Read Ebook: The Art of Entertaining by Sherwood M E W Mary Elizabeth Wilson

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Ebook has 607 lines and 57795 words, and 13 pages

what the third man does, except to black boots, I have never been able to discover. I think he serves as valet to the gentlemen and the growing boys, runs with notes, and is "Jeames Yellowplush" generally. I was once taken over her vast establishment by an English countess, who was most kind in explaining to me her domestic arrangements; but I did not think she knew herself what that third man did. I noticed that there were always several footmen waiting at dinner.

"They also serve who only stand and wait."

One thing I do remember in the housekeeper's room. There sat a very grand dame carving, and giving the servants their dinner. She rose and stood while my lady spoke to her, but at a wave of the hand from the countess all the others remained seated. The butler was at the other end of the table looking very sheepish. The dinner was a boiled leg of mutton, and some sort of meat pie, and a huge Yorkshire pudding,--no vegetables but potatoes; pitchers of ale, and bread and cheese, finished this meal. The third footman, I remember, brought in afternoon tea; perhaps he filled that place which is described in one of Miss Mulock's novels:--

"Dolly was hired as an off maid, to do everything which the other servants would not do."

The etiquette of the stable servants was also explained to me in England. The coachman is as powerful a person in the equine realm as is the butler in the house. The head groom and his assistants always raise their finger to their hats when spoken to by master, or mistress, or the younger members of the family, or visitors, and in the case of royalty all stand with hats off, the coachman on the box slightly raising his, until the Prince of Wales, or his peers, are seated.

In some houses I was told that the upper servants had their meals prepared by a kitchen maid, and that they had a different table from the scullery maids.

That is a glorious thing for the flag, for the United States, but there is a missing link in the golden chain of household order. It is a difficult task to produce here the harmony of an English household. Our service at home is like our diplomatic service; we have no trained diplomats, no gradation of service, but in the case of our foreign ministers, they have risen to be the best in the world. We have plenty of talent at top; it is the root of the tree which puzzles us.

We may make up our minds that no longer will the American girl go out to service. It is a thousand pities that she will not. It is not ignoble to do household work well. The ch?telaines of the Middle Ages cooked and served the meals with their own fair hands. Training-schools are greatly needed; we should follow the nurses' training-school.

Our dinner-tables in America are generally long and narrow, fitted to the shape of the dining-room. Once I saw in England, in a great house, a table so narrow that one could almost have shaken hands with one's opposite neighbour. The ornaments were high, slender vases filled with grasses and orchids, far above our heads. One or two matchless ornaments of Dresden, the gifts of monarchs, alone ornamented the table. This was a very sociable dinner-table and rather pleasing. Then came the round table, so vast that the footmen must have mounted up on it to place the centre piece, like poor distraught Lady Caroline Lamb, whose husband came in to find her walking up and down the table, telling the butler to "produce pyramidal effects." There is also the fine broad parallelogram, suited to a baronial hall; and this is copied in our best country houses. As no conversation of a confidential character is ever allowed at an English table until all the servants have left the room, so it is not considered good-breeding to allow a servant to talk to the mistress or the young ladies of what she hears in the servants' hall. The gossip of couriers and maids at a foreign watering-place reaches American ears, and unluckily gets into American newspapers sometimes. It is a wise precaution on the part of the English never to listen to this. As we have conquered everything else in America, perhaps we shall conquer the servant question, to the advantage of both parties. We should try to keep our servants a longer time with us.

There are some houses where the law of change goes on forever, and there are some where the domestic machine runs without friction. The hostess may be a person with a talent for governing, and may be inspired with a sixth sense. If she is she can make her composite family respectful, helpful, and happy; but it must be confessed that it is as yet a vexed question, one which gives us trouble and will give us more. Those people are the happiest who can get on with three or four servants, and very many families live well and elegantly with this number, while more live well with two.

