Living on a Little

by Caroline French Benton

On cooler mornings they had a first course of little melons, followed by eggs, muffins and coffee, or fried tomatoes in the place of the eggs.

For luncheon they had all sorts of things from the garden. Often the main dish was a vegetable salad,—string-beans or stuffed tomatoes, or cucumbers and tomatoes,—with freshly made cottage cheese bought from a neighbor, and bread and butter and iced tea, coffee or chocolate. Or, if the day was cool, they had the vegetable hot,—baked corn, or creamed peas, or tomatoes, baked, filled with crumbs and seasoning,—and for a second course there was usually fruit. Luncheons such as these were nothing to get up. The vegetables were prepared directly after breakfast. If they were to be served as salads, they were cooked, cooled and set on the ice; if hot, they were made all ready to put in the oven at the last moment.

Their cold dinners, however, were their pride. They found so many good things to have that they fairly hesitated which to choose for any particular night. Sometimes they began with clear soup. This, of course, was made the day before in the tireless stove, and only strained and put on ice the next morning for the second evening. On very hot days sometimes they put it in a small pail, and set this in another and larger one, with ice between, and put it back in the stove for the afternoon; then it came out full of splinters of ice, a most delightfully cool affair. Fruit soups they experimented with, but found they did not care for, so they clung to this clear bouillon when they had soup at all.

Usually, however, their dinner began with meat. This was made ready either the day before it was needed, or else it was prepared early in the morning. They had veal loaf sometimes, surrounded with sliced tomatoes and French dressing; or slices of cold mutton with peas in mayonnaise; or occasionally, as a treat, jellied chicken with the peas. Sometimes they had bits of lamb, cooked very tender with a knuckle-bone, and then made exactly like the jellied chicken, the meat turning out set in an aspic. Often peas were mixed with the lamb in the mould, and then a little gelatine was added to ensure its setting firmly. Usually, with the dish, they had dressed lettuce.

After this combination course of meat and salad, came dessert. They often had an ice or sherbet made from the fruit in the garden, costing nothing but the small amount of sugar used in making it and the ice used in freezing. This was alternated with some sort of mousse made in the fireless stove. Sometimes there was fruit jelly, raspberries, possibly, set with lemon jelly, moulded in a circle with whipped cream in the middle. Or there would be a chilled rice pudding; or peaches, cut up, sugared, and put in a pail with ice around them and set away till they were half frozen. These things, too, could all be prepared early in the day.

Usually, even when the weather was hot, the one exception to the cold-food rule was the coffee, which they liked best hot at night as well as morning, but when they had had any mousse or ice-cream for dinner, part of this was sometimes saved, and late in the evening there came in tall glasses of iced coffee or chocolate with a spoonful of the cream in the bottom of each; a sort of ice-cream-soda they particularly fancied.

When the weather grew cooler these cold dinners gave way to hot ones. Then they had cream soups first, made with any vegetable they happened to have ready cooked from the night before; a spoonful of spinach, or a handful of beans, or the outer leaves of lettuce, all were used. Afterward came meat and vegetables, and then perhaps a berry tart or a custard or shortcake. However, whatever they had, they were certain to prepare it to the last possible spoonful in the morning.

The meat course at dinner was too often a problem, for the butcher continued all summer to exercise them in the virtue of patience. In the early part of their stay his shop was so far from sanitarily clean that they were obliged to tell him they could not trade with him unless he improved his ways. This he good-naturedly consented to do as far as in him lay. He put his meat in the ice-box instead of leaving it exposed on the counter; what there was out he covered with a mosquito-netting. But as his ice-box was small, this meant that the meat could not hang long enough to make it tender; it was brought in one day by the farmers and put out for sale the next. All the beef was tough and stringy; the veal was apt to be far too young, and the chickens far too old. There was seldom any lamb to be had, and the mutton often had a curious flavor decidedly suggestive of wool.