Cream of corn soup.Frenched chops; purée of cucumber; potato croquettes; iced tea.Lettuce with peppers stuffed with string-beans; cheese balls.Ginger ice.
"Just make a memorandum of that cucumber purée," said Mary as Dolly finished. "You cook the cucumbers soft in just a tiny bit of water; then season well, put them through the sieve, and serve very hot, a spoonful on each plate. It is very good indeed. The salad, too, is nice. Fill green pepper shells with tiny cooked beans, and pour French dressing over; on top of each put one white cream cheese ball, and stand on a lettuce leaf. The ice is just a plain lemon water ice, with preserved ginger cut up in it."
"Now the next one," said Dolly.
"Well, suppose we have two for each season. This will do for another summer one:
"Cubes of watermelon in glasses.Soft shell crabs; fried tomatoes; potatoes.Yellow tomato salad on lettuce.Raspberry ice; sponge cake.Iced coffee."
"Suppose you can't get crabs; what do you do then?"
"Tell the grocer to order them for you in tins; they come with the shells thrown in at about thirty or forty cents a big can, which holds enough for a whole family. Instead of having the soft-shelled crabs fried, devil the canned meat and serve in the shells; it's perfectly delicious."
"And whatever is yellow tomato salad? I never ate such a thing."
"Don't you know those little pear-shaped yellow tomatoes you see in summer? You scald those and skin them, chill them well, lay them on lettuce, and put on French dressing. Or, you can have mayonnaise with them, if you like. It's a nice change from the usual salad, and it will not interfere with your having fried tomatoes with the main course, for they neither look or taste alike."
"Very well; now the next one."
"Mark this Autumn. Suppose we have melons first;
"Little melons, halved.Tomato bisque.Strips of veal, breaded; creamed chestnuts; spiced peaches; coffee.Salad of red peppers filled with cauliflower.Pêche Melba.
"Cut the melons in halves, Dolly, and chill them, but mind you don't put ice inside, to make them watery and horrid. And pick out little melons, spicy greenones. Get the big Italian chestnuts to serve with the veal, if you can. Cook and peel them, and leave the inside skins on; then just cream them. If you can't get those, use ordinary ones, and put them through the sieve like a purée; they taste just as well. The salad is very pretty. Cut the tops off the red peppers and take out the inside exactly as you did with the green ones; cook the cauliflower, pick it up in flowerets, and mix with French dressing and fill the peppers. If you wish to be perfectly grand, cook a carrot, cut it up into tiny dice, and put a few on top of each; the colors are lovely together. Serve these on lettuce, of course. Then the dessert. Halve nice peaches, peel them, and put one half on a round of sponge cake for each person. Fill the middle with a spoonful of plain ice-cream, and add a little bit of candied cherry if you have any."
"One more for Autumn; two for each season except Spring,—I have three for that," said Dolly complacently.
"Try this:
"Cream of Lima bean soup.Filets of fish; white sauce; potato balls; stuffed tomatoes.Lettuce and grape salad.Frozen peaches.Coffee.
"That needs no explaining, I am sure. Have sauce tartare instead of white sauce with the fish if you can afford it, Dolly, for it's better. And serve the peaches in glasses, just a little to each person; they will be cheap, anyway, at that time of year. Now for winter; that is the most difficult time to entertain in, to my thinking."
"Still, we must entertain," said Dolly inflexibly.
"Then try this:
"Clam soup.Creamed chicken; peas in crusts; sweet potato puff; tea.Celery and nut salad with mayonnaise.Little cakes filled with ice-cream."
"Very good! And as I can make all those things, go right on while the inspiration holds."
"Bouillon.Fried oysters with sauce tartare; French fried potatoes; creamed celery.Banana and peanut salad.Chocolate mousse.Coffee."
"How do you make that salad?"
"Peel the bananas and cut them in halves crosswise; cut off also the pointed end to make each one looklike a croquette; then roll them in chopped peanuts and lay them on lettuce. Pass mayonnaise with them."
"That's easy enough," Dolly said as she scribbled it down. "And that is the whole set already. I wish you would go on and do me a lot more, Mary; you do them like a lightning calculator."
"Why did I go to all the trouble to teach you that Game of Menus, I'd like to know, if this is the result? Not another one will I furnish you; just write out a lot yourself."
"Well, but don't rush away like that! Tell me how much these are going to cost?"