To mark the difference in feeling as between those who employ and those who serve, one little anecdote may apply. At a watering-place in Europe I once met an English family, of the middle class. The lady said to her maid, "Bromley, your master wishes you to be in at nine o'clock this evening."

Bromley said, "Yes, my lady."

An American lady stood near with her maid, who flushed deeply.

"What is the matter, Jane?" asked her lady.

"I never could stand having any one called my master," said the American.

This intimate nerve of self-love, this egotism, this false idea of independence affects women more than men, and in a country where both can go from the humblest position to the highest, it produces a "glistering grief." The difficulty of getting good servants prevents many families from keeping house. It brings on us the foreign reproach that we live in hotels and boarding-houses. It is at this moment the great unsolved American Question. What shall we do with it?

SOMETHING ABOUT COOKS.

"Last night I weighed, quite wearied out, The question that perplexes still; And that sad spirit we call doubt Made the good naught beside the ill.

"This morning, when with rested mind, I try again the selfsame theme, The whole is altered, and I find The balance turned, the good supreme."

What amateur cook has not had these moments of depression and exaltation as she has weighed the flour and sugar, stoned the raisins, and mixed the cake, or, even worse in her young novitiate, has attempted to make a soup and has begun with the formula which so often turns out badly:--

"Take a shin of beef and put it in a pot with three dozen carrots, a dozen onions, two dozen pieces of celery, twelve turnips, a fowl, and two partridges. It must simmer six hours, etc." Yes, and last week and the week before her husband said, "it was miserable." How willingly would she allow the claim of that glorious old coxcomb, Louis Eustache Ude, who had been cook to two French kings and never forgave the world for not permitting him to call himself an artist.

"Scrapers of catgut," he says, "call themselves artists, and fellows who jump like a kangaroo claim the title; yet the man who has under his sole direction the great feasts given by the nobility of England to the allied sovereigns, and who superintended the grand banquet at Crockford's on the occasion of the coronation of Victoria, was denied the title prodigally showered on singers, dancers, and comedians, whose only quality, not requiring the microscope to discern, is vanity."

"I have known balls where the next day, in spite of the pillage of a pack of footmen, which was enormous, I have seen thirty hams, one hundred and fifty to two hundred carved fowls, and forty or fifty tongues given away. Jellies melt on all the tables; pastries, patties, aspics, and lobster salads are heaped up in the kitchen and strewed about in the passages; and all this an utter waste, for not even the footmen would eat this; they do not consider it a legitimate repast to dine off the remnants of a last night's feast. Footmen are like cats; they only like what they steal, but are indifferent to what is given them."

Times have changed. Cooks now prefer living on their masters to dying for them.

"Bertrand, you are plundering me," stormed the prince. "This article shall not pass." The blood of the cook was up. "My lord," said he, sternly, "you do not understand the resources of our art. Give the word and I will so melt down these hams that they will go into a little glass bottle no bigger than my thumb." The prince was abashed by the genius of the spit, and the fifty hams were purchased.

The Duke of Wellington liked a good dinner, and employed an artist named Felix. Lord Seaforth, finding Felix too expensive, allowed him to go to the Iron Duke, but Felix came back with tears in his eyes.

"What is the matter," said Lord Seaforth; "has the Duke turned rusty?"

"No, no, my lord! but I serve him a dinner which would make Francatelli or Ude die of envy, and he say nothing. I go to the country and leave him to try a dinner cooked by a stupid, dirty cook-maid, and he say nothing; that is what hurt my feelings."

Felix lived on approbation; he would have been capable of dying like Vatel.

So Moli?re, true to the spirit of his time, paid this compliment to the Marquis.

Imagine the descent from these poets to the good plain cook,--you can depend upon the truth of this description,--with a six weeks' reference from her last place. Imagine the greasy soups, the mutton cutlets hard as a board, the few hard green peas, the soggy potatoes. How awful the recollections of one who came in "a week on trial!" Whose trial? Those who had to eat her food. It is bad to be without a cook, but ten times worse to have a bad one.

