not so very comfortable, to our ways of thinking."
"But certainly, if I rent the apartment and take a small house, I shall
find food cheap enough."
"Just about as it is here: vegetables and fruit will be cheap, and meat
poor, and ice probably hard to be had. But milk will be inexpensive, and
probably eggs and butter, too."
"The farther off you get the more it costs to live, if one is to go by
prices in the Adirondacks, or similar remote spots. I remember going
there once and staying in a camp, and everything had to be brought by
pack, and I knew it must cost heaps to get such things as vegetables and
eggs and city groceries."
"Yes, such places are costly if you try and live as you do at home. I
believe the only way to manage is to accommodate yourself as far as
possible to the place you are in. That is, here we do not send away for
anything but groceries, and only one box of those in a summer; we eat
the local meat, and if we had no garden we could buy vegetables of our
neighbors. At the seashore you must live on what is there; not meat and
vegetables, but fish you can catch for yourself and clams you can dig.
In the hills, put up with discomforts and look at the sunsets. Don't try
and have city meats, but when the farmer kills an animal, take what you
can get of it and be thankful, and make it up on vegetables and
blueberries and such things."
"But taking this summer as a whole and comparing it with life in the
city and elsewhere, would you not say that the country is about the best
place of all to live in? It seems to me that it is. Living has been very
cheap this summer, hasn't it?"
"Yes, very, but remember that we pay no rent here, and have a garden.
Suppose we hired a cottage and had to have a garden made. That would be
another story, for the first year at least. I suppose after that the
garden part would be less expensive. Then remember that there are two of
us to do the work; you alone without a maid would find it much harder to
get along. And then in summer, it is lovely anywhere in the country, but
think of this place in winter, with snow piled up high and nobody to dig
walks except a husband who has only brief mornings and evenings to do it
in. Then the problem of heating the house! No, I do not believe I should
find it easy to live here in the winter."
"Oh, I did not mean here; I meant in some nice suburb not too far from
town."
"Well, rents are high in any nice place, and you have to have a furnace
man and somebody to shovel snow just as you would have here. Beside,
food is always very expensive in a suburb; you have to pay city prices
for everything."
"Well, is the last word that the city is the only place to live in
economically?"
"Not at all. I hope I could live economically anywhere. But if you do
live in town in an apartment, you get your heating done without trouble
on your part, and you can buy any sort of food at any price you choose
to pay. If you want cheap meat you can get it, and it will be of a good
kind, not the poor stuff we have here. Vegetables and fruit are as cheap
in summer in town as they are anywhere, provided you have to buy them
in the country. You have to spend car-fares there, and here you have a
commutation ticket to get. My mind is exactly where it was before we
came out here for the summer. It is not the place you live in, it is the
way you live that makes things come out even. Don't pay more rent than
you can afford; don't spend more on your table than you can afford;
watch your small outgoings; keep down Incidentals. If you observe these
rules, Dolly, I am sure you will come out right in the end wherever you
are. Live in the country if you choose; there are lots of compensations
for the extra care of the fires and the snow in the winter. Think of the
lovely summer we have had here. That would be worth a long cold winter,
I really believe. Or, live in a suburb and have a good time socially--I
believe you get more gaiety of a nice kind in a small place than in
town. But if you do, be very, very careful, for it is extra hard there
to live on a little. If you live in an apartment in town, economize all
winter, for no one will be the wiser, and spend the money you save in an
outing in summer of some sort. That is my advice after trying living in
all sorts of places."
"Well, I'll consider the subject later on. Meanwhile, tell me truly:
have you saved as much money as you expected to when we came out here?"
"Yes, quite as much. Meat has cost little, and vegetables still less, in
spite of the wages of the weeding boy. Fuel has been low; milk less than
in town, and butter and eggs no more here than there. Fruit has been
almost nothing at all, and though we have done up so much, the sugar has
not been so very expensive, because we bought that by the half-barrel
and saved a good deal so. On the whole, I am more than satisfied, and we
will have a snug little sum left over after we put back what we took out
of Incidentals when we came."
"And next time we will have a cow and make all our butter," said Dolly.
"And we will surely have hens, too," said her sister. "That is, we will
have them if we can; I am not sure we could invest in any for one summer
alone, though I do sigh for plenty of eggs and broilers. I have heard,
however, that hens are expensive and unsatisfactory in the hands of a
novice, so we won't order any in advance."
When Mr. Thorne came home at night he had two letters in his pocket
which proved of amazing interest.
One was Dolly's regular letter from South America, but it conveyed the
joyful news that the end of probation was at hand and it was about time
to begin ordering the trousseau for an early wedding. The other letter
was from Aunt Maria, and said that her sister was ill and she should
not return in the autumn, and the family was to have whatever they could
take home from the garden. These things naturally made the breaking up
of the little home very exciting.
"We will take all the potatoes," said Mary as they looked over the
outdoor supplies still uneaten. "We will have those put in two barrels,
and have one apiece for you and ourselves. The squashes we will take
too, and the onions and turnips and beets, and all those things. The
parsley we will plant in boxes for the kitchen windows, and the apples
we will take every one."
"And may a mere man inquire where on earth you are going to store all
these things in our flat?" asked her husband. "The barrel of potatoes
can stand in the dining-room, to be sure, and the apples in the parlor,
but the squashes and turnips will have to go in your dress-boxes under
the beds."
"No, they won't. We will take everything to town that we can and divide
them up. The janitor can keep our barrels in the basement and bring up
one at a time, and I will put the other things in baskets and pile those
one on top of the other in the corner by the refrigerator, or some other
place."
"Some other place will be better," said Dick.
"Well, of course I realize that they will not keep forever, Dick Thorne,
but I shall take every single thing I can find, for all that, and we
will eat them up as soon as possible. Still, it is maddening not to have
more room to store things in a city apartment. Now in the country we
should have a root cellar, Dolly, and put lots of them out there, and
have them come in all winter when we needed them. And of course potatoes
and apples and squashes we could put down cellar and they would be all
right there. Isn't it too provoking we can't do that way in town? I
declare it is enough to make me determine to stay on here till spring."
"Do," said her husband encouragingly. "Shovelling snow is said to be the
finest exercise in the world, and you can do it at odd moments when you
are not stoking the kitchen fire. I should have to catch the early train
in the morning, and it would be dark when I came back, so I could not
help you, unfortunately, much as I should regret the fact. But I am sure
it would do you all the good in the world."
"Some other winter," laughed his wife. "The next thing is to get Dolly
married, and we must go back to get that over. Father and mother will be
home soon, too, and that is another reason for our leaving. But it has
been a lovely summer; we shall always remember it, I am sure."
"It has been a lovely year all through," said Dolly. "I can't tell you
how grateful I am for your taking me in. And do you--now honestly,
Mary--do you think I know enough to keep house all by myself?"
"I have my doubts, Dolly dear," her brother broke in. "On the whole I
think Fred had better put off coming home for awhile. I shall write him
to-morrow in any case, and I shall tell him so and save you the
trouble."
"There won't be time for a letter to reach him, unfortunately," Dolly
replied with a most becoming blush. "He is coming right away--about next
week, he thinks. So, Mary, you see why I am anxious to know whether I
can keep house or not. Do tell me honestly."
"I can conscientiously give you a diploma, my dear, so don't worry. You
really and truly have learned to live on a little."