"I planned for a dollar and a quarter apiece for six people. That leaves a margin, and you can put as much or as little in addition in flowers and such extravagances as you choose. I do not think any luncheon will cost more than my estimate; if it does, I'll pay the difference."
"Then I'm certain it will not cost one cent more," said Dolly with decision. "That remark settles the matter for me. I know too well you would never make the offer if you were not sure and certain."
"A letter from Aunt Maria," said Mr. Thorne, who had met the postman at the door at breakfast time. "Dear old lady! I wonder whether she can be coming to make us a good long visit."
His wife looked up from the coffee cups with dismay. "Don't suggest such a thing," she remonstrated. "Remember that last three months visit. Of course she will not come again for years."
Dolly looked inquiringly at her sister. "Aunt Maria? I think I recall something about a visit from such a relative."
"Of course you do," said her brother. "She came and found Mary was keeping house all wrong, and kindly tried to show her how it should be done. She insisted on boiled dinners and pie for me at night, and doughnuts every morning for breakfast. When at last she showed signs of getting ready to go home, I entreated her to stay longer, and it is my fondest dream to have her back; indeed, I want her to make her home with us permanently."
"Do hurry up and read the letter, Dick. If she says she is coming here, I warn you in advance that Dolly can keep house. I shall go off and make some visits."
After a brief glance at the page Mr. Thorne waved the letter about his head. "Glory, glory!" he chanted. "Listen to this and think shame to your inhospitable selves.
"'My dear Nephew:—I have decided to go West and spend the summer with your great-aunt Eliza. I write to say that, as I do not care to close the cottage, I shall be pleased to have you and Mary spend two or three months in it. I recall that though your ways of keeping house in the city seemed strange to me, still Mary did have things tidy, so I am quite willing to have her here in my absence. I shall go next week, and you can come any time after that. My regards to your wife.
"'My dear Nephew:—I have decided to go West and spend the summer with your great-aunt Eliza. I write to say that, as I do not care to close the cottage, I shall be pleased to have you and Mary spend two or three months in it. I recall that though your ways of keeping house in the city seemed strange to me, still Mary did have things tidy, so I am quite willing to have her here in my absence. I shall go next week, and you can come any time after that. My regards to your wife.
"'Your affectionate aunt,"'Maria Hancock.'"
Mary beamed as she listened. "Dear old thing," she said when her husband laid down the letter; "there's a reward for all my sufferings while she was here. Dolly, she has a darling little house only an hour's ride from town; and a garden, my dear, a garden! We can have a lovely cool time all summer, and eat our own vegetables. Think of it."
"Yes, Dolly, I seem to smell the delicious, soul-satisfying odor of those onions now," said Dick, luxuriously closing his eyes. "Young ones, Dolly, strong and spicy. We shall have them for breakfast in the morning and for dinner at night, and I shall have a light lunch of them with bread and butter at bedtime; there's nothing like onions for insomnia. Sundays, of course, I shall have them four times. Dear, dear Aunt Maria!"
"Hush, Dick; don't spoil all our pleasure with such horrid suggestions. Is it really a nice place, Mary?"
"Nice! It's heavenly. Not much society, you know, just a plain little country village, but cool and lovely. We will wear our oldest gowns, and do up fruit, and have our breakfasts on the porch, and just revel."
"Cherry pie," murmured Mr. Thorne, who was apparently eating his breakfast in a sort of waking dream. "And apple pie; rhubarb pie, too, and currant pie; strawberry pie and gooseberry pie also. Dear Aunt Maria!"
"You can cut the grass nights after you get home, Dick," said his wife; "and you can get up early and pull the weeds in the garden and water things. And on half-holidays you can saw wood; I remember Aunt Maria said she had a wood-stove. It will give you just the exercise you need, and be a pleasant change for you from office work."
"Mary," said Dick, rising suddenly from the table, "don't detain me with such frivolous ideas when I am in such a hurry as I am in this morning. However, I must pause long enough to say that I am to have extra hours this summer, and no half-holidays, so that it will not do for you to depend upon me to pull weeds or cut grass. You had better plan to do those little things yourselves."
"He may joke all he likes," smiled his wife as the dining-room door closed after her husband, "but he is as delighted as we are over the prospect. We will go the very minute Aunt Maria leaves the house. It seems as though I couldn't wait till then."
