Queen Mab omelets
Beat four eggs, the yolks as smooth as cream, the whites to a standing froth. Into the yolks whip three tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar. Mix all together, add a tablespoonful of thick cream, whip lightly and pour into buttered “nappies,” filling each half-way to the top. Set in a pan of boiling water in a quick oven and bake five minutes, covered. Turn out upon a hot platter, sift powdered sugar over them and serve at once.
FAMILIAR TALK
A commonsensible talk with the nominal mistress of the house
There is not that household in the land where servants are employed which is not measurably dependent upon them for peace of mind as well as for comfort of body. Every housewife who reads this will recall the sinking of heart, the damp depression of spirit, which has suddenly overtaken a cheerful mood when the kitchen barometer beckoned “storm” or “change.” Such an overtaking is not an affliction, but it sometimes comes dangerously near to sorrow. The independent maid of all work has it in her power to alter the family plans with a word, when that word is “going.” Should she elect to stay, her lowering brows and sharp or sullen speech abash a mistress who quails at little else. In wealthier households a domestic “strike” involves panic, disorder and suffering.
I know of a wet-nurse whose abandonment of her infant charge, without a word of warning, at ten o’clock one Saturday night, caused a long and terrible illness, resulting in infantile paralysis. A cook who had lived in one family for three years resented the arrival of unexpected guests, packed her trunk and left her mistress to get dinner. The lady was in delicate health and all unused to such work. She became overheated and exhausted, took a heavy cold, which ripened into pneumonia, and died three days after the cook’s desertion.
I need not multiply illustrations of the helplessness of American housewives in the face of such disasters, and the possibility that these may befall any one of us. We have no redress. The women who helped organize the “Protective League” know this. The law does not protect the employer. Public opinion gives her no support. The cook whose fit of temper cost a kind mistress her life was recommended to me within a month after an event that should have shocked the moral sense of every housewife in the community, and recommended by a friend of the murdered woman and of myself. When I exclaimed in surprise, I was told: “We can not be judges of our neighbors’ domestic affairs.”
There is no class spirit among us. For some reasons this is a matter of congratulation to us and the public. All that is needed to make the opening gulf between mistresses and maids impassible is organization on our part, which signifies open war. It is, nevertheless, I note in passing, patent that there should be a code of honor among us with regard to employment of those who have proved absolutely untrustworthy in other households.
We are not true to one another in this matter, and our employées, who are held together by the unwritten laws of a union, none the less strong because nameless and informal, know this as well as we do. The knowledge is one of the most potent weapons in their armory.
Let this pass for the present. I would direct your attention, my sister-worker in the home missionary field, to the brighter side of the vexed question.
After forty years’ careful study of this matter of domestic service—study carried on in other lands as well as in our own—I record thankfully my conviction that the domestics in well-regulated American homes are better cared for, better paid and more thoroughly appreciated than any other class of working women in this country or abroad. I record, likewise and confidently, that the proportion of faithful, valued and even belovéd domestics among us is much larger than that of indifferent or worthless. Most cheerfully and thankfully I add to this record that, personally, I have a list of honest, virtuous, willing workers, whose terms of service in my family varied from three to thirteen years, and who went from my house to homes of their own, bearing with them the cordial esteem of those they had served. Nor is my experience singular, even in these United States. It is so far from being exceptional that I deprecate, almost as an individual grievance, any attempt to organize those who should be our coworkers into a faction that considers us as “the opposition.” It is a putting asunder of those whom a mutual need should join together.
Backed by my two-score years of experiment and action, I dare believe that a leaf or two from my book of household happenings may be of service to younger women and novices in the profession which absorbs the major part of our time and strength.
To begin with—beware of discouragement during the early trial-days of the new maid. Be slow to say, even to yourself: “She will never suit me!” The first days and weeks of a strange “place” are a crucial test for her as for you, and she has not your sense of proportion, your discipline of emotion and your philosophical spirit to help her to endure the discomforts of new machinery.
Looking back upon my housewifely experiences, I am moved to the conclusion that the domestics who stayed with me longest and served me best were those who did not promise great things in their novitiate.
One—“a greenhorn, but six weeks in the country”—frankly owned that she knew nothing of American houses and ways. She was “willing to learn,” and—with a childish tremble of the chin—“didn’t mind how hard she worked if people were kind to her.” I think the quivering chin and the clouding of the “Irish blue” eyes moved me to give her a trial. She did not know a silver fork from a pepper cruet, or a tea-strainer from a colander, and distinguished the sideboard from the buffet by calling the one the “big,” the other the “little dresser.” She had been with me a month when I trusted her to prepare some melons for dessert, giving her careful and minute directions how to halve the nutmeg melons, take out the seeds and fill the cavities with cracked ice, while the watermelon—royal in proportions and the first fruits of our own vines—was to be washed, wiped, and kept in the ice-chest until it was wanted.
