The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864

Lady-visitor loq.—"The first time I was invited to Mr. –'s, (the Hon. – –'s, you know,) I was somewhat anxious, but went home flattering myself I had made a creditable impression. Imagine my consternation, when I came to relieve the pocket of my gala-gown, donned for the occasion, at discovering among its treasures a tea-napkin, marked gorgeously with the Hon. – –'s family-crest, which had maliciously crept into its depths in order to bring me into disgrace! I have never been able to bring myself to the point of confession, in spite of my subsequent intimacy with the family. If it were not for Joseph's positive assertion to the contrary, I should be of the opinion that his cup of divination conjured itself deliberately and sinfully into innocent Benjamin's sack."

Student loq. (Testimony open to criticism.)—"Met pretty girl on the street yesterday. Sure I had on my 'Armstrong' hat when I left home,—sure as fate; but when I went to pull it off,—by the crown, of course,—to bow to pretty girl, I smashed in my beaver! How it got there don't know. Knocked it off. Pretty girl picked it up and handed it to me. Confounded things, any way!"

Young divine loq.—"While I was in the army, I was in Washington on 'leave' for two or three days. One night, at a party, I became utterly bewildered in an attempt to converse, after long desuetude, with a fascinating woman. I went stumbling on, amazing her more and more, until finally I covered myself with glory by the categorical statement that in my opinion General McClellan could 'never get across the Peninsula without a fattle; I beg pardon, Madam! what I mean to say is, without a bight.'"

School-girl loq.—"When Uncle – was President, I was at the White House at a state-dinner one evening. Senator – came rushing in frantically after we had been at table some time. No sooner was he seated than he turned to Aunt to apologize for his delay; and, being very much heated, and very much embarrassed, he tugged away desperately at his pocket, and finally succeeded in extracting a huge blue stocking, evidently of home-manufacture, with which he proceeded to wipe his forehead very energetically and very conspicuously. I suppose the truth was that the poor man's handkerchiefs were "on a strike," and thrust forward this homespun stocking to bring him to terms."

School-girl, No. 2, loq.—"My last term at F., I was expecting a box of 'goodies' from home. So when the message came, 'An express-package for you, Miss Fanny!' I invited all my specials to come and assist at the opening. Instead of the expected box, there appeared a misshapen-bundle, done up in yellow wrapping-paper. Four such dejected-looking damsels were never seen before as we, standing around the ugly old thing. Finally, Alice suggested,—

"'Open it!'

"'Oh, I know what it is,' I said; 'it is my old Thibet, that mother has had made over for me.'

"'Let's see,' persisted Alice.

"So I opened the package. The first thing I drew out was too much for me.

"'What a funny-looking basque!' exclaimed Alice. All the rest were struck dumb with disappointment.

"No! not a basque at all, but a man's black satin waistcoat! and next came objects about which there could be no doubt,—a pair of dingy old trousers, and a swallow-tailed coat! Imagine the chorus of damsels!

"The secret was, that two packages lay in father's office,—one for me, the other for those everlasting freedmen. John was to forward mine. He had taken up the box to write my address on it, when the yellow bundle tumbled off the desk at his feet and scared the wits out of his head. So I came in for father's secondhand clothes, and the Ethiopians had the 'goodies'!"

Repentant Dominie loq.—"I don't approve of it at all; but then, if you must write the wicked thing, I heard a good story for you to-day. Dr. – found himself in the pulpit of a Dutch Reformed Church the other Sunday. You know he is one who prides himself on his adaptation to places and times. Just at the close of the introductory services, a black gown lying over the arm of the sofa caught his eye. He was rising to deliver his sermon, when it forced itself on his attention again.

"'Sure enough,' thought he, 'Dutch Reformed clergymen do wear gowns. I might as well put it on.'

"So he solemnly thrust himself into the malicious (as you would say) garment, and went through the services as well as he could, considering that his audience seemed singularly agitated, and indeed on the point of bursting out into a general laugh, throughout the entire service. And no wonder! The good Doctor, in his zeal for conformity, had attired himself in the black cambric duster in which the pulpit was shrouded during week-days, and had been gesticulating his eloquent homily with his arms thrust through the holes left for the pulpit-lamps!"

WHAT SHALL WE HAVE FOR DINNER?

