XXXIV My Novitiate as a Practical Housewife — My Cook “Gets Her Hand Out” — Inception of “Common Sense in the Household”
Fifty years after it was written, I found among some family papers a letter from my husband to his father, dated “February 20, 1857.” His description of the cottage home in which we were now installed, as master and mistress, reads like a pastoral. He was not addicted to sentimental rhapsodies. If this were ever his style, he would have curbed the disposition to effervesce, in writing to another man. But the tone of the whole epistle is that of one thoroughly content with his home and the management thereof.
One sentence brought deep gratification to me, blended oddly with amusement and a tinge of melancholy:
“Virginia is very well and very busy. I confess to some surprise at her skill in housewifery. She seems as much at home in the kitchen as in the drawing-room, to which she is summoned many times a day to receive visitors.”
Until I read that letter, I had not meant to devote so much as a page—much less a chapter—to the crucial experiences of that novitiate in domestic lore. Now, I feel it incumbent upon me, as a duty I owe to the countrywomen I have tried to help along these lines, for forty-odd years, to lift the veil from the homely, ill-appointed kitchen in which I successfully deluded a quick-eyed, quick-witted man into believing I was mistress of the situation.
In my father’s house I was considered to have a turn, if not a talent, for housewifery. From childhood it was my delight to haunt the laundry, where the finer branches of cookery were carried on when the washing was out of the way. My mother was a very Mrs. Rundle in the excellence of her preserves and pickles. Mary Anne, the comely Indo-mulatto, was proficient in the composition of cakes, jellies, and pastries, syllabubs and creams. She liked to have me “help” her, as she put it. That is, I whipped eggs and beat butter and pounded spices, peeled fruit, topped and tailed gooseberries, when I felt like it, and kept her amused with my chatter.
At ten, I was trusted to carry the key-basket and to “give out” ingredients required for the day’s cooking and serving. At fourteen, I believed myself to be a clever cake-maker, and at sixteen, proudly assumed the responsibility of putting up preserves and pickles for the winter’s consumption, one summer, when my mother’s health obliged her to leave town in the height of the fruit season. When she came home, the stern old granddame, with whom I was rather a favorite (if she ever indulged her buckram-clad spirit in the weakness of having a favorite), informed her gentle daughter-in-law that “Mary”—as she persisted in calling me—“had kept the house so well that we had hardly missed her mother.”
It was not strange, therefore, that I took the helm of my newly launched barque with faint and few misgivings as to my ability to navigate the unknown seas that looked calm and bright from the shore.
Ours was a prosperous country parish, and liberal hospitality was the law of daily living. The Henrys vacated the Parsonage a few days before Christmas, and I went down to Richmond for a fortnight, to complete the household plenishing we had begun during the honeymoon. My sisters-in-law—with whom I was ever upon cordial terms—had lent advice and co-operation in the selection of furniture at the North. My carpets were bought in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where Judge Terhune was an old and honored resident. My mother had seen to the outfit of household linen. I smile now, in recollecting how care-free was my mood through that happy Christmas fortnight, after the receipt of a letter from the member of the firm who abode by the stuff for ten days of my holiday, apprised me of the arrival of the furniture from New Brunswick and from Richmond, likewise, that “Mrs. Eggleston and Mrs. Henry, with some other ladies, kindly insist upon having the house cleaned, the carpets made and put down, and the furniture settled in place while you are away.”
The proceedings would astound me now that I know more of humankind, and of parishes. Still more extraordinary would I consider the cool, matter-of-course way in which I received the intelligence. It was the Old Virginia atmosphere in that long-dead-and-buried time.
I did open my eyes, and break into ecstatic gratitude, when, on taking formal possession of our real home, where we had expected to live in picnic fashion upon the provisions we had laid away in baskets and trunks before leaving Richmond, we beheld the table set in the dining-room for supper, and fires alight in every room. Further search revealed that the house was in perfect order, the curtains hung, carpets down, and the larder stocked to overflowing with staples and delicacies. The cook and chambermaid hired for the year—as was the invariable custom of the “system”—were on hand, and John, the man-of-all-work, had met us at the station. Not another human creature was visible. For any evidence furnished to the contrary, by sight or hearing, the “surprise” might have been the work of benevolent pixies. My sister Alice—a girl of fourteen—would be an inmate of our house for most of the time, and study with us as heretofore. She and I ran about the house like two madcaps, after supper and until bedtime, calling out excitedly at each fresh discovery.
Two barrels of flour and one of corn-meal; two of apples and one of potatoes; a half-barrel of sugar, and other staple groceries, in divers measures, made the foundation of the abundant supply for creature wants. The upper shelves of the store-room were crowded with pickles, preserves, and all manner of conserved fruits for which the Virginia housewife was justly famed. Truly, the lines had fallen to us in pleasant places.
