or rye, or beans, or peas. In the second place, it is freshly roasted,
whenever made,—roasted with great care and evenness in a little
revolving cylinder which makes part of the furniture of every kitchen,
and which keeps in the aroma of the berry. It is never overdone, so as
to destroy the coffee-flavor, which is in nine cases out of ten the
fault of the coffee we meet with. Then it is ground, and placed in a
coffee-pot with a filter, through which it percolates in clear drops,
the coffee-pot standing on a heated stove to maintain the temperature.
The nose of the coffee-pot is stopped up to prevent the escape of the
aroma during this process. The extract thus obtained is a perfectly
clear, dark fluid, known as _café noir_, or black coffee. It is black
only because of its strength, being in fact almost the very essential
oil of coffee. A table-spoonful of this in boiled milk would make what
is ordinarily called a strong cup of coffee. The boiled milk is prepared
with no less care. It must be fresh and new, not merely warmed or even
brought to the boiling-point, but slowly simmered till it attains a
thick, creamy richness. The coffee mixed with this, and sweetened with
that sparkling beet-root sugar which ornaments a French table, is the
celebrated _café-au-lait_, the name of which has gone round the world.
As we look to France for the best coffee, so we must look to England for
the perfection of tea. The tea-kettle is as much an English institution
as aristocracy or the Prayer-Book; and when one wants to know exactly
how tea should be made, one has only to ask how a fine old English
housekeeper makes it.
The first article of her faith is that the water must not merely be hot,
not merely _have boiled_ a few moments since, but be actually _boiling_
at the moment it touches the tea. Hence, though servants in England are
vastly better trained than with us, this delicate mystery is seldom left
to their hands. Tea-making belongs to the drawing-room, and high-born
ladies preside at “the bubbling and loud-hissing urn,” and see that all
due rites and solemnities are properly performed,—that the cups are hot,
and that the infused tea waits the exact time before the libations
commence. O, ye dear old English tea-tables, resorts of the
kindest-hearted hospitality in the world! we still cherish your memory,
even though you do not say pleasant things of us there. One of these
days you will think better of us. Of late, the introduction of English
breakfast-tea has raised a new sect among the tea-drinkers, reversing
some of the old canons. Breakfast-tea must be boiled! Unlike the
delicate article of olden time, which required only a momentary infusion
to develop its richness, this requires a longer and severer treatment to
bring out its strength,—thus confusing all the established usages, and
throwing the work into the hands of the cook in the kitchen.
The faults of tea, as too commonly found at our hotels and
boarding-houses, are that it is made in every way the reverse of what it
should be. The water is hot, perhaps but not boiling; the tea has a
general flat, stale, smoky taste, devoid of life or spirit; and it is
served, usually, with thin milk, instead of cream. Cream is as essential
to the richness of tea as of coffee. We could wish that the English
fashion might generally prevail, of giving the traveller his own kettle
of boiling water and his own tea-chest, and letting him make tea for
himself. At all events, he would then be sure of one merit in his
tea,—it would be hot, a very simple and obvious virtue, but one very
seldom obtained.
Chocolate is a French and Spanish article, and one seldom served on
American tables. We, in America, however, make an article every way
equal to any which can be imported from Paris, and he who buys Baker’s
best vanilla-chocolate may rest assured that no foreign land can furnish
anything better. A very rich and delicious beverage may be made by
dissolving this in milk slowly boiled down after the French fashion.
* * * * *
I have now gone over all the ground I laid out, as comprising the great
first principles of cookery; and I would here modestly offer the opinion
that a table where all these principles are carefully observed would
need few dainties. The struggle after so-called delicacies comes from
the poorness of common things. Perfect bread and butter would soon drive
cake out of the field; it has done so in many families. Nevertheless, I
have a word to say under the head of _Confectionery_, meaning by this
the whole range of ornamental cookery,—or pastry, ices, jellies,
preserves, etc. The art of making all these very perfectly is far better
understood in America than the art of common cooking.
There are more women who know how to make good cake than good
bread,—more who can furnish you with a good ice-cream than a well-cooked
mutton-chop; a fair charlotte-russe is easier to come by than a perfect
cup of coffee, and you shall find a sparkling jelly to your dessert
where you sighed in vain for so simple a luxury as a well-cooked potato.