In France the Little Sisters of the Poor go about with clean dishes and clean baskets, to collect these morsels which fall from the rich man's table. It is a worthy custom.

Get half a dozen peaches, peel them carefully and boil them, with their kernels, a short time in a fine syrup, squeeze six lemons into it, and pass it through a bag. Add some clarified isinglass and put some of it into a mould in ice; then fill up with the jelly and peaches alternately and freeze it.

Fruit cheeses are very pleasant, rich conserves for dessert. They can be made with apricots, strawberries, pineapple, peaches, or gooseberries. The fruit is powdered with sugar and rubbed through a colander; then melted isinglass and thick cream is added, whipped over ice and put into the mould.

The French prepare the most ornamental ices, both water and cream, but they do not equal in richness or flavour those made in New York.

There seems to be nothing left to eat after all this perilous sweet stuff but a devilled biscuit at ten o'clock.

"'A well devilled biscuit!' said Jenkins, enchanted, 'I'll have after dinner,--the thought is divine!' The biscuit was brought and he now only wanted, To fully enjoy it, a glass of good wine. He flew to the pepper and sat down before it, And at peppering the well-buttered biscuit he went; Then some cheese in a paste mixed with mustard spread o'er it, And down to the kitchen the devil was sent.

"'Oh, how!' said the cook, 'can I thus think of grilling? When common the pepper, the whole will be flat; But here's the cayenne, if my master be willing I'll make if he pleases a devil with that.' So the footman ran up with the cook's observation To Jenkins, who gave him a terrible look; 'Oh, go to the devil!'--forgetting his station-- Was the answer that Jenkins sent down to the cook."

THE FURNISHING OF A COUNTRY HOUSE.

The hostess should, in furnishing her house, provide a number of bath-tubs. The tin ones, shaped like a hat, are very convenient, as are also india-rubber portable baths. If there is not a bath-room belonging to every room, this will enable an Englishman to take his tub as cold as he pleases, or allow the American to take the warmer sponge bath which Americans generally prefer.

The house should also be well supplied with lunch-baskets for picnics and for the railway journey. These can be had for a small sum, and are well fitted up with drinking-cups, knives, forks, spoons, corkscrews, sandwich-boxes, etc. These and a great supply of unbreakable cups for the lawn-tennis ground are very useful.

There should be also any number of painted tin pails, and small pitchers to carry hot water; several services of plain tea things, and Japanese waiters, on which to send tea to the bedrooms; and in every room should be placed a table, thoroughly furnished with writing-materials, and with all the conveniences for writing and sealing a letter.

Shakspeare's bequest to his wife of his second-best bed has passed as a bit of post-mortem ungallantry, which has dimmed his fame as a model husband; but to-day that second-best bed would be a very handsome bequest, not only because it was Shakspeare's, but because it was doubtless a "tester," for which there is a craze. All the old four-posters, which our grandmothers sent to the garret, are on their way back again to the model bedroom. With all our rage for ventilation and fresh air, we no longer fear the bed curtains which a few years ago were supposed to foster disease and death; because the model bedroom can now be furnished with a ventilator for admitting the fresh, and one permitting the egress of the foul air. Each gas bracket is provided with a pipe placed above it, which pierces the wall and through which the product of combustion is carried out of the house. This is a late sanitary improvement in London, and is being introduced in New York.

As for the bed curtains, they are hung on rods with brass rings, no canopy on top, so that the curtains can be shaken and dusted freely. This is a great improvement on the old upholstered top, which recalls Dickens's description of Mrs. Todger's boarding-house, where at the top of the stairs "the odour of many generations of dinners had gathered and had never been dispelled." In like manner the unpleasant feeling that perhaps whole generations of sleepers had breathed into the same upholstery overhead, used to haunt the wakeful, in old English inns, to the murdering of sleep.