Excitement was renewed next morning by the appearance at the outer gate, and streaming down the walk, of a procession of colored men and women, each laden with basket, or pail, or tray, or parcel. The women bore their burdens on their heads, the men upon shoulders or in their arms. All, like the Greeks of old, came bearing gifts, and of a more perishable nature than those that loaded pantry and store-room shelves. Honey, breads of all shapes and characters; cakes, butter, and eggs; chickens, dressed for the table; sausage, spareribs, hams, and shoulders; a roast of beef; custards and puddings and mince-pies—seemed designed to victual a garrison rather than a family of three whites and three servants. To crown the profusion and add to the variety, the elegant young lawyer, Mr. Cardwell, who had figured in our bridal train, drove up through the main street, in at our front gate, and down to the Parsonage door, a cow and calf, to the unbounded delight of the village urchins who flocked at his heels up to the gate. The cow, “Old Blue,” as she was dubbed, because her color could not be more accurately described, gave the richest milk I ever skimmed. I would let no one else take care of it after one week’s experience had taught me the necessity of giving my personal attention to each department of housewifery, if I would not be cheated at every conceivable opportunity.
Thus gayly began my training in a school from which I have not yet been graduated.
My mother was a good housekeeper, and the wheels of her machine ran in smooth ruts. She had old and competent servants. I doubt if she had ever swept a room, or roasted a piece of meat, in her life. The cook we had hired from a neighboring planter had excellent recommendations. True, she had been one of the superfluous “hands” who were hired out from year’s end to year’s end, and such were not warranted as first-class workers. They were prone to become shiftless and indifferent to their work, by reason of frequent changes. Still, Emily was reputed to be a fair cook and laundress. Among the cuts of fresh meat sent in by the friends, whose consistent generosity moved me to the invention of the phrase “kitchenly-kindness,” was a noble beefsteak. I ordered it to be cooked for breakfast the second day of our incumbency.
Emily fried it brown—almost to a crisp!
Five cook-books were in my just-unpacked library. Breakfast over, I sought out Miss Leslie’s Complete Cook-Book, and read up on beefsteak.
Two more were sent in that day from country parishioners. Next morning, I hied me surreptitiously to the kitchen before my husband or sister was awake. I bore the steak upon a charger—alias, a crockery platter. It had been under lock and key until then; otherwise, its fair proportions would inevitably have been shorn. The honesty of the hired hand was an axiomatic negligible quantity; and the most faithful of family servants seldom resisted successfully the temptation to appropriate to their own use an unlawful share of eatables. They were a gluttonous race, and the tenet that “taking from marster wasn’t stealing,” stood high in their creed.
I had told Emily overnight that I would show her how a steak should be cooked, and she was more than ready for me.
I had never touched a bit of raw meat before, and the clamminess of the gory cut sent “creeps” all over me. It was very bloody to my eyes, and I washed it well in cold water preparatory to laying it upon the broad bottom of the frying-pan, heated and buttered, which, I had learned from another of the five manuals, was “a passable substitute for a gridiron if the young housekeeper had failed to provide herself with this important utensil.” Emily had not found a gridiron in the box of kitchen utensils unpacked before my arrival, and there was no time to look it up. The steak, dripping wet, went into the broad pan set over a bed of red coals. We cooked with wood in Old Virginia. It hissed and spluttered and steamed like the escape-valve of a balky locomotive. Miss Leslie said, “Turn it at the end of eight minutes.” The sodden pallor of the exposed side did not look right to me, somehow.
“Oh!” quoth Emily, “you is gwine to stew it—is you?”
Pass we quickly over the abhorrent tale! The steak never attained unto the “rich brown” which, according to my cook-book makers, it should display when ready for table. I turned it four times, and, with a vague idea that butter browned more readily than meat, I added a great spoonful to the juices oozing from the steak. There was a great deal of gravy in the dish when it was served, and my companions pronounced it “extremely savory.”
“But you should not have gone out into the kitchen,” demurred my husband. “Does not the cook understand her business?”
“Few of her class can do without teaching,” I rejoined, valiantly.