In ten days the little apartment was ready to be closed for the summer and the trunks stood in the hallway. Mrs. Thorne was taking a parting glance all around.
"I have just one regret in leaving," she said to Dolly. "That is, that we have had no time to try and sub-let this place. I have known ever so many people who went away in summer and rented their apartments to people who wanted to come to the city and study in the college or take a course in art, or something of the sort. Often you can find half a dozen nice girls who want to do their own housekeeping in a furnished flat, and then, you see, I would have let them have this for exactly the same rent as we pay and sohave saved a lot. Of course, as we do not pay rent in the country, there is no additional expense, but still I cannot help mourning over the 'might have been.' Remember, Dolly, to try and get a good tenant when you move out temporarily."
By afternoon of the next day the family was settled in the little cottage. It was a plain, old house with a low roof, and the furnishings were largely of hair-cloth, and the pictures enlarged crayon portraits of deceased relatives, or wreaths of wax flowers encased in glass. Still, the porch was shaded with vines, and the flowers grew luxuriantly in the little yard in front, and back of the house was what Mary declared was "a perfect dream" of a vegetable garden, with rows of currant and raspberry bushes along the fence and a group of fruit trees in a tiny orchard further off. Altogether, it was just what filled their needs.
"The kitchen, however, does not suit me a bit," declared Dolly after the rest of the house had been examined and pronounced quite comfortable, and roomy enough for a servantless ménage.
"Well, it isn't up to our modern notions, to be sure," said her sister, looking critically around. "Everything is as clean as wax, as I had expected, but an unpainted sink needs lots of scrubbing, and a wood-stove needs blacking, and also constant stoking. Dear me, how horrid it is to have to burn wood aftergas! But never mind; I ought to be ashamed to say such a thing in view of our mercies. Keep your mind on the garden, Dolly, and such things as scrubbing will be forgotten."
"And no bread-mixer," Dolly went on, investigating the pantry shelves, "and no egg-beater and no cream-whipper! My dear, we must pack up our trunks and go straight back to town. We will be worn to a frazzle in a week working in Aunt Maria's ways."
"Don't worry," said Mrs. Thorne placidly. "Those things are all in the big barrel I packed while you were off shopping day before yesterday. I forgot to tell you. I knew we would have to eke out in such things. As to the bread-mixer, one of my unpardonable sins, in Aunt Maria's eyes, was that I made bread in one, so I knew in advance that I must bring mine along."
"And did you buy a kerosene-stove, too?"
"Yes, I did! I was going to surprise you with it, however, and I wish you hadn't asked. I just boldly took the price out of Incidentals, knowing that we should save mints of money on vegetables this summer and I could put the amount back on our return to town in September."
"And all those groans over the stove-stoking we were going to do were words, idle words!"
Mrs. Thorne laughed gaily. "Just low comedy,"she said. "And now for our meals. What shall we have for dinner to-night? We shall have to go down-town and buy some butter and eggs and coffee and such things, and bring them back, too; we must not expect city service here."
They decided that this first night it would be foolish to try and have a regular dinner, so when Mr. Thorne came home he found a supper table set out on the porch, and a little meal arranged of parsley omelet, creamed potatoes, and coffee, followed by strawberries and cream. It was the very poetry of living to sit leisurely in the growing dusk under the vines and listen to the soft country noises. The family then and there decided to take their meals out-of-doors all summer.
"The neighbors will think we are crazy," said Mr. Thorne placidly. "They will write to Aunt Maria and tell her we are disgracing her hearthstone. No well conducted villagers would think of doing such a thing as eating on a porch when there was a dining-room with a black walnut table and six chairs in their proper places. They will not consider us respectable, my dears!"
"I can't help it if they don't like it, and I don't believe it would surprise Aunt Maria in the least if she heard of it; I think she would say she had no doubt I was quite capable of doing something even asoutlandish as this. But in spite of everything, we certainly shall have our meals out-of-doors except on blazing hot noons, and on rainy nights. So there!"
Mr. Thorne was entirely right in the estimation put on the family by the neighbors, but nevertheless they ate, and rejoiced that they could eat under the vines on the porch all summer long.
The second day they took account of what their garden could be depended on to give them. They found string-beans in plenty, radishes, potatoes, spinach and beets. Lettuce was almost ready; peas and corn progressing nicely, and later on there would be cucumbers and tomatoes and eggplant. Last of all, squashes and melons might be looked for. They could scarcely believe all this wealth was to be theirs for the picking.
