It can be a nice little dinner, nevertheless. Suppose you begin with grapefruit, which you can arrange yourself, cutting out the center and putting sugar in and setting it in the ice-box early in the day so that the juices will be drawn out and it will be cold and delicious by dinner time. Next, a clear soup, which can be prepared the day before or can be a canned consommé of the best make, flavored with a little lemon, and with a thin slice of lemon in each plate. (Even if your maid can make a delicious cream soup I wouldn’t advise attempting it, since it takes too much time on the day of the dinner.) Third, a roast and two or three vegetables. For the fourth course a salad which you can prepare yourself, making the dressing. Next the fifth course, ice-cream and cake, or some other bought dessert; and, finally, coffee.
All these suggestions that I have written you have actually been tried and found practical and cause the least amount of friction, so I send them to you to modify to suit your own case. That is where your genius will come in—the modifications that oil the machinery of your house to suit your circumstances and your maid’s particular characteristics.
I have only a minute before the mail goes to add another suggestion to this long letter of advice, and that is that it might help you to look into the question of the innumerable domestic labor-saving machines, such as fireless cookers, bread-mixers, vacuum cleaners, washing-machines, electric utensils of all sorts and kinds, and see if there are any that could be used to advantage in your household. With every wish that contentment may soon reign in your kitchen,
Devotedly yours,
Jane Prince.
CHAPTER V ⬩ WEEKLY
CLEANING ❧ ❧
York Harbor, August 27.
Dear Penelope:
Your sense of the ludicrous is going to be of the greatest help over rough places, for often little troubles seem to vanish if we can only laugh over them. I was very much amused with your clever devices to cover up from your maid the fact that you could not remember in what order her work ought to be done. It is surprising, isn’t it, how we can go on living for years in our mothers’ well-ordered households without ever thinking what the method is that makes everything go so like clockwork?