I had already made a resolve from which I never swerved: If my cook did not understand her business, and I understood it even less, I would not confess it. As time went on, I was to feel such test of the heroic resolve as I had never anticipated. For, as the knowledge of Emily’s ineptitude grew upon me, the conviction of my own crass and comprehensive ignorance waxed into a haunting horror. I was as unlearned as the babe unborn in everything that a practical housekeeper should know. I could not make a batch of bread, or boil a potato, or broil a chop, had my eternal welfare—or my husband’s happiness—depended upon it. As for soup-making, roasting, stewing, and boiling meats, frying and baking fish—the very commonest and coarsest rudiments of the lore in which I was supposed to be proficient—I was as idiotically void of comprehension as if I had never heard of a kitchen. How I maintained a brazen show of competency is a mystery to me at this distance from that awful trial-period. I studied my quintette of cook-books with agonized earnestness. And when I was tolerably positive that I had mastered a recipe, I “went and did it” with Squeersian philosophy. How many failures were buried out of the sight of those who loved me best, and were most constantly with me, would have shocked the frugal housewife into hysterics. My mastery of this and of that process was painfully slow, but it began to tell upon our daily fare. I got out the gridiron, and learned to cook to perfection the steaks my husband’s soul loved, and from my nonpareil of neighbors, Mrs. Eggleston, I got a recipe for quick biscuits.
To the acquisition of that particular formula, and the conversation that embedded the gift, I attribute a large measure of the success which eventually rewarded the striving unto blood, that was my secret martyrdom for half a year.
She was a “capable” housewife, according to Mrs. Stowe’s characterization of the guild. She was, moreover, warm-hearted, sensible, and sympathetically reminiscent of her own early struggles with the housekeeping problem. When I took her into confidence as to my distrust of my quintette of manuals, she laughed out so cheerily that I felt the fog lift from my spirits.
“All written by old maids, or by women who never kept house,” she declared. “To my certain knowledge, Miss Leslie has boarded in a Philadelphia hotel for twenty years. I wouldn’t give a guinea a gross for their books. Make your own! I do! When I get a tiptop, practical recipe—one that I have tried for myself and proved, I write it down in my own every-day language; then I have met that enemy, and it is mine!”
We were in her house, and she brought out the manuscript book in which her victories were recorded. Next, she offered to lend it to me.
“I don’t think,” she subjoined, tactfully, “that old-fashioned housekeepers, like your mother and mine—yes, and my mother-in-law—take the lively interest in learning new ways of doing things that we do. I am very proud of some discoveries and a few inventions that I have written down there. Those quick biscuits, for instance, are my resource when the bread doesn’t turn out just right. They never fail. And speaking of bread, here is a sort of short-cut to excellence in that direction. That is my composition, too. Take the book with you, and copy anything you fancy.”
“Bread is Emily’s strong point,” I remarked, complacently, in accepting the loan. “Nevertheless, I shall try your composition.”
The promise was fulfilled in a way I had not expected. I had been keeping house now about four months, and was beginning to justify, in some degree, the fond boast of the son to the father of my familiarity with kitchen-craft, when Emily announced one morning, as I was “giving out” for the day:
“Tain’ no use measurin’ out dat ar’ flour, Miss Virginny!” (The old-time servant never said “Mrs.” to, or of anybody.) “I done got my han’ out makin’ bread! I’d jes’ spile yer flour an’ things ef I was to try to make a batch o’ bread.”
“What is the matter with your hands?” I looked at the members, brown and brawny, and apparently uninjured.
She spread them out as a bat might his wings, and regarded them in affectionate commiseration.
“As I tole you, I done got my han’ out for makin’ bread. Nobody don’ know how-come a body’s han’ gits out for somethin’ or ’nother. Sometimes, it’s fur bread, an’ then agin it’s fur cake, or maybe cookin’ chickens, or the likes o’ that. Thar’s some as thinks it’s a sort of bewitched, or conjurin’. Some says as how it’s the ole Satan what takes his spite on us that ’ar way. I don’t know nothin’ bout how that may be. I jes’ know that my han’ done got out for makin’ bread. I been done feel it soon’s I got out o’ bade this mornin’.”
“And may I ask,” I interrupted, in freezing politeness that was utterly wasted, “how long your hand is likely to stay out?”
She shook her head, sadly, imperturbably.
“Nobody can’ never say how long, Miss Virginny. Maybe six days, and maybe two mont’s. Sis’ Phœbe” (fellow church-members were always “Brother” and “Sister” even in every-day speech), “what b’long to Mars’ Wyatt Cardwell, she got her han’ out for two or three t’ings at oncet las’ year, an’ sho’s you’re born an’ I’m standin’ here in this yere blessed sto’-room, she ain’t got it in agin fur better’n six mont. I’s certainly mighty sorry fur you an’ Mars’ Ed’ard, but the Lord’s will is jes’ p’intedly got to be done.”
Constant to my vow of discretion in all things pertaining to domestic tribulations, I said never a word to the other members of the smitten household of what menaced them. The congestion was the more serious, inasmuch as there was not a baker within twenty miles, and we baked fresh bread and rolls every day. I was in poor physical case for culinary enterprise, for one of the constitutional headaches which I had inherited from both parents had warned me of its approach; I ought to keep quiet and discourage the advance. Instead of which, I girded up the loins of my spirit and concluded that there could hardly be a more propitious opportunity for trying Mrs. Eggleston’s bread recipe. Since a knowledge of practical bread-making was one of life’s stringent necessities in this latitude, “better sune than syne.”
