The Art of Living

At this stage of my reflections I am interrupted by my wife, Barbara – for I was thinking aloud – with a few words of expostulation.

“Are you not a little severe? I assume that you are referring now to people with a comfortable income, but who are not disgustingly rich. Of course, nowadays, the very rich people keep cooks who can cook for a dinner-party, cooks at eight dollars or more a week and a kitchen maid; so it is only the hostess with a cook at four and a half to six dollars a week and no kitchen maid who is likely to engage an accommodator. But what is the poor thing to do? Give a wretched, or plain dinner which may make her hair grow white in a single night? Surely, when a woman invites friends to her house she does not wish them to go away half starved, or remembering that they have had disagreeable things to eat. In that case she would prefer not to entertain at all.”

“The question is,” I answered, “whether it is more sensible to try to be content with what one has, or to vie with those who are better off. We do not attempt to dine on gold plate, nor have we a piano decorated with a five-thousand-dollar painting by one of the great artists, like Patterson, the banker. Why should we endeavor to compete with his kitchen?”

“The clever thing, of course, is to find a cook for six dollars a week who can cook for a dinner-party,” answered Barbara, pensively; “and yet,” she added, “though our cook can, the chances are that nine out of ten of the people who dine with us think that we hired her for the occasion.”

“Precisely. Just because the custom has grown so. It is sheer extravagance.”

“After all, my dear, it is a comparatively small matter – a five-dollar bill.”

“Pardon me. Five dollars for the cook, because one’s own cook is not good enough; three or five dollars for an accommodating maid or waiter, because you cannot trust your chamber-maid to assist your waitress; eight dollars for champagne, and so on.”

“Do not say ‘your’ – mine can.”

“Her, then – the woman of the day. I am trying to show that a small informal dinner is a cruelly expensive affair for the average man with a comfortable working income.”

“I admit that a dinner for eight or ten is expensive,” said Barbara. “It means twenty-five dollars at the lowest, even if you have your own cook. But what is one to do? You don’t seem to appreciate that a good plain cook cannot usually prepare dinner-party dishes, and that a plain dinner is now almost as different from a dinner-party dinner as a boiled egg is from caviare.”

“Precisely. There is the pity of it. The growth here of the French restaurant and the taste for rich and elaborate cookery has doubtless been a good thing in its way, if only that it is now possible to obtain a tolerably well-cooked meal at most of the hotels in our large cities and principal watering-places; but why should people of moderate means and social instincts feel constrained to offer a banquet on every occasion when they entertain? I for one consider it a bore to have so much provided when I go out to dinner.”

“You must admit,” said Barbara, “that dinners are not nearly so long as they were a few years ago. Now, by means of the extra service you complain of, and by keeping the number of courses down, a dinner ought not to last longer than an hour and a half, whereas it used to take two hours and over. In England they are much worse than here. You are given, for instance, two puddings, one after the other, and ices to follow.”

“I agree,” said I, “that we have curtailed the length so that there is not much to complain of on that score. I think, though, that comparatively plain dishes well served are quite as apt to please as the aspics, chartreuses, timbales, and other impressive gallicisms under which the accommodating party cook is wont to cater to the palates of informally invited guests. I sometimes think that the very few of our great great-grandfathers who knew how to live at all must have had more appetizing tables than we. Their family cooks, from all accounts, knew how to roast and boil and bake and stew, culinary arts which somehow seem to be little understood by the chefs of to-day. Then again, the old-fashioned Delft crockery – blue ships sailing on a blue sea – was very attractive. Our modern dinner-tables, when arrayed for a party, have almost too much fuss and feathers. Women worry until they get cut glass, if it is not given them as a wedding present, and several sets of costly plates – Sèvres, Dresden, or Crown Derby – are apt to seem indispensable to housekeepers of comparatively limited means.”

“Cut glass is lovely, and the same plates through seven courses are rather trying,” said Barbara, parenthetically.

“Of course it is lovely, and I am very glad you have some. But is not the modern American woman of refined sensibilities just a little too eager to crowd her table with every article of virtu she possesses – every ornamental spoon, dish, cup, and candlestick – until one is unable to see at any one spot more than a square inch of tablecloth? In the centre of the table she sets a crystal bowl of flowers, a silver basket of ferns, or a dish of fruit. This is flanked by apostle or gold-lined spoons, silver dishes of confectionery of various kinds, silver candlesticks or candelabra fitted with pink or saffron shades, one or two of which are expected to catch fire, an array of cut glass or Venetian glass at every plate, and, like as not, pansies strewn all over the table.”

“The modern dinner-table is very pretty,” responded Barbara. “I don’t see how it could be improved materially.”

“I dare say, but somehow one can’t help thinking at times that the effort for effect is too noticeable, and that the real object of sitting down to dinner in company, agreeable social intercourse, is consequently lost sight of. If only the very rich were guilty of wanton display, the answer would be that the rank and file of our well-to-do, sensible people have very simple entertainments. Unfortunately, while the very rich are constantly vying to outstrip one another, the dinner-table and the dinner of the well-to-do American are each growing more and more complex and elaborate. Perhaps not more so than abroad among the nobility or people of means; but certainly we have been Europeanized in this respect to such an extent that, not only is there practically nothing left for us to learn in the way of being luxurious, but I am not sure that we are not disposed to convince the rest of the civilized world that a free-born American, when fully developed, can be the most luxurious individual on earth.”