Our fair countrywomen might rest upon their laurels in these higher
fields, and turn their great energy and ingenuity to the study of
essentials. To do common things perfectly is far better worth our
endeavor than to do uncommon things respectably. We Americans in many
things as yet have been a little inclined to begin making our shirt at
the ruffle; but, nevertheless, when we set about it, we can make the
shirt as nicely as anybody,—it needs only that we turn our attention to
it, resolved, that, ruffle or no ruffle, the shirt we will have.
I have also a few words to say as to the prevalent ideas in respect to
French cookery. Having heard much of it, with no very distinct idea what
it is, our people have somehow fallen into the notion that its forte
lies in high spicing,—and so, when our cooks put a great abundance of
clove, mace, nutmeg, and cinnamon into their preparations, they fancy
that they are growing up to be French cooks. But the fact is, that the
Americans and English are far more given to spicing than the French.
Spices in our made dishes are abundant, and their taste is strongly
pronounced. In living a year in France I forgot the taste of nutmeg,
clove, and allspice, which had met me in so many dishes in America.
The thing may be briefly defined. The English and Americans deal in
_spices_, the French in _flavors_,—flavors many and subtile, imitating
often in their delicacy those subtile blendings which Nature produces in
high-flavored fruits. The recipes of our cookery-books are most of them
of English origin, coming down from the times of our phlegmatic
ancestors, when the solid, burly, beefy growth of the foggy island
required the heat of fiery condiments, and could digest heavy sweets.
Witness the national recipe for plum-pudding, which may be
rendered,—Take a pound of every indigestible substance you can think of,
boil into a cannon-ball, and serve in flaming brandy. So of the
Christmas mince-pie and many other national dishes. But in America,
owing to our brighter skies and more fervid climate, we have developed
an acute, nervous delicacy of temperament far more akin to that of
France than of England.
Half of the recipes in our cook-books are mere murder to such
constitutions and stomachs as we grow here. We require to ponder these
things, and think how we in our climate and under our circumstances
ought to live, and in doing so, we may, without accusation of foreign
foppery, take some leaves from many foreign books.
* * * * *
But Christopher has prosed long enough. I must now read this to my wife,
and see what she says.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XI.
OUR HOUSE.
OUR gallant Bob Stephens, into whose life-boat our Marianne has been
received, has lately taken the mania of house-building into his head.
Bob is somewhat fastidious, difficult to please, fond of domesticities
and individualities; and such a man never can fit himself into a house
built by another, and accordingly house-building has always been his
favorite mental recreation. During all his courtship as much time was
taken up in planning a future house as if he had money to build one; and
all Marianne’s patterns, and the backs of half their letters, were
scrawled with ground-plans and elevations. But latterly this chronic
disposition has been quickened into an acute form by the falling-in of
some few thousands to their domestic treasury,—left as the sole residuum
of a painstaking old aunt, who took it into her head to make a will in
Bob’s favor, leaving, among other good things, a nice little bit of land
in a rural district half an hour’s railroad-ride from Boston.
So now ground-plans thicken, and my wife is being consulted morning,
noon, and night; and I never come into the room without finding their
heads close together over a paper, and hearing Bob expatiate on his
favorite idea of a library. He appears to have got so far as this, that
the ceiling is to be of carved oak, with ribs running to a boss over
head, and finished mediævally with ultramarine blue and gilding,—and
then away he goes sketching Gothic patterns of book-shelves which
require only experienced carvers, and the wherewithal to pay them, to be
the divinest things in the world.
Marianne is exercised about china-closets and pantries, and about a
bedroom on the ground-floor,—for, like all other women of our days, she
expects not to have strength enough to run up-stairs oftener than once
or twice a week; and my wife, who is a native genius in this line, and
has planned in her time dozens of houses for acquaintances, wherein they
are at this moment living happily, goes over every day with her pencil
and ruler the work of rearranging the plans, according as the ideas of
the young couple veer and vary.
One day Bob is importuned to give two feet off from his library for a
closet in the bedroom,—but resists like a Trojan. The next morning,
being mollified by private domestic supplications, Bob yields, and my
wife rubs out the lines of yesterday, two feet come off the library, and
a closet is constructed. But now the parlor proves too narrow,—the
parlor-wall must be moved two feet into the hall. Bob declares this will
spoil the symmetry of the latter; and if there is anything he wants, it
is a wide, generous, ample hall to step into when you open the
front-door.