I set the sponge at noon, in pursuance of directions laid down so explicitly that a novice with a headache that was by now a fixed fact, could not err therein. I could not sit up to supper for the blinding pain. Alice was taking that meal, and was to spend the evening with a friend, and my husband had a business call in his study. No one would be privy to the appeal I meditated making to my tyrant. I sent for her, and ordered her to bring to my room the sponge I had left in a secluded corner of the dining-room. When it came, I bade her bring kneading-tray and flour. These set in order on the table, I called her attention to the hopeful and enticing foaming condition of the sponge, and assured her that no evil could befall the dough if she were to knead in the flour and prepare the mass for the night’s working, there under my eyes.
She planted herself in the middle of the floor and surveyed me mournfully—a sphinx done in chocolate.
“I suttinly is mighty sorry for you, Miss Virginny, an’ I’d do anyt’ing what I could do fur to help you out o’ you’ trouble. But thar ain’t no manner o’ use in my layin’ my han’ to that ar’ dough. It wouldn’t never rise, not ‘tell the jedgment-day. It would be temptin’ Providence, out and out. When a body’s han’ is out, it’s out for good and all! I done do my best to make you onderstan’ what’s happen’ to me, an’ angels couldn’t do no mo’! Lord ’a’ mercy! what is you goin’ to do?”
I had jumped up and belted in my dressing-gown, rushed to the wash-stand, and washed my hands furiously. Without a syllable I tackled the sponge, measured and worked in the flour, and fell to kneading it in a blind rage. Pretty soon my strength flagged; the pain in my temples and back of the eyes beat me faint. To get a better purchase on the stiffened mass, I set the tray down on the floor and knelt over it. That bread had to be made if I perished in the attempt.
The chocolate-colored sphinx surveyed me sorrowfully, without stirring an inch from her place on the hearth-rug.
Neither of us heard the door open, softly and cautiously, lest the noise might disturb my slumbers. Both of us started violently at the voice that said:
“What is the meaning of this?”
I sat up on my knees and faced the speaker, essaying a miserable imitation of a laugh.
“Emily has got her hand out in bread-making, and I am trying mine. This is almost ready now.”
He walked across the floor and lifted me to my feet; laid me incontinently upon the lounge, and confronted the cook.
“Take up that tray!” She obeyed dumbly. “Carry it out into the kitchen and finish the bread. Yes! I mean it! Get your hand in before you are a minute older, or I’ll know the reason why. And if the bread is not good, I shall send you back to your master to-morrow morning, and tell him I have no further use for you.”
He would have cut his hand off before he would have struck a woman, and the creature knew it as well as I did, but she cowered before the blue blaze of his eyes, as at a lightning flash.
His call stayed her on the threshold.
“Do you understand what I have said?”
The sphinx crumbled:
“Ya’as, suh!”
“You understand, too, that your hand is not to get out again?”
“Not ef I can holp it, Mars’ Ed’ard!”
“See that you do help it!”
Then I held my head hard with both hands to keep the sutures from flying asunder, and laughed until I cried.
From the stress and toils, the mortifications and bewilderment of that year, grew into a settled purpose the longing to spare other women—as ill-equipped as I was, when I entered upon my housewifely career—the real anguish of my novitiate. The foundation of Common Sense in the Household was laid in the manuscript recipe-book begun at Mrs. Eggleston’s instance. I had learned, to my bitter woe, that there was no printed manual that would take the tyro by the hand and show her a plain path between pitfalls and morasses. I learned, by degrees, to regard housewifery as a profession that dignifies her who follows it, and contributes, more than any other calling, to the mental, moral, and spiritual sanity of the human race. I received my call to this ministry in that cottage parsonage.
My departure from the beaten track of novel-writing, in which I had achieved a moderate degree of success, was in direct opposition to the advice of the friends to whom I mentioned the project. The publishers, in whose hands my first cook-book has reached the million mark, confessed frankly to me, after ten editions had sold in as many months, that they accepted the work solely in the hope that I might give them a novel at some subsequent period. Even my husband shook a doubtful head over the wild scheme. It was the only book published by me that had not his frank and hearty approval. Upheld by the rooted conviction that I had been made, through my own shortcomings and battles, fit to supply what American women lacked and needed sorely, I never debated or doubted.
My husband found me “gloating” over a copy of Common Sense the week after it was published.
“I verily believe,” he said, wonderingly, “that you take more pride in that book than in all the rest you have written.”
I answered, confidently, “It will do more good than all of them put together.”
This was fifteen years after Emily’s hand got out, and I knelt on the carpet in my bedroom to knead my trial batch of bread.