I think I must be personally known to most of the readers of the "Atlantic." I see them wherever I go, and they see me. Beneath a shelter-tent by the Rapidan, in a striped railroad-station in Bavaria, at the counter of Trübner's bookstore in London, and at Cordaville, in Worcester County, Massachusetts, as we waited for the freight to get out of the way, I have read the "Atlantic" over their shoulders, or they over mine. The same thing has happened at six hundred and thirty-two other improbable places. More than this, however, my words and works in the great science of Domestic Economy have travelled everywhere before me, not simply like the Connecticut of the poet,

"Bringing shad to South Hadley, and pleasure to man,"[34 - "All hail, thou Connecticut, who forever hast ran,Bringing shad to South Hadley, and pleasure to man!"]

but extending all over the civilized world. Not that I am the author of the clothes-wringing machine, or of the spring clothes-pin,—my influence has been more subtile. I have propounded great central axioms in housekeeping and the other economies, which have rushed over the world with the inevitable momentum of truth. It was I, for instance, who first discovered and proclaimed the great governing fact that the butter of a family costs more than its bread. It was I who first announced that you cannot economize in the quality of your paper. I am the discoverer of the formula that a family consumes as many barrels of flour in a year as it has adult members, reducing children to adults by the rule of three. The morning after our marriage I raised the window-shade, so that the rising sun of that auspicious day should shine full upon our parlor-Brussels. I said to Lois, "Let us never be slaves to our carpets!" The angel smiled assent; and on the wings of that smile my whisper fluttered over the earth. It brooded in a thousand homes else miserable. Light was where before was chaos. Sunshine drove scrofula from ten thousand quivering frames, and millions of infant lips would this day raise Lois's name and mine in their Kindergarten songs, did they only know who were their benefactors.

Standing thus in the centre of the sphere of the domestic economies, I have, of course, read with passionate interest the "House and Home Papers" in the "Atlantic." It is I, as I am proud to confess, who have, violated all copyright, have had them reprinted, as Tract No. 2237 of the American Tract Society, No. 63 of the American Tract Society of Boston, and No. 445 of the issues of the Sanitary Commission, and am now about to introduce them surreptitiously into the bureaus of these charities, so that the colporteurs, of every stripe, may at last be certain that they are conferring the first of benefits upon their homeless fellow-creatures. It is I who every night toil through long streets that I may slide these little tracts, messengers of blessing, under the front-doors of wretched friends, who are dying without homes in the gilded miseries of their bowling-alley parlors. Where they have introduced the patent weather-strip, I place the tract on the upper door-step, with a brick-bat, which keeps it from blowing away. But I observe that it is no part of the plan of those charming papers, more than it was of the "Novum Organon" or of the "Principia," to descend into the details of the economies. I suppose that the author left all that to the "Domestic Economy" of her excellent sister, and, as far as the details of practice go, well she might. But between that practical detail by which one sister cooks to-day the dinners on a million tables, and the æsthetic, moral, and religious considerations by which the other sister elevates the life of the million homes in whose dining-rooms those tables stand, there is room for a brief exposition of the principles on which those dinners are to be selected.

It is that exposition which, as I sit superior, I am to give, ex cathedra, after this long preface, now.

I shall illustrate the necessity of this exposition by an introduction to follow the preface, after the manner of the Germans, before we arrive at the substance of our work, which will be itself comprised in its first chapter. This introduction will consist of two illustrations. The first relates to the planting of potatoes. When I inherited my ancestral estate, known as "Crusoe's Well," I resolved to devote it to potatoes for the first summer. I summoned my vassals, and we fenced it. I bought dung and manured it. I hired ploughmen and oxen, and they ploughed it. I made a covenant with a Kelt, who became, quoad hoc, my slave, and gave to him money, with which I directed him to buy seed-potatoes and plant it.

And he,—"How many shall I buy?"

I retired to my study, consulted London, Lindley, and Linnæus,—the thick Gray, the middling Gray, and the child's Gray,—Worcester's Dictionary, and Webster's, in both of which you can usually find almost anything but what should be there,—Johnson's "Dictionary of Gardening," and Gardner's "Dictionary of Farming,"—and none of these treatises mentioned the quantity of potatoes proper for planting a given space of land. Even the Worcester and Webster failed. I was reduced to tell the Kelt to ask the huckster of whom he bought. All the treatises went on the principle—true, but inadequate—that "any fool would know." Any fool might, probably does,—but I was not a fool.

The next year, having built my house and taken Lois home, the bluebirds sang spring to us one fine morning, and we went out to plant our radish-seeds. With fit forethought, the seed had been bought, the ground manured and raked, the string, the dibble, the woman's trowel, the man's trowel, the sticks for the seed-papers, and the papers were all there. Lois was charming, in her sun-bonnet; I looked knowing in my Canadian oat-straw. We marked out the bed,—as the robins, meadow-larks, and bluebirds directed. Lois then looked up article "Radish" in the "Farmer's Dictionary," and we found the lists of "Long White Naples," "White Spanish," "Black Spanish," "Long Scarlet," "White Turnip-Root," "Purple Turnip," and the rest, for two columns, which we should and should not plant. All that was nothing to us. We were to plant radish-seeds, which we had bought, as such, from Mr. Swett. How deep to plant them, how far apart or how near together, the book was to tell. But the book only said, "Everybody knows how to plant radishes."