"But the weeding, don't forget that!" said Dolly, as she heard her sister's exclamation. "I somehow don't seem to fancy the idea of weeding this place. At least, I don't yearn to begin."
"I think we had better have a regular weeding boy; we can pay him in vegetables."
"He will not take them; everybody has vegetables here."
"Then we will pay him in dollars and cents,—mostly cents. Of course we can't do the weeding ourselves, except casually and at odd minutes, and I foresee that Dick will never do a bit. I shall take themoney out of what we would spend on food at home, our dollar a day. Weeding is a legitimate expense, but you know how I hate to break into Incidentals, and we can easily save here."
"There's the washing and ironing, remember. You have got to pay for those, you know. I wonder whether they will be a great deal here."
"Those will be less than in town; we can have the wash-lady scrub up the floors too."
"And there is milk."
"That will be less, too. In town we have to pay eight cents a bottle, and in some places it is more than that; here, I fancy, it will be about six cents a quart."
"And there is ice; or do they use ice in the country?"
"Yes, they cut it on the river near here; but it is not always good or abundant. I rather think we cannot use it recklessly; I have known the supply to give out in the middle of the summer when there was a short crop cut."
"And is it cheap?"
"About as much as in town, I think; that is the way usually."
"What do you think about meat? Did you see the butcher shop when we came up from the station?"
"Yes, and I did not like its looks a bit better than I see you did. But perhaps we need not buy our meat there, if we do not like it better when we go inside andlook around. There may be a meat-wagon that comes around."
"I think meat-wagons are horrid; they are never clean."
"Not to our city eyes, you mean. Well, we shall see. Perhaps there is a model cart with everything spick and span, and driver in a white jacket; who knows?"
One morning, when they had quite settled down to housekeeping, Mary got out the best preserving-kettle, after the breakfast dishes were done, and presently the weeding boy appeared with a big basket of strawberries which had been ordered the day before, as the garden bed must not be entirely picked off.
"Now for some delicious strawberry preserves," the cook observed as she began vigorously to stem them. "Get out my book, Dolly, and copy down for yourself that recipe marked 'Strawberries; unfailing.' I got it from a Danish woman once, and it is the best I ever saw. The fruit looks like rich German berries, the kind that come done up in glass and cost a dollar a bottle, and they never lose color or spoil; they keep for years."
So Dolly read and wrote out:
"'Get firm, large berries, and stem but do not wash them. Weigh three-quarters of a pound of sugar toeach pound of fruit, and arrange them in layers in your kettle; cover and let them stand all night (or if the weather is very hot and damp, do this in the early morning and cook them toward night). The next morning put the kettle on and bring the berries slowly to the boiling point and skim them. Simmer exactly fifteen minutes and take the kettle off the fire; cover it with a thin cloth and let it stand all night without moving. In the morning heat again, and skim; this time let it simmer exactly ten minutes and take off the kettle; drain off the juice and boil down for just five minutes, put the berries in, and put them in the cans and seal.' That's a queer rule," Dolly commented as she finished.
"It's perfectly splendid, and we will follow it to the letter and you shall see for yourself. Now remember this important thing that I am about to tell you, for it is something you must never lose sight of when you do up fruit: the reason why any fruit spoils, when you put it in good, air-tight cans, is that you have not sterilized the cans and covers, and have not used new rubbers each year."
"But just how do you sterilize cans?"
"Wash them, and then put them in the oven, tops and all, and bake them half an hour. Put the rubbers in hot water for fifteen minutes and wipe them dry. And always use glass cans with glass tops fastened onwith wires. When you put the fruit away, find a place for it in a cool, rather dark closet. If you do all these things, none of it will ever 'turn' or spoil."
"Well, I'll impress it all on my mind. Now tell me what we are going to do up this summer, and all about it."
"Currants come first. I shall make jelly of some of those, and later on we will spice them and make conserve, and mix some with raspberries for another sort of jam."
"Does your jelly always 'jell?'"
