[LETTER IV.]
FLIES.—SERVANTS' OFFICES, INCLUDING THE HOUSEKEEPER'S ROOM AND STORE-CLOSET, THE KITCHEN, AND THE SCULLERY.—BREWING; MAKING HOME-MADE WINES, CIDER, AND PERRY; AND MAKING BREAD, ROLLS, CAKES, RUSKS, MUFFINS AND CRUMPETS, AND BISCUITS.
It gave me the greatest pleasure, my dear Annie, to hear that your husband is so well pleased with the improvement produced by the removal of the Scotch pines, that he wishes you to follow my advice in other things, and that you have actually ordered furniture for your morning room in accordance with my suggestions. You ask, however, why I have said nothing of your husband's business-room, and add that you suppose I forgot it; but this was far from being the case. The reason I omitted it was, that I wished, if he asked your opinion respecting it, you might be able to speak entirely from your own feelings, and not from the advice of another. No female friend should ever, on any account, interfere between a man and his wife. In any matter that falls within your own province, I shall always be delighted to give you the best advice I can, but that is all. Should any quarrels arise between you and your husband, (and it would be very strange, indeed, if there should not,) your best plan is to keep them entirely to yourself, and never to ask advice respecting them from any friend whatever.
But to return to your house. I was very much surprised to find that you were annoyed with flies, till I read "notwithstanding all the pains our careful housemaid takes to catch them with saucers of sugar and water." This explained the mystery. It is the saucers of sugar and water that attract the flies, and, indeed, one half of what are called remedies for these little pests only increase the nuisance. Besides, without pretending to any morbid sensibility, I must confess that I always think the sight of the poor flies struggling to get out of the liquid grave into which they have been entrapped extremely painful to the feelings. I know it is a law of nature that all creatures should prey upon each other; but I do not like killing creatures by wholesale, when there appears no absolute necessity for so doing. I think if you remove your sugar and water, your flies will disappear of themselves; and, if they do not, you must, in such rooms as are lighted from one side only, adopt our kind friend Mr. Spence's admirable plan of putting network over the window-frame, so that whenever the window is opened, either at the top or the bottom, the space is still covered with the net. You will be astonished to see how efficacious this simple plan is; as, though the flies could easily get through the meshes, they are afraid of trying, lest they should be entrapped.
I will now proceed to say a few words on your servants' offices, and of these the housekeeper's room generally ranks first. As I see no store-closet marked in your plan, I suppose you will make the housekeeper's room serve for that purpose; particularly as you say you mean to be your own housekeeper; and you will find the store-closet a most important place in the country, as it is necessary to lay in larger stores of all the common articles of daily consumption than are ever required in a town, where shops can be sent to on any emergency. Your housekeeper's room should therefore have ranges of cupboards and drawers all round it, to contain the household linen, china, glass, pickles, preserves, cakes, tea, coffee, sugar, and in short every article wanted by the family, a store of which is kept. There should be a bureau, or desk with drawers beneath, to keep the account-books, receipts for bills, and other papers relating to housekeeping; and on one side of the fireplace you may have a cupboard with iron doors enclosing a small oven, and a range of charcoal stoves, for making any dishes in French cookery, or any cakes or preserves that you may take a fancy to do yourself, with the assistance of your maid, apart from the observation of the other servants. On the other side of the fireplace may be a similar cupboard, containing a small sink with a wash-hand basin furnished with a plug and waste-pipe to let off the water, and two pipes, one to supply cold water from a cistern, and the other hot water from a boiler behind the fireplace.
Before fixing up the cupboards the walls should be made perfectly dry, and, if they are not so, they should be battened, that is, covered with canvass strained over slips of wood nailed to the walls, strong brown paper being afterwards pasted over the canvass. This preserves a stratum of air between the walls and the backs of the cupboards, which effectually excludes damp. You may easily know when a room is damp by its appearance, before you have kept any thing in it. If the walls have been whitewashed, they will show various-coloured stains; and, if they have been papered, the paper will hang loose. No expense should be spared to make a room dry, that is to be used for keeping stores in, as the mischief done by damp is incalculable. Lump sugar crumbles into powder; moist sugar hardens into lumps; saltpetre and bay salt turn to water; preserves become mouldy or candied, cakes soft, and linen mildewed. Nor is the mischief done by damp confined to any one part of the house. In the butler's pantry the silver will become spotted; in the cellar the wine will lose its strength and flavour; and, in the living-rooms, the oil paintings will become blistered, and the books and engravings stained.
But to return to the housekeeper's room. In one part you can have a cupboard to open with folding-doors like a wardrobe, for keeping tea and sugar and similar articles. There should be shelves in this, on which should stand numerous tin canisters marked with the names of the different articles they contain. In the upper part should be a shelf suspended by cords passing through holes bored in the corners, for loaves of sugar, or any similar articles likely to be attacked by mice. The common tea should be kept in a chest lined with lead, which may stand in the lower part of the closet, and the finer kinds should be kept in canisters. A bag of raw coffee may also stand on the lower shelf of the closet; but, after the coffee is ground, it should be kept in a canister, and as far apart from the tea as possible, as, if it is near it, it will give the tea an unpleasant taste. Moist sugar should be kept in a large tin canister, the lid of which opens with a hinge. The coffee-mill, if in this apartment, must be fixed to some part of the room where it will be quite firm, and yet be so placed that the person grinding may have room to use the arm freely; but many persons have the coffee-mill in the kitchen, and also a mill for pepper. When any thing is to be ground in a mill, of a different nature from what it is generally used for, the mill should be first cleaned by grinding in it a hard crust of bread.
A second cupboard should be set aside for the soap and candles. In this there should be some strong hooked nails driven into the wall, for the kitchen candles; and a kind of bench or wooden stand for the boxes containing mould candles, if you use any, though most persons now prefer the composition or stearine candles with plaited wicks, as they do not require snuffing. These candles, and those of wax or spermaceti, may be kept a long time without injury, if they are covered with paper within the box, to prevent them from becoming discoloured, which they will soon be, if much exposed to the air; but tallow candles of all kinds should never be kept more than six months, as, when old, they are very apt to gutter. Soap, also, should never be kept too long, or be suffered to become too dry. It is true that, when used too new, it wastes away very rapidly; yet, if it is kept more than six months, and particularly if it becomes too dry, it cracks and shrinks so much, as to render it very troublesome to use, and nearly double the quantity is required.