The Successful Housekeeper

The 1884 ladies' book The Successful Housekeeper is a big green cloth-bound manual with a textured cover, stamped with gold letters and blind-debossed with ornaments. Here's the best-looking part:


That's the short title, by the way. The full subtitle is:


That would be: A Manual of Universal Application, especially adapted to the every day wants of American housewives; embracing several thousand thoroughly tested and approved recipes, care and culture of children, birds, and house plants; flower and window gardening, etc.; with many valuable hints on home decoration.

My favorite part of that listing is the combination of "care and culture of children, birds, and house plants," since those three things are so often combined.

The preface sets us up for the attitude we should expect from the book:

The most worthless unit in a family is an ill-managing wife, or an indolent woman of any sort. If she knows nothing of her kitchen, and is at the mercy of the cook, the table will soon become intolerable—bad soup, soft and flabby fish, meat burned outside and raw within. The husband will soon fly from the Barmecide feast, and take refuge in his club, where he will not only find food that he can digest, but at the same time escape from the domestic discord that usually accompanies ill-cooked victuals at home....

Vice and crime consort with foul living. In those places demoralization is the normal condition. There is an absence of cleanliness, of decency, of decorum—all tending to foster idleness, drunkenness and vicious abandonment. 

Isn't it amazing how the writer can assume that the reader is of a class to have servants and to allow the husband to belong to a club, and yet despite that level of wealth, they will devolve into foul living, vice, and crime? It's a pretty great example of Victorian morality. (In case you are wondering what a Barmecide feast is, as I was, it comes from A Thousand and One Arabian Nights and it's a feast with only empty dishes.)

Here are a few other fun items I found while looking through it. First, an engraving of a Bride Cake:


Next, from the opening of the chapter on canning fruit:

For the benefit of those thrifty housewives who have fruit of their own which they wish to save, or who think that any preparation of food made outside of the home kitchen, and branded "factory make," should be considered "common and unclean," we append a few recipes which will be found in every way satisfactory.

The color illustrations, tipped in on a few pages, are so appetizing:




The writers continued with their class attitude, not surprisingly. Here's what they had to say about soup:

Soups: There is no part of cookery which is so imperfectly understood by ordinary cooks as the preparation of a soup. Amongst the wealthy it is considered a necessity, and, as a matter of course, forms part of the dinner. Amongst the middle classes it is more usually served than it used to be, and is, year by year, increasingly appreciated; but amongst the lower classes it is all but scorned; and mistresses of small households will testify that the maid-of-all-work, who, when at home is half starved instead of being properly fed, will consider herself most hardly used if part of the provision of the day's dinner consists of a portion of wholesome soup. This opinion is, of course, a sign of ignorance. Soup is both nourishing and wholesome, and it may also be prepared economically.

The book sometimes jumps from a topic like that to something like this:

Incombustible Dresses: Ladies' dresses, even of the lightest and most inflammable nature, may be rendered almost completely fire-proof by being dipped in a solution of the chloride of zinc. When they are thus treated, it will be found almost impossible to make them blaze by contact with flame.

Which makes it pretty amusing, in an unintended way.

Finally, there was this factoid that started the chapter on drinks: "Since Pasquet Rossee opened the first coffee-house in Europe in Newman's Court, Cornill, London in 1652..." I don't know if that name, place and date are agreed upon by historians as the first European coffeehouse or not, but I liked how it was thrown out so nonchalantly, as if it were a fact everyone knows.