At dinner the “nutmegs” appeared whole; the watermelon had been cut across the middle and eviscerated—scraped down to the white lining of the rind—then filled with pounded ice. The succulent sweetness, the rosy lusciousness of the heart, had gone into the garbage can.
Nevertheless, I kept blue-eyed Margaret for eight years. She stands out in my grateful memory as the one and only maid I have ever had who washed dishes “in my way.” Never having learned any other, she mastered and maintained the proper method.
The best nursery-maid I ever knew, and who blessed my household for eleven years, objected diffidently at our first interview to giving a list of her qualifications for the situation. She “would rather a lady would find out for herself by a fair trial whether she would fit the place or not.” I engaged her because the quaint phrase took my fancy. She proved such a perfect fit that she continued to fill the place until she went to a snug home of her own.
What may be called the New Broom of Commerce has no misgivings as to her ability to fill any place, however important. Upon inquiry of the would-be employer as to the latter’s qualifications for that high position, the N. B. of C. may decline to accept her offer of an office which promises more work than “privileges.” But she could fill it—full—if she were willing to “take service” with the applicant.
One of the oddest incongruities of the new-broom problem is that we are always disposed to take it at its own valuation. With each fresh experiment we are confident that—at last!—we have what we have been looking for lo! these many years. She is a shrewd house-mother who reserves judgment until the first awkward week or the crucial first month has brought out the staying power or proved the lack of it.
Officious activity in unusual directions is a bad omen in the New Broom of Commerce. In sporting parlance, I at once “saw the finish” of one whom I found upon the second day of service with me washing a window in the cellar. She “couldn’t abide dirt nowhere,” she informed me, scrubbing vehemently at the dim panes. I had just passed through the kitchen where a grateful of fiery coals was heating the range plates to an angry glow. All the drafts were open; the boiler over the sink was at a bubbling roar; upon the tables was a litter of dirty plates and dishes; pots, pans and kettles filled the sink.
It is well to have a care of the corners, but the weightier matters of the law of cleanliness are usually in full sight.
I once knew a woman who, deliberately, and of purpose, changed servants every month. She said no new broom lasted more than four weeks, and when one became grubby and stumpy she got rid of it. Her house was the cleanest in town and her temper did not seem worse for friction.
Another woman who, strange to tell, lived to be ninety years old, “liked moving” and never lived two years in one and the same house. She maintained that she kept clear of rubbish by frequent flittings, and enjoyed rubbing out and beginning again. Personally, I should have preferred a clean, lively conflagration every three years or so, but she throve upon nomadism.
In minor details of housewifery, as in more important, make up your mind how you will manage the home and turn a deaf ear to gratuitous suggestions from people whose own households would be better conducted if their energies were concentrated.
Let one example suffice: A so-called reformer felt herself called in (or out of) the Gospel of Humanity, the other day, to inveigh in a parlor lecture upon the unkindness and general unchristianliness of the maid’s cap and apron which all would-be stylish mistresses insist upon. “Have I, a Christian woman in a republic,” cried the oratress, “the right to put the badge of servitude upon my sister woman, because, having less money than I have, she is obliged to earn her living? Do I not tend to degrade, instead of elevating her?
“Of a piece with the cap and apron is the black dress, now ‘the thing’ for girls in domestic service. Why should not Bridget and Dinah exercise their own right in dress as well as I?”
These questions have been put to me many times by women who think and act for themselves without regard to arbitrary conventionalities.
I am so well assured that most conventionalities have a substratum of common sense that I am slow to condemn any one of them.
I dispute, at the outset, the insinuation that black dress, white cap and apron are a badge of servitude. I know no more independent class of women than trained nurses, no more arbitrary men than railway officials. I should certainly never consider the distinctive garb of the Sisters of Charity—Protestant or Roman Catholic—as degrading. The idea of humiliation attached to the uniform of housemaid and child’s nurse in the mind of employees or employer is founded upon the conviction that domestic service demeans her who performs it. This is precisely the prejudice which sensible, philanthropic women are trying to beat down—a prejudice that has more to do with the complications of the servant question than all other influences combined. If I hesitate to ask a maid entering my service to wear the uniform of her calling, I intimate too broadly to be misunderstood that there is something in that service which would demean her were it generally known that she is in it.
I had one maid, years ago, who would not run around the corner to grocery or haberdasher’s without taking time to put on her Sunday coat and hat, and to lay off her apron. When I spoke to her of the absurdity and inconvenience of this, she confessed, blushingly, that the porter at the grocery was “keeping company with her,” and “it was nat’ral a gurrel should want to look her best when she was like to see him.”
“Ah,” I said, “doesn’t he know what your position is in my house? Has he never seen you in cap and apron?”
“Shure, mem! Every day when he fetches the groceries.”
