Breakfast, luncheon, and tea / by Marion Harland.

  • Harland, Marion, 1830-1922.
Date:
[1875]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Breakfast, luncheon, and tea / by Marion Harland. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ser\-ed ! When I think of them, I abominate our great, vulgar joints and stiff dinner-tables ! ” Yet Mrs. Nouveau Riche dawdles all the forenoon over a piece of tasteless embroidery, and gives the afternoon to gossip ; while Bridget or Dinah prepares dinner, and serves it in accordance with her peculiar ideas of right and fitness. “ Train American servants ?” she says, in a transport of contemptuous incredulity at my suggestion that here is good missionary ground, “ I have had enough of that ! Just as soon as I teach them the rudiments of decent cookery they carry off their knowledge to somebody else, trade for double wages from my neighbour upon w'hat they have gained from me ! ” “ But,” I remark, argumentatively, “ do you not see, my dear lady, that so surely as ‘ ten times one is ten,’ if all your neighbours were, in like manner, to instruct the servants who come to them and desert, so soon as they are taught their trade, the great work of securing wholesome and palatable cookery and tasteful serving would soon be an accomplished fact in your community t and, by the natural spread of the leaven, the race of incompetent cooks and clumsy waiters would before long become extinct ? Would it not be worth while for housekeepers to co-operate in the attempt to secure excellence in these departments instead of ‘getting along somehow’ with ‘ the materials’—i.e., servants—‘thiscountry affords ? ’ Why not compel the country—wrong-headed abstraction that it is !—to afford us what we want ? Would not the demand, thus enforced and persisted in, create a supply ? ” “ Not in my day,” she retorts, illogically. “ I don’t care to wear myself out for the benefit of posterity.” I do not gainsay the latter remark. If she had any desire that the days to come should be better than these she would see to it that her daughters are rendered comparatively independent of the ungrateful caprices of the coming Celt or Teuton, or the ambitious vagaries of “ the Nation’s Ward,” by a practical knowledge of housewifery. Perhaps she is deterred from undertaking their instruction by the forecast shadow of their desertion of the maternal abode for homes of their own. The prettiest thing that has ever been said of the informal “ talks ” I had with you, my Reader, in former days, was the too-flattering remark of a Syracuse (N. Y.) editor, that they were “like a breath of fresh air blowing across the ‘heated term ’ of the cook.”