"Always. It has to, whether it wants to or not. Most jellies are perfectly easy to make, so you can follow a good cook-book; currant jelly is the only sort you could ever have any trouble with, and that you need not have if you follow this rule. Write down:
"'Currant Jelly That Never Fails. Take currants that are barely ripe, and do not pick them just after a rain, when the juice is thin. Do not stem them or wash them, but look them over carefully and crush them in a crock with a wooden potato masher. Put them in a bag, and hang them up and let them drain all night. In the morning measure the juice and take just as much sugar, with the addition of one extra half-pint at the end; put this in the oven to heat. Put the juice on the fire and boil it twenty minutes, skimming it occasionally; then put in the hot sugar and stirtill this is dissolved. Let it boil up hard just once, and take it from the fire immediately, for the jelly has come; longer boiling will prevent its ever setting. Pour it into glasses and put it in the sunshine for two days, then cover with paraffin and put it away. This is perfectly clear and of a fine flavor.'"
"So it is," Mrs. Thorne added, as Dolly copied the last words. "Next let us make a sort of list of what you can put up when you are where you can get fruits cheaply in summer. When you are in town you cannot well do them by the wholesale, but a glass or a can when you can find something reasonable, such as a box of nice berries one day, and a quart of nicer plums the next, and so on."
"Like winter preserves," said Dolly.
"Exactly. But now, as we happen to be in clover this summer, we must do up a lot of things. I have learned to alternate the fruits, one year doing one kind and the next leaving that sort out and taking another, for variety's sake; but as you are going to divide all the fruit with me this year and have half for your very own, we must do up heaps and piles of everything. I will tell you what we can make if we choose."
Dolly took her pencil again, and her sister gave her this list: "Take strawberries first; those you preserve and also make into jam. Then come cherries; likethe strawberries, you use the Danish rule, taking less sugar if they are sweet, or the usual amount if they are sour. You can make spiced cherries to eat with meats, too; those are lovely. Currants you make into jelly, of course; to my mind it is the best kind of all. Then you spice them also, and make currant conserve, which is a mixture of currants, raisins and oranges, and awfully good. You also mix them with red raspberries for jam, and if you like, you make raspberry and currant jelly too. Raspberries you do up by the Danish rule, using the smaller amount of sugar, as they are sweet. Raspberry jam is very nice for a good many things, and I usually do up a good deal of that.
"Then come gooseberries; those you make into jam to eat with cream cheese—home-made Bar-le-Duc, you know. And you spice them exactly as you do currants. All those rules are in your cook-book.
"Pineapples you can with a good deal of sugar. Blackberries you can make into jam and jelly, and you can also can them, but to my mind they are pretty seedy except in jelly, and that is rather dark colored, not as pretty as most jellies. Still, all things are good for a change. Blueberries or huckleberries I can for tarts in winter.
"Then melons come on, and you can make watermelon sweet pickles, and also citron preserves. Plums come, too, about this time, and those you merelycan, making them as sweet as you like. I put up greengages and purple plums in quantities, and use them for deep tarts in winter, saving eggs, you see, in my desserts. And I also make plum jelly and spiced plums, if I can get them at a cheap price.
"Peaches are your best preserve. I can them in a rather rich syrup, leaving them whole and putting in a good many kernels from their stones. Buy those carefully, for they are usually expensive. The bits left over I make into peach jam; it is the best thing for little tarts and to use with whipped cream in different ways. And of course I make spiced peaches, too. Pears I can, and I make pear conserve, out of pears, lemon and ginger-root; that is very good with cream cheese and crackers for lunch.
"Quinces I use in jelly, sometimes mixing apples with it, as it is apt to be a little high flavored. I also do up a few cans of preserves, and once in awhile I make a lovely conserve of quince, grapefruit and a few oranges; that I do later in the fall. Grapes I make into jelly, and I spice a lot, too. I make a marmalade with the skins and pulp and sugar, all boiled down together; and grape conserve, made of grape pulp and oranges and raisins, is one of my choicest things. Citron you preserve; it looks exactly like pineapple.
"By this time crab-apples come, and I spice some of those, and make a good deal of jelly, it is so clear andpretty. By the way, because your cook-book will not mention the fact, remember always to put half a lemon, cut up with its peel, into each kettle of hot jelly as you take it off the fire; just stir it in and leave it while you dip out the jelly. It gives a delicious flavor. And when you want geranium jelly, drop in three of four leaves of rose geranium with the lemon at the same time; you can bruise them a little if you like. Spiced crab-apple jelly is nice, too; you just add a bag of whole spices as it cooks. You see what a lot of things there are, and I am sure I could think up others if I tried. But probably you will learn more for yourself as you keep