There is a growing admiration, unfortunately, for tufted bedsteads. They are in the long run neither clean nor wholesome, and not easily kept free from vermin; but they are undeniably handsome, and recall the imperial beds of state apartments, where kings and queens are supposed to seek that repose which comes so unwillingly to them, but so readily to the plough-boy. These upholstered, tufted, satin-covered bedsteads should be fitted with a canopy, and from this should hang a baldachin and side curtains. Certain very beautiful specimens of this regal arrangement, bought in Italy, are in the Vanderbilt palaces in New York. Opulent purchasers can get copies at the great furnishing-houses, but it is becoming difficult to get the real antiques. Travellers in Brittany find the most wonderful carved bedsteads built into the wall, and are always buying them of the astonished fisher-folk, who have no idea how valuable is their smoke-stained, carved oak.

But as to the making up of the bed. There are nowadays cleanly springs and hair mattresses, in place of the old feather-beds; and as to stiff white bedcovers, pillowslips and shams, false sheets and valenciennes trimmings, monogrammed and ruffled fineries, there is a truce. They were so slippery, so troublesome, and so false withal, that the beds that have known them shall know them no more forever. They had always to be unpinned and unhooked before the sleeper could enter his bed; and they were the torment of the housemaid. They entailed a degree of washing and ironing which was endless, and yet many a young housekeeper thought them indispensable. That idea has gone out completely. The bed now is made up with its fresh linen sheets, its clean blankets and its Marseilles quilt, with square or long pillow as the sleeper fancies, with bolster in plain linen sheath. Then over the whole is thrown a light lace cover lined with Liberty silk. This may be as expensive or as cheap as the owner pleases. Or the spreads may be of satin covered with Chinese embroidery, Turkish Smyrniote, or other rare things, or of the patchwork or decorative art designs now so fashionable. One light and easily aired drapery succeeds the four or five pieces of unmanageable linen. If the bed is a tester and the curtains of silk or chintz, the bed-covering should match in tint. In a very pretty bedroom the walls should be covered with chintz or silk.

The modern highly glazed tile paper for walls and ceiling is an admirable covering, as it refuses to harbour dirt, and the housemaid's brush can keep it sweet and clean. Wall papers are so pretty and so exquisite in design that it seems hardly necessary to do more than mention them. Let us hope the exasperating old rectangular patterns, which have confused so many weary brains and haunted so many a feverish pillow, are gone forever.

The floors should be of plain painted wood, varnished, than which nothing can be cleaner; or perhaps of polished or oiled wood of the natural colour, with parquetried borders. If this is impossible cover with dark-stained mattings, which are as clean and healthful as possible. These may remain down all winter, and rugs may be laid over them at the fireplace and near the bed, sofa, etc. Readily lifted and shaken, rugs have all the comfort of carpets, and none of their disadvantages.

Much is said of the unhealthfulness of gas in bedrooms, but if it does not escape, it is not unhealthful. The prettiest illumination is by candles in the charming new candlesticks in tin and brass, which are as nice as Roman lamps.

On the old bedsteads of Cromwell's time we find a shelf running across the head of the bed, just above the sleeper's head,--placed there for the posset cup. This is now utilized for a safety lamp, for those who indulge in the pernicious practice of reading in bed; but it is even better used as a receptacle for the book, the letter-case, the many little things which an invalid may need, and it saves calling a nurse.

All paint used in a model bedroom should be free from poison. The fireplace should be tiled, and the windows made with a deep beading on the sill. This is a piece of wood like the rest of the frame, which comes up two or three inches in front of the lower part of the window. The object of this is to admit of the lower sash being raised without causing a draught. The room is thus ventilated by the air which filters through the slight aperture between the upper and lower sashes. Above all things have an open fireplace in the bedroom. Abolish stoves from that sacred precinct. Use wood for fuel if possible; if not, the softest of cannel-coal.

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