Eating house

“ It is you that are the materialist, not I, for the reason that the familiarity of the process of eating blinds you to its essentially mysterious nature; that process of transmutation of gastronomic alchemy, by which food is changed into genius and beauty, and the kitchen seen to be the power-house of the soul. ”

“ He is the waiter of the eating-house; the dishes which he brings us have been given him already cooked in the kitchen. But to appreciate properly the service he renders us we must remember that the dishes to be obtained from grass are very, very small, and that it would be a great fatigue to the stomach if it could only get at such tiny scraps at a time; as, alas! has sometimes happened to the famine-stricken poor, who have tried in vain to support life from the grass in the field. But these minute dishes are brought to us in the mass whenever we eat beef, and our stomachs benefit accordingly. ”

“ A certain family who possess a delightful country place make their Sunday evening al fresco tea one of the pleasantest spots in the week. No one is present but the family and any guests who may be staying in the house. The pretty, simple meal is served out on the [Pg 262] grassy lawn, which slopes down to the water. When the eating is over, the maid comes out, gathers the dishes into a tray, and carries them back to the house, happy in the thought that there is no supper-table to be cleared and no dining-room to be brushed up. ”

“ At the house is formality and frigidity; at the home is ease and enjoyment. The children of the home make breaks and we love them for it; it's natural instinct and frankness.
In the house is worry; in the home is happiness.
Verily there's a difference in the atmosphere of the house built with gold and the home built with love; one is worthless existence, the other worth-while living.
[Pg 71]
DIET RULES Seven Sensible Simple Suggestions on Eating
I haven't time in this book to give reasons or show proofs for everything I suggest. ”

“ The nature and the simplicity of gentlemen and ladies, with their servants and furniture, I think is best observed by meals within doors. When you are tired of eating strawberries in the garden, there shall be cold meat in the house. ”

“ The penetrating odors of meat cookery which announce their presence by escape from the kitchen, and will pervade the air of other rooms in any private house but a large one, and which are encountered in clubs, restaurants, and hotels without stint, alone suffice to blunt the inclination for food of one who, returning from daily occupation, fatigued and fastidious, desires food easy of digestion, attractive in appearance, and unassociated with any element of a repulsive character. ”

“ No virtues apparently will avail for happiness if the righteous art of cooking be neglected by the national conscience. We owe much to the fruitful meditations of our sages, but a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen—the kitchen of the small house, the abode of the preponderant majority of the people. ”

“ If they are exactly followed, and due regard is paid also to incidental remarks of the same nature contained in the body of the book, your little house need never be invaded by the smell of cooking, generally so offensive and always unnecessary, which too often meets one in the hall and in nine cases out of ten—if not in every case—means simply that good food is being spoiled in the kitchen. ”

“ You must not leave the kitchen while the cooking is going on—unless of necessity and only for a very few minutes at a time.
The bane of life in a small house is the smell of cooking. Very few are free from it. ”

“ Pure air and the restfulness of order are favourable and refining to appetite.
To allow fruit or any kind of food to stand in the dining room is a poor custom. Such things attract flies, create an odour of food in the room, and encourage the indulgent habit of eating bits now and then between meals. ”

“ In the dining-room, a few minutes later, the two men sat at adjoining tables; and the young man heard his neighbor bullying the waiters and commenting in an audible undertone, upon every dish that was served to him--swearing by all the heathen gods, known and unknown, that there was nothing fit to eat in the house ”

“ As noon drew near,--the time at which she was accustomed in her father's house to eat dinner,--the pangs of her hunger grew unbearable.
"I can't bear it another minute," she said to herself. "I must, and I will, have something to eat! I will slip down by some back way to the kitchen. There must be a kitchen, I suppose." ”