Now this was not true. We did not know.

These two illustrations, as the minister says, are sufficient to show the character of the deficiency which I am now to supply,—which young housekeepers of intelligence feel, when they have got their nests ready and begin to bill and coo in-doors. There are many things which every fool knows, which people of sense do not know. First among these things is, "What will you have for dinner?"—a question not to be answered by detailed answers,—on the principle of the imaginary Barmacide feasts of the cook-books,—but by the results of deep principles, which underlie, indeed, the whole superficial strata of civilized life. Did not the army of the Punjaub perish, as it retreated from Ghizni to Jelalabad, not because the enemy's lances were strong, but because one day it did not dine?

I am not going to tell the old story of that "sweet pretty girl" who, after a week of legs of mutton, ordered a "leg of beef." I sympathize with her from the bottom of my heart. Her sister will be married to-morrow. To her I dedicate this paper, that she may know, not what she shall order,—that is left to her own sweet will, less fettered now that her life is rounded by her welding it upon its other half than it was when she wandered in maiden meditation fancy-free,—not, I say, what she shall order for her dinner and for Leander's, but the principle on which the order is to be given.

"But, my dear Mr. Carter," says the blushing child, as she reads, "we have got to be so dreadfully economical!"

Fairest of your sex, there was never one of your sex, since Eve finished the apple, lest any should be wasted, nor of my sex, since Adam grimly champed the parings, thinking he was "in for it," who should not be economical. A just economy is the law of a luxurious life. "Dreadful economy" is the principle which is now to be unfolded to you.

Economy in itself is one of the most agreeable of luxuries. This I need not demonstrate. Everybody knows what good fun it is to make a bargain. Economy becomes dreadful, only when some lightning-flash of truth shows us that our painful frugality has been really the most lavish waste.

So Lois and I, for nine years, lived without a corkscrew. We would buy busts and chromoliths with our money instead,—we would go to the White Mountains, we would maintain an elegant æsthetic hospitality, as they do in Paris, with the money we should save by doing without a corkscrew. So I spoiled two sets of kitchen-forks by drawing corks with them, I broke the necks of legions of bottles for which Mr. Tarr would have credited me two cents each, and many times damaged, even to the swearing-point, one of the sweetest tempers in the world,—all that we might economize on this corkscrew. But one day, at the corner-shop, I saw a corkscrew in the glass show-case, lying on some pocket-combs and family dye-stuffs. I asked the price, to learn that it cost seventeen cents. The resolution of years gave way before the temptation. I bought the corkscrew, and from that moment my income has equalled my expenses. So you see, my sweet May-bud, just trembling on the edge of housekeeping, that true economy consists in buying the right thing at the right time,—if you only pay for it as you go.

"But, my dear Mr. Carter, I don't know what the right thing is!"

Sweet heart, I knew it. And your husband knows no more than you do,—although he will pretend to know, that he may look cross when the bills come in. Read what follows; hide the "Atlantic" before he comes home; and you will know more than he knows on the most important point in human life. Vainly, henceforth, will he quote Greek to you, or talk pompous nonsense about the price of Treasury certificates, if you know at what price eggs are really cheap, and at what price they are really dear.

Listen, and remember! Then hide the "Atlantic" away.

When I engaged in the study of Hebrew, which was at that time a "regular" at college, (for why should I blush to own that I am in my one hundred and tenth year?) as I toiled through the rules and exceptions in dear old Stephen Sewall's Hebrew Grammar, I ventured to ask him, one desperately hot June day, whether he could not tell us, were it only for curiosity's sake, which rule would come into play in every verse, and which would be of use only once or twice in the whole Bible. "Ah, Carter," said the dear old fellow, (he taught his beloved language with his own book,) "it is all of use,—all!" And so we had to take it all, and find out as we could which rules would be constant servitors to us, and which occasional lackeys, hired for special occasions. Just so, dear Hero, do you stand about your housekeeping. You wall be fretting yourself to death to economize in each one of one hundred and seven different articles,—for so many are you and Leander to assimilate and make your own special phosphate and carbon, as this sweet honey-year of yours goes on. Of that fret and wear of your sweet temper, child, there is no use at all. Listen, and you shall learn what are to be the great constants of your expense,—what Stephen Sewall would have called the regular verbs transitive of your being, doing, and suffering,—and how many of the one hundred and seven are only exceptional Lamed Hhes, at which you can guess or which you can skip, if the great central movements of your economies go bravely on.