Barbara looked a little grave at this. “Everything used to be so ugly and unattractive a little while ago that I suppose our heads have been turned,” she answered. “After this I shall make a rule, when we give a dinner-party, to keep one-half of my table ornaments in the safe as a rebuke to my vanity. Only if I am to show so much of the tablecloth, I shall have to buy some with handsome patterns. Don’t you see?”

Perhaps this suggestion that our heads have been turned for the time being by our national prosperity, and that they will become straight again in due course of time, is the most sensible view to take of the situation. There can be no doubt that among well-to-do people, who would object to be classed in “the smart set,” as the reporters of social gossip odiously characterize those prominent in fashionable society in our large cities, the changes in the last thirty years connected with every-day living, as well as with entertaining, have all been in the direction of cosmopolitan usage. It is now only a very old-fashioned or a very blatant person who objects to the use of evening dress at the dinner-table, or the theatre, as inconsistent with true patriotism. The dinner-hour has steadily progressed from twelve o’clock noon until it has halted at seven post meridian, as the ordinary hour for the most formal meal of the day, with further postponement to half-past seven or even eight among the fashionable for the sake of company. The frying-pan and the tea-pot have ceased to reign supreme as the patron saints of female nutrition, and the beefsteak, the egg, both cooked and raw, milk and other flesh-and-blood-producing food are abundantly supplied to the rising generation of both sexes by the provident parent of to-day. The price of beef in our large cities has steadily advanced in price until its use as an article of diet is a serious monster to encounter in the monthly bills, but the husband and father who is seeking to live wisely, seems not to be deterred from providing it abundantly.

From this it is evident that if we are unduly exuberant in the pursuit of creature comforts, it is not solely in the line of purely ornamental luxuries. If we continue to try our nervous systems by undue exertion, they are at least better fitted to stand the strain, by virtue of plenty of nutritious food, even though dinner-parties tempt us now and then to over-indulgence, or bore us by their elaborateness. Yet it remains to be seen whether the income of the American husband and father will be able to stand the steady drain occasioned by the liberal table he provides, and it may be that we have some lessons in thrift on this score still in store for us. There is this consolation, that if our heads have been turned in this respect also, and we are supplying more food for our human furnaces than they need, the force of any reaction will not fall on us, but on the market-men, who are such a privileged class that our candidates for public office commonly provide a rally for their special edification just before election-day, and whose white smock-frocks are commonly a cloak for fat though greasy purses. Yet Providence seems to smile on the market-man in that it has given him the telephone, through which the modern mistress can order her dinner, or command chops or birds, when unexpected guests are foreshadowed. Owing to the multiplicity of the demands upon the time of both men and women, the custom of going to market in person has largely fallen into decay. The butcher and grocer send assistants to the house for orders, and the daily personal encounter with the smug man in white, which used to be as inevitable as the dinner, has now mainly been relegated to the blushing bride of from one week to two years’ standing, and the people who pay cash for everything. Very likely we are assessed for the privilege of not being obliged to nose our turkeys and see our chops weighed in advance, and it is difficult to answer the strictures of those who sigh for what they call the good old times, when it was every man’s duty, before he went to his office, to look over his butcher’s entire stock and select the fattest and juiciest edibles for the consumption of himself and family. As for paying cash for everything, my wife Barbara says that, unless people are obliged to be extremely economical, no woman in this age of nervous prostration ought to run the risk of bringing on that dire malady by any such imprudence, and that to save five dollars a month on a butcher’s bill, and pay twenty-five to a physician for ruined nerves, is false political economy.

“I agree with you,” she added, “that we Americans live extravagantly in the matter of daily food – especially meat – as compared with the general run of people in other countries; but far more serious than our appetites and liberal habits, in my opinion, is the horrible waste which goes on in our kitchens, due to the fact that our cooks are totally ignorant of the art of making the most of things. Abroad, particularly on the Continent, they understand how to utilize every scrap, so that many a comfortable meal is provided from what our servants habitually cast into the swill-tub. Here there is perpetual waste – waste – waste, and no one seems to understand how to prevent it. There you have one never-failing reason for the size of our butchers’ and grocers’ bills.”

I assume that my wife, who is an intelligent person, must be correct in this accusation of general wastefulness which she makes against the American kitchen. If so, here we are confronted again with the question of domestic service from another point of view. How long can we afford to throw our substance into the swill-tub? If our emigrant cooks do not understand the art of utilizing scraps and remnants, are we to continue to enrich our butchers without let or hindrance? It would seem that if the American housewife does not take this matter in hand promptly, the cruel laws of political economy will soon convince her by grisly experience that neither poetry nor philanthropy can flourish in a land where there is perpetual waste below stairs.