Never dip the ivory handles of knives in hot water.
Silver.
Wash, after each meal, all that is soiled, in very hot soft water, with hard soap. Wipe hard and quickly on a clean towel; then polish with dry flannel. If discolored with egg, mustard, spinach, or beans, by any other means, rub out the stain with a stiff toothbrush (used only for this purpose), and silver soap.
For years I have used no other preparation for cleaning silver than the Indexical silver soap, applied as I have described. After rubbing with a stiff lather made with this, wash off with hot water, wipe and polish while hot. There is no need for the weekly silver cleaning to be an event or a bugbear, if a little care and watchfulness be observed after each meal. Silver should never be allowed to grow dingy. If Bridget or Chloe will not attend properly to this matter, take it in hand yourself. Have your own soap-cups—two of them—one with common soap, the other with a cake of silver soap in the bottom. Have for one a mop, for the other a stiff brush—a toothbrush is best. Use your softest towels for silver.
Besides being clean and easy of application, the silver soap will not wear away the metal as will whiting or chalk, or plate-powder, however finely pulverized.
China and Glass.
There are few of the minor crooks in the lot of the careful housewife that cause her more anxiety and more discouragement than the attempt to teach domestics how to wash up dishes.
“I’ve heard that Mrs. —— is very exact about some things, such as washing up dishes and the likes of that!” said a woman to me, with an affected laugh, having called to apply for the then vacant position of cook in my kitchen. She had high recommendations, a whine engrafted upon her native brogue, and spoke of me in the third person—a trick of cheap (and bogus) gentility that tries my nerves and temper to the very marrow of my spine. “I was a-saying to myself, as I came along, that Mrs. —— must have been very onlucky in her girls if she had to tache them how to wash up dishes. I always thought that was one of the things that came kinder nat’ral to every cook.”
“Mrs. ——’s” experience goes to prove that the wrong way of doing this must “come natural” to the class mentioned, and that Nature is mighty in woman. The fact that the right way is not to pile unrinsed dishes and plates in a big pan with a loose bit of soap on top, and pour lukewarm water over all; then with a bit of rag to splash said water over each separately, and make another pile of them upon the kitchen-table, until the last is drawn, reeking with liquid grease, sticky and streaming, from the now filthy puddle of diluted swill; then to rub them lightly and leisurely with one towel—be they many or few—is as difficult of comprehension to the scullionly mind as would be a familiar lecture upon the pons asinorum.
Yet the right and only neat method is so simple and easy! Rinse the greasy plates, and whatever is sticky with sugar or other sweet, in hot water and transfer to a larger pan of very hot. Wash glass first; next silver; then china—one article at a time, although you may put several in the pan. Have a mop with a handle; rub upon the soap (over which the water should have been poured) until you have strong suds. There is a little implement made by the “Dover Stamping Co.,” a cup of tinned wire, called a “soap-shaker,” that greatly facilitates this process of suds-making, without waste of soap. Wash both sides of plate and saucer, and wipe before putting it out of your hand. Draining leaves streaks which can be felt by sensitive finger-tips, if not seen. If china is rough to the touch, it is dirty. Hot, clean suds, a dry, clean towel, and quick wiping leave it bright and shining. Roll your glasses around in the water, filling them as soon as they touch it, and you need never crack one. A lady did once explain the dinginess of her goblets to me by saying that she was “afraid to put them in hot water. It rots glass and makes it so tender! I prefer to have them a little cloudy.” This is literally true—that she said it, I mean. Certainly not that a year’s soak in hot water could make glass tender.