In case of ants in cupboard or refrigerator, scour the shelves well with hot water and borax. Dry in the sun if the shelves are portable, then sprinkle thickly with dry borax. It is odorless and harmless, and may be used freely.
In case of soured dough, stir an even teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda, better known as baking-soda, into a cupful of warm water; turn the over-risen dough upon a board and work in the soda-water, gradually, until all is absorbed. If the dough is so soft that it runs, add a little sifted flour as you go on. Knead thoroughly and set for the last rising, taking care this is not in a hot place. I have seen an apparently hopeless batch of dough redeemed in this way.
In case of meat that has a “close” smell, yet is not actually tainted, wash well in soda and water, rubbing it well into every crack and line; wash off with fresh iced water; leave in salted iced water for half an hour, wash again with fresh, wipe quickly until perfectly dry, and cook at once.
In case of boiling milk more than eight hours old in summer, or twelve in winter, drop in a bit of baking-soda the size of a pea for each quart when you put the milk over the fire. I have boiled cream in this way without curdling it. Bear in mind that the first stage of decomposition is acid, and treat suspected food with soda as the most convenient and harmless of alkalies.
In case of curdled mayonnaise, whip the yolk of a fresh egg smooth and thick and stir into the curdled dressing.
Nothing brings me more closely in touch with my sister housemother than the request, “Will you tell me what to do in case of”—let the exigency be a shattered hope, an aching heart, a hankering after a mission, or broken china.
The dismay of the housewife over the destruction of her brittle treasures dates far back of the poetical precision who makes her ability to be “mistress of herself though china fall,” the test of breeding. I suspect, if the truth were known, we should learn that the potsherd, picked up from the ash-heap by hapless, skin-smitten Job, marked an evil day in the calendar of his shrewish wife and the unlucky servant through whose carelessness pot, or cup, or platter came to grief. Furthermore, that the broken utensil belonged to a set that could not be matched in any china-shop in the length and breadth of Uz.
I read, yesterday, in one of the “Be-thrifty-and-you-will-be-prosperous” essays, that are as rusty needles in the thick of the thumb of the woman of experience, an anecdote of a notable manager who still uses the same “snow-drop figure” napery affected by her mother and her grandmother before her, and the same pattern of china and cut-glass that set forth their tables. Hence—the hateful “Hence” that breaks off the needle-point in the flesh!—“she has no difficulty in matching worn-out and fractured articles of household use.” Queen Victoria had a similar fad. When the chair and sofas of Windsor got shabby they were spirited away, one by one, without her knowledge (presumably), and recovered with stuff of the same design and color, artistically dimmed and frayed so as to resemble the old exactly. Queens can afford to have expensive and almost impossible whims. The drawback to imitation of Mrs. Guelph’s and Mrs. Notable’s sentimental economics is that crockery, glass and linen merchants do not carry dead stock. When a pattern becomes unfashionable it disappears from the market. The moral and exasperating “Hence” should have a corollary in the shape of a card, telling us where Mrs. Notable finds benevolent tradesmen who replenish her stores with snow-drop damask and fifty-year-old designs in “fragiles.”
A friend writes to me of the death of her colored butler, after twenty-three years’ service in her family.
“He was not particularly bright or brisk,” she says, “and had some grave faults. But he did not break or chip one piece of glass or china while he was with us. Do you wonder that we mourn him?”