“Well, then,” says Marianne, “let’s put two feet more into the width of
the house.”
“Can’t on account of the expense, you see,” says Bob. “You see every
additional foot of outside wall necessitates so many more bricks, so
much more flooring, so much more roofing, etc.”
And my wife, with thoughtful brow, looks over the plans, and considers
how two feet more are to be got into the parlor without moving any of
the walls.
“I say,” says Bob, bending over her shoulder, “here, take your two feet
in the parlor, and put two more feet on to the other side of the
hall-stairs”; and he dashes heavily with his pencil.
“O, Bob!” exclaims Marianne, “there are the kitchen-pantries! you ruin
them,—and no place for the cellar-stairs!”
“Hang the pantries and cellar-stairs!” says Bob. “Mother must find a
place for them somewhere else. I say the house must be roomy and
cheerful, and pantries and those things may take care of themselves;
they can be put _somewhere_ well enough. No fear but you will find a
place for them somewhere. What do you women always want such a great
enormous kitchen for?”
“It is not any larger than is necessary,” said my wife, thoughtfully;
“nothing is gained by taking off from it.”
“What if you should put it all down into a basement,” suggests Bob, “and
so get it all out of sight together?”
“Never if it can be helped,” said my wife. “Basement-kitchens are
necessary evils, only to be tolerated in cities where land is too dear
to afford any other.”
So goes the discussion till the trio agree to sleep over it. The next
morning an inspiration visits my wife’s pillow. She is up and seizes
plans and paper, and before six o’clock has enlarged the parlor very
cleverly, by throwing out a bow-window. So waxes and wanes the
prospective house, innocently battered down and rebuilt with
India-rubber and black-lead. Doors are cut out to-night, and walled up
to-morrow; windows knocked out here and put in there, as some observer
suggests possibilities of too much or too little draught. Now all seems
finished, when, lo, a discovery! There is no fireplace nor stove-flue in
my lady’s bedroom, and can be none without moving the bathing-room.
Pencil and India-rubber are busy again, and for a while the whole house
seems to threaten to fall to pieces with the confusion of the moving;
the bath-room wanders like a ghost, now invading a closet, now
threatening the tranquillity of the parlor, till at last it is laid by
some unheard-of calculations of my wife’s, and sinks to rest in a place
so much better that every body wonders it never was thought of before.
“Papa,” said Jenny, “it appears to me people don’t exactly know what
they want when they build; why don’t you write a paper on
house-building?”
“I have thought of it,” said I, with the air of a man called to settle
some great reform. “It must be entirely because Christopher has not
written that our young people and mamma are tangling themselves daily in
webs which are untangled the next day.”
“You see,” said Jenny, “they have only just so much money, and they want
everything they can think of under the sun. There’s Bob been studying
architectural antiquities, and nobody knows what, and sketching all
sorts of curly-whorlies; and Marianne has her notions about a parlor and
boudoir and china-closets and bedroom-closets; and Bob wants a baronial
hall; and mamma stands out for linen-closets and bathing-rooms and all
that; and so among them all it will just end in getting them head over
ears in debt.”
The thing struck me as not improbable.
“I don’t know, Jenny, whether my writing an article is going to prevent
all this; but as my time in the ‘Atlantic’ is coming round, I may as
well write on what I am obliged to think of, and so I will give a paper
on the subject to enliven our next evening’s session.”
So that evening, when Bob and Marianne had dropped in as usual, and
while the customary work of drawing and rubbing-out was going on at Mrs.
Crowfield’s sofa, I produced my paper and read as follows:—
OUR HOUSE.
There is a place called “Our House,” which everybody knows of. The
sailor talks of it in his dreams at sea. The wounded soldier, turning in
his uneasy hospital-bed, brightens at the word; it is like the dropping
of cool water in the desert, like the touch of cool fingers on a burning
brow. “Our house,” he says feebly, and the light comes back into his dim
eyes,—for all homely charities, all fond thoughts, all purities, all
that man loves on earth or hopes for in heaven, rise with the word.