I do not know, of course, whether Leander is fond of coffee, and whether you drink tea or no. I can only tell you what is in our family, and assure you that ours is a model family. Such a model is it, that Lois has just now counted up the one hundred and seven articles for me,—has shown me that they all together cost us nine hundred and twenty-six dollars and thirty-two cents in the year 1863, and how much each of them cost. Now our family consists,—

1. Of the baby, who is king.

2, 3. Of two nurses, who are prime-ministers, one of domestic affairs, one of private education.

4, 5. Of a cook and table-girl, who are chancellor and foreign secretary. These four make the cabinet.

6-8. Three older children; these are in the government, but not in the cabinet.

9 and 10. Lois and I,—who pay the taxes, fight common enemies, and do what the others tell us as well as we can.

This family, you observe, consists of six grown persons, and three children old enough to eat, who are equivalent to a seventh. I may say, in passing, that it therefore consumes just seven barrels of flour a year.

To feed it, as Lois has just now shown you, cost in the year 1863 nine hundred and twenty-six dollars and thirty-two cents. That is the way we chose to live. We could have lived just as happily on half that sum,—we could have lived just as wretchedly on ten times that sum. But, however we lived, the proportions of our expense would not have varied much from what I am now to teach you, dear Hero (if that really be your name).

Butter is the biggest expense-item of all. Of our nine hundred and twenty-six dollars and thirty-two cents, ninety-one dollars and twenty-six cents went for butter. Remember that your butter is one-tenth part of the whole.

Next comes flour. Our seven barrels cost us seventy dollars and eighty-three cents. We bought, besides, six dollars and seventy-six cents' worth of bread, and six dollars and seventy-one cents' worth of crackers,—convenient sometimes, dear Hero. So that your wheat-flour and bread are almost a tenth of the whole.

Next comes beef, in all forms, ninety dollars and seventy-six cents; there goes another tenth. The other meats are, mutton, forty-seven dollars and sixty-seven cents; turkeys, chickens, etc., if you call them meat, sixty-one dollars and fifty-six cents; lamb, seventeen dollars and fifty-three cents; veal, eleven dollars and fifty-three cents; fresh pork, one dollar and seventy-three cents. (This must have been for some guest. Lois and I each had a grandfather named Enoch, and have Jewish prejudices; also, fresh pork is really the most costly article of diet, if you count in the doctor's bills. But for ham there is ten dollars and twenty-two cents. Ham is always available, you know, Hero. For other salt pork, I recommend you to institute a father or brother, or cousin attached to you in youth, who shall carry on a model farm in the country, and kill for you a model corn-fed pig every year, see it salted with his own eyes, and send to you a half-barrel of the pork for a gage d'amour. It is a much more sentimental present than rosebuds, dearest Hero,—and it lasts longer. That is the way we do; and salt pork, therefore, does not appear on our bills. But against such salt pork I have no Hebrew prejudice. Try it, Hero, with paper-sliced potatoes fried for breakfast.) All other forms of meat sum up only two dollars and twenty-three cents. And now, Hero, I will explain to you the philosophy of meats. You see they cost you a quarter part of what you spend.

Know, then, my dear child, that the real business of the three meals a day,—of the neat luncheon you serve on your wedding-silver for Mrs. Dubbadoe and her pretty daughter, when they drive in from Milton to see you,—of the ice-cream you ate last night at the summer party which the Bellinghams gave the Pinckneys,—of the hard-tack and boiled dog which dear John is now digesting in front of Petersburg,—the real business, I say, is to supply the human frame with carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen in organized forms. It must be in organized matter. You might pound your wedding-diamonds for carbon, you might give water from Jordan for oxygen and hydrogen, and the snow-flakes of the Jungfrau might serve the nitrogen for Leander's dinners, but, because these are not organized, Leander's cheek would pale, and his teeth shake in their sockets, and his muscles dwindle to packthreads, as William Augustus's do in the Slovenly-Peter books, and he would die before your eyes, Hero! Yes, he would die! Do not, in your love of him, therefore, feed him on your diamonds. Give him organized matter. Now, in doing this, you have been wise in spending even a tenth of your substance on wheat. For wheat is almost pure food; and wheat contains all you want,—more carbon than your diamonds, more oxygen and hydrogen than your tears, more nitrogen than the snow-flake,—but not nitrogen enough, dear Hero.

"More nitrogen!" gasps Leander, "more nitrogen, my charmer, or I die!" This is the real meaning of the words, when he says, "Let us have roast-beef for dinner," or when he asks you to pass him the butter.

Although beef, then, has little more than a quarter as much food in it as wheat has, you must have some beef, or something like it, because Leander, and you too, my rosy-cheek, must have nitrogen as well as carbon.