“ If there be a drain to carry off the household slops and suds it should be laid as far as possible from the well and so constructed that there shall be no leakage. Whatever else you may lack, be firm in your efforts to have pure water, and pure air and sunshine in plenty in the house.
Try to get as much variety in your food as possible, especially in the matter of the more substantial things, such as vegetables, meats, fish, soups, and breads. Try to educate your family and yourself up to the point where pies, cake, doughnuts, etc. need not be a daily dish on your table. ”

“ Wishing to refresh ourselves by leaving the carriage while the horses were changed, I entered a sort of rustic public-house, where I observed with much interest the interior of a French cottage kitchen and its inhabitants. A group of peasants sat round a wood fire, apparently waiting for their dinner, which, as a brisk lively paysanne took it off the embers to pour into a dish, looked and smelt most temptingly; it consisted of a mess of bread, herbs, and vegetables, stewed in broth: there was a member of this little circle who seemed to watch the progress of the cooking with peculiar delight ”

“ With such a rush at meal-times, elegant or even tolerably decent table manners were impossible, and the visitor in the home found eating a difficult business when accompanied by the sight of the haste and habits that often could only be described as revolting. ”

“ As a rule, there was food for whites and blacks, but inside the house, and on the dining-room table, there was wanting that delicacy and refinement of touch and finish which can make a home the most convenient, comfortable, and attractive place in the world. ”

“ THE ART OF DINING
uman nature is so susceptible to externals, while good digestion is so dependent upon interior conditions, that all the accessories of pleasant surroundings—neatness, cheeriness, and good breeding—should be brought into requisition for the daily gathering of the family at mealtime. The dining room should be one of the airiest, choicest rooms in the house, with a pleasant outlook, and, if possible, with east windows, that the morning sun may gladden the breakfast hour with its cheering rays. ”

“ This was the first time Elizabeth or I had sat down to dinner in a kitchen. Much we should have cared had it been in the scullery, the barn, or the hen-house! There is no appetite like that which comes from physical toil!
Glorious greed was a delicious sauce—if any sauce had been needed—to the plentiful and savoury farm-house meal that was provided for us of boiled bacon, potatoes, greens, butter, bread, buttermilk, fruit tart, and cheese. ”

“ The housewife must not be shocked when she hears that the kitchens of our model city, and all the kitchen offices, are immediately beneath these garden roofs; are, in fact, in the upper floor of the house instead of the lower. In every point of view, sanitary and economical, this arrangement succeeds admirably. The kitchen is lighted to perfection, so that all uncleanliness is at once detected. The smell which arises from cooking is never disseminated through the rooms of the house. ”

“ So through a large passage we pass, and he ushers us into the lodging-house kitchen. As the door opens a babel of many voices greets us, a rush of warm air comes at us, and the evidence of our noses proclaims that bloaters and bacon, liver and onions, sausages and fresh fish are being cooked. We look and see, we see and taste! Strange eyes are turned upon us just for a moment, but we are not "'tecs," so the eyes are turned back to the different frying-pans or roasting-forks, as the case may be. ”

“ The remains of cold joints, nicely garnished, a few sweets, or a little hashed meat, poultry or game, are the usual articles placed on the table for luncheon, with bread and cheese, biscuits, butter, &c. If a substantial meal is desired, rump-steaks or mutton chops may he served, as also veal cutlets, kidneys, or any dish of that kind. In families where there is a nursery, the mistress of the house often partakes of the meal with the children, and makes it her luncheon. ”

“ Indeed, we have eaten in much worse places, and the dinner was far better than we thought could be evolved from a house with so many idiosyncrasies, so very prominent barn-door qualities, such mooings and lowings in undreamed-of corners and at unexpected moments. ”

“ If I had none, my kitchen, dining-room, store-room, china-closet, butler's pantry and all the blessed facilities for cooking, serving and removing the meals should be within a radius of ten feet. How any mortal woman with a soul above dress trimmings can be content to spend three hours in preparing meals to be eaten in thirty minutes passes my comprehension. ”