“Our house” may be in any style of architecture, low or high. It may be
the brown old farm-house, with its tall well-sweep; or the one-story
gambrel-roofed cottage; or the large, square, white house, with green
blinds, under the wind-swung elms of a century; or it may be the
log-cabin of the wilderness, with its one room,—still there is a spell
in the memory of it beyond all conjurations. Its stone and brick and
mortar are like no other; its very clapboards and shingles are dear to
us, powerful to bring back the memories of early days, and all that is
sacred in home-love.
* * * * *
“Papa is getting quite sentimental,” whispered Jenny, loud enough for me
to hear. I shook my head at her impressively, and went on undaunted.
* * * * *
There is no one fact of our human existence that has a stronger
influence upon us than the house we dwell in,—especially that in which
our earlier and more impressible years are spent. The building and
arrangement of a house influence the health, the comfort, the morals,
the religion. There have been houses built so devoid of all
consideration for the occupants, so rambling and hap-hazard in the
disposal of rooms, so sunless and cheerless and wholly without snugness
or privacy, as to make it seem impossible to live a joyous, generous,
rational, religious family-life in them.
There are, we shame to say, in our cities _things_ called houses, built
and rented by people who walk erect and have the general air and manner
of civilized and Christianized men, which are so inhuman in their
building that they can only be called snares and traps for souls,—places
where children cannot well escape growing up filthy and impure,—places
where to form a home is impossible, and to live a decent, Christian life
would require miraculous strength.
A celebrated British philanthropist, who had devoted much study to the
dwellings of the poor, gave it as his opinion that temperance-societies
were a hopeless undertaking in London, unless these dwellings underwent
a transformation. They were so squalid, so dark, so comfortless, so
constantly pressing upon the senses foulness, pain, and inconvenience,
that it was only by being drugged with gin and opium that their
miserable inhabitants could find heart to drag on life from day to day.
He had himself tried the experiment of reforming a drunkard by taking
him from one of these loathsome dens, and enabling him to rent a
tenement in a block of model lodging-houses which had been built under
his supervision. The young man had been a designer of figures for
prints; he was of a delicate frame, and a nervous, susceptible
temperament. Shut in one miserable room with his wife and little
children, without the possibility of pure air, with only filthy, fetid
water to drink, with the noise of other miserable families resounding
through the thin partitions, what possibility was there of doing
anything except by the help of stimulants, which for a brief hour lifted
him above the perception of these miseries? Changed at once to a neat
flat, where, for the same rent as his former den, he had three good
rooms, with water for drinking, house-service, and bathing freely
supplied, and the blessed sunshine and air coming in through windows
well arranged for ventilation, he became in a few weeks a new man. In
the charms of the little spot which he could call home, its quiet, its
order, his former talent came back to him, and he found strength, in
pure air and pure water and those purer thoughts of which they are the
emblems, to abandon burning and stupefying stimulants.
The influence of dwelling-houses for good or for evil—their influence on
the brain, the nerves, and, through these, on the heart and life—is one
of those things that cannot be enough pondered by those who build houses
to sell or rent.
Something more generous ought to inspire a man than merely the
percentage which he can get for his money. He who would build houses
should think a little on the subject. He should reflect what houses are
for,—what they may be made to do for human beings. The great majority of
houses in cities are not built by the indwellers themselves,—they are
built _for_ them by those who invest their money in this way, with
little other thought than the percentage which the investment will
return.
For persons of ample fortune there are, indeed, palatial residences,
with all that wealth can do to render life delightful. But in that class
of houses which must be the lot of the large majority, those which must
be chosen by young men in the beginning of life, when means are
comparatively restricted, there is yet wide room for thought and the
judicious application of money.
In looking over houses to be rented by persons of moderate means, one
cannot help longing to build,—one sees so many ways in which the same
sum which built an inconvenient and unpleasant house might have been
made to build a delightful one.
* * * * *
“That’s so!” said Bob, with emphasis. “Don’t you remember, Marianne, how
many dismal, commonplace, shabby houses we trailed through?”
“Yes,” said Marianne. “You remember those houses with such little
squeezed rooms and that flourishing staircase, with the colored-glass
china-closet window, and no butler’s sink?”
“Yes,” said Bob; “and those astonishing, abominable stone abortions that
adorned the door-steps. People do lay out a deal of money to make houses
look ugly, it must be confessed.”