“Then, if he is a sensible fellow, he will respect you all the more for not pretending to be what you are not. Since he knows what your business is, show him that you are not ashamed of it. You are as respectable in your place as he is in his—as I am in mine—always providing that you respect your service and yourself.” Call the distinctive dress of your maid a “uniform,” not a livery. Point out to her the examples of trained nurses, of railway conductors, of the very porters who “keep company” with her; the policemen she admires afar off; the soldiers, whose brass buttons dazzle her imagination. Remind her that saleswomen in fashionable shops wear the black gown, white apron, deep linen collar and cuffs and pride themselves upon looking their best in them. Especially make her comprehend (if you can, for the ways of the untrained mind are past finding out), that she has an honorable calling and need not be ashamed to advertise it.
Congratulate yourself, above all, that a sensible fashion holds back Bridget and Dinah from the “exercise of their own taste in dress.” The modification of that taste wrought by the neat and modest costume prescribed by a majority of modern housewives may be in itself a good thing, sparing the eyes of spectators of her toilettes when she becomes “Mrs.” and independent, and the purse of the porter, or truckman, or mechanic, who will have to pay for them.
I have laid stress upon the advantages of long terms of service, to maid and to mistress. Like all other good things it has its perils and its abuses to be avoided.
Two-thirds of the scandals that poison the social atmosphere steal out, like pestilential fogs, through servants’ gossip. We discuss “the girl” in our bedchambers, and if so much stirred up by her works and ways as to forget what is due to our ladyhood, compare notes in the parlor as to these same works and ways. Being well-bred women, the traditions of our caste prevent us from making domestic grievances the staple of drawing-room conversation and the marrow of table-talk. The electroplated vulgarian never calls attention more emphatically to the absence of the “Sterling” stamp upon her breeding, than when she chatters habitually of the virtues and the faults of her household staff.
On the other hand, the most sophisticated of us would be amazed and confounded if she knew what a conspicuous part She plays in talk below stairs and on afternoons and evenings “out.”
Thackeray, prince of satirists, puts it cleverly:
“Some people ought to have mutes for servants in Vanity Fair—mutes who could not write. If you are guilty—tremble! That fellow behind your chair may be a Janissary with a bowstring in his plush breeches pocket. If you are not guilty, have a care of appearances, which are as ruinous as guilt.” We should be neither shocked nor confounded that these things are so. If we are mildly surprised, it argues ignorance of human nature, and of the general likeness of one human creature to another, that proves the whole world kin. When mistresses in Parisian toilettes, clinking gold spoons against Dresden as they sip Bohea in boudoir or drawing-room, raise their eyebrows or laugh musically over the latest bit of social carrion in “our set”—Jeames or Abigail, who has caught a whiff at a door ajar, or through a keyhole, is the lesser sinner in serving up the story in the kitchen cabinet. The domestics are in, yet not of, the employer’s world, living for six and a half days of the week among people with whom they have no affinity by nature or education. Where we would talk of “things,” the lower classes discuss what they name “folks.” Their range of thought is pitifully narrow; the happenings in their social life are few and tame. What wonder if they retail what we say and do and are, as sayings, doings and characters appear to them?
What would be extraordinary, if it were not so common, is the opportunity gratuitously afforded in—we will say, guardedly—one family out of three for the collection of material for these sensations of the nether story. I speak by the card in asserting that the influence gained by the confidential maid over her well-born, well-mannered, well-educated mistress is greater than that possessed by any friend in the (alleged) superior’s proper circle of equals.
Without taxing memory I can tell off on my fingers ten gentlewomen, in every other sense of the word, whose intimate confidantes are hirelings who were strangers until they entered the employ of their respective mistresses(?). We need not cross the ocean to listen with incredulous horror to insinuations and open assertions as to the hold a gigantic Scotch gilly acquired over a royal widow. Our next-door neighbors on both sides and our acquaintances across the way are in like bondage.
I have in mind one of the best and most refined women I ever knew whose infatuation for her incomparable Jane was the laughing-stock of some, the surprise and grief of others. Jane disputed the dear soul’s will, oft and again; gave her more advice than she took, and, behind her back, ridiculed her unsparingly—as many of the mistress’s friends were aware. The dupe would resign the affection and society of one and all of her compeers sooner than part with Jane.
Another “just could not live without my Mary.” The remote suggestion throws her into a paroxysm of distress. Her own husband knows it to be necessary to warn her not to tell this and that business or family secret to Mary, knowing, the while, in his sad soul, the chances to be against her keeping her promise not to share it with her factotum.
Ellen is the bosom friend of a third; Bridget is the right hand, the counsellor and colleague of a fourth. A fifth confides to her second-rate associates that her faithful Fanny knows as much of family histories (and there are histories in the clan) as she does, and that she—the miscalled mistress—takes no step of importance without consulting her.
Perhaps one man in five hundred is under the thumb of his employee, and then because the underling has come into possession of some dangerous secret, or has a “business hold” upon him.
Have wives more need of sympathy? or are they less nice in the choice of intimates, and more reckless in confidences?