“ Then the men of the family are at home for the day, the children have no claims of school or play to hurry them through their meals, and there is a general impression of delightful leisure which seems favorable to the eating and digestion of an excellent and hearty dinner. ”

“ We had first understood each other in a matter of window-sill food: This would be a crust, or a bit of baked apple, or a cracker which I used to lay behind the dining-room window-shutter—the closed one. For in the house at evening it was warm and238 light and Just-had-your-supper, while outside it was dark and damp and big, and I conceived that it must be lonely and hungry. The Dark was like a great helpless something, filling the air and not wanting particularly to be there. Surely It would much rather be light, with voices and three meals, than the Dark, with nobody and no food. ”

“ The windows of the dining room were open as they sat at breakfast, and Cousin Winnie saw white butterflies out in the neat little garden. Most lovely perfumes drifted in, fresh-cut grass and pine needles, and the very last roses; and from the kitchen came another current, warmer, like a Gulf Stream, and less romantic, but beautiful, made of the aromas of pancakes, maple sirup, bacon, and coffee. ”

“ They crossed the lawn to the house, went in at the back door, and entered the kitchen. There he sat down to breakfast with the cook, the housemaid, the laundress, and Eddy. The kitchen was warm and clean, and neat as a new pin; very agreeable in the morning sunshine. The breakfast was good, and he was very hungry, and ate with a healthy appetite. ”

“ Any housewife can imagine the emotions of Sister Hope, when she took possession of a large, dilapidated kitchen, containing an old stove and the peculiar stores out of which food was to be evolved for her little family of eleven. Cakes of maple sugar, dried peas and beans, barley and hominy, meal of all sorts, potatoes, and dried fruit. ”

“ There seems to me, more mere animalism in wading through a long bill of fare, eating three or four indifferently cooked vegetables, fish, meat, poultry, each second-rate in quality, or made so by bad cooking, and declaring that you have dined well, and are easy to please, than there is in taking pains to have a perfectly broiled chop, a fine potato, and a salad, on which any true epicure could dine well, while on the former fare he would leave the table hungry. ”

“ The kitchen is indispensable to the home; and there are exceptional persons to whom it is the most important part of the home. Yet it is no more than a strictly subordinate part of the home. When we have finished with the business of procuring and eating bread, then the real business of life begins. ”

“ The wife and mother, who is the home-maker and consequently responsible for the esprit de corps of the family, will direct, suggest, and guide the conversation into profitable and interesting channels. By thus supplying the atmosphere necessary to the efficient eating of a meal, the digestion and the assimilation of the food will adequately take care of itself. Overeating is never a part of any meal and should be religiously avoided. ”

“ On the other hand, civilization, house-building, warm apartments and kitchen fires, well-stored larders, and especially exemption from rude toil, abolish these extreme caricatures; and keeping appetite down to a middling level by the rote of meals, and thus taking away the incentives to ravenous haste, they allow the mind to tutor and variegate the tongue, and to substitute the harmonies and melodies of deliberate gustation for such unseemly bolting. ”

“ The kitchen generally runs the whole length and breadth of the house—often a kind of half-basement effect is seen, open in front on the road, but closed entirely by the hill behind. Here cooking, washing, spinning, sewing and the general household work of the industrious habitants is carried on, and here is where dinner is generally served. ”

“ The house was always dirty and the children, some other man’s children, were always about under foot. When the two men who had been working in the fields came into the house to eat, the food was badly cooked. ”

“ When you visit a friend’s newly finished Home you will be shown through all the Bath rooms, but when you leave you couldn’t, to save your soul, tell [Pg 143] where the dining room was. They seem to kinder want to camouflage or hide that nowadays. There is such little eating being done in the Homes now that a dining room is almost a lost art. Breakfast is being served in bed, Dinner at the Cabaret with dancing attached, and Lunch—no up-to-date Man would think of going anywhere but to his Clubs for lunch. ”