“One would willingly,” said Marianne, “dispense with frightful stone
ornaments in front, and with heavy mouldings inside, which are of no
possible use or beauty, and with showy plaster cornices and
centre-pieces in the parlor-ceilings, and even with marble mantels, for
the luxury of hot and cold water in each chamber, and a couple of
comfortable bath-rooms. Then, the disposition of windows and doors is so
wholly without regard to convenience! How often we find rooms, meant for
bedrooms, where really there is no good place for either bed or
dressing-table!”
Here my wife looked up, having just finished redrawing the plans to the
latest alteration.
“One of the greatest reforms that could be, in these reforming days,”
she observed, “would be to have women architects. The mischief with
houses built to rent is that they are all mere male contrivances. No
woman would ever plan chambers where there is no earthly place to set a
bed except against a window or door, or waste the room in entries that
might be made into closets. I don’t see, for my part, _apropos_ to the
modern movement for opening new professions to the female sex, why there
should not be well-educated female architects. The planning and
arrangement of houses, and the laying-out of grounds, are a fair subject
of womanly knowledge and taste. It is the teaching of Nature. What would
anybody think of a bluebird’s nest that had been built entirely by Mr.
Blue, without the help of his wife?”
“My dear,” said I, “you must positively send a paper on this subject to
the next Woman’s-Rights Convention.”
“I am of Sojourner Truth’s opinion,” said my wife,—“that the best way to
prove the propriety of one’s doing anything is to go and _do it_. A
woman who should have energy to go through the preparatory studies and
set to work in this field would, I am sure, soon find employment.”
“If she did as well as you would do, my dear,” said I. “There are plenty
of young women in our Boston high-schools who are going through higher
fields of mathematics than are required by the architect, and the
schools for design show the flexibility and fertility of the female
pencil. The thing appears to me altogether more feasible than many other
openings which have been suggested to woman.”
“Well,” said Jenny, “isn’t papa ever to go on with his paper?”
* * * * *
I continued:—
What ought “our house” to be? Could any other question be asked
admitting in its details of such varied answers,—answers various as the
means, the character, and situation of different individuals? But there
are great wants pertaining to every human being, into which all lesser
ones run. There are things in a house that every one, high or low, rich
or poor, ought, according to his means, to seek. I think I shall class
them according to the elemental division of the old philosophers,—Fire,
Air, Earth, and Water. These form the groundwork of this _need-be_,—the
_sine-qua-nons_ of a house.
* * * * *
“Fire, air, earth, and water! I don’t understand,” said Jenny.
“Wait a little till you do, then,” said I. “I will try to make my
meaning plain.”
* * * * *
The first object of a house is shelter from the elements. This object is
effected by a tent or wigwam which keeps off rain and wind. The first
disadvantage of this shelter is, that the vital air which you take into
your lungs, and on the purity of which depends the purity of blood and
brain and nerve, is vitiated. In the wigwam or tent you are constantly
taking in poison, more or less active, with every inspiration. Napoleon
had his army sleep without tents. He stated, that from experience, he
found it more healthy, and wonderful have been the instances of delicate
persons gaining constantly in vigor from being obliged, in the midst of
hardships, to sleep constantly in the open air. Now the first problem in
house-building is to combine the advantage of shelter with the fresh
elasticity of out-door air. I am not going to give here a treatise on
ventilation, but merely to say, in general terms, that the first object
of a house-builder or contriver should be to make a healthy house; and
the first requisite of a healthy house is a pure, sweet, elastic air.
I am in favor, therefore, of those plans of house-building which have
wide central spaces, whether halls or courts, into which all the rooms
open, and which necessarily preserve a body of fresh air for the use of
them all. In hot climates this is the object of the central court which
cuts into the body of the house, with its fountain and flowers, and its
galleries, into which the various apartments open. When people are
restricted for space, and cannot afford to give up wide central portions
of the house for the mere purposes of passage, this central hall can be
made a pleasant sitting-room. With tables, chairs, bookcases, and sofas
comfortably disposed, this ample central room above and below is, in
many respects, the most agreeable lounging-room of the house; while the
parlors below and the chambers above, opening upon it, form agreeable
withdrawing-rooms for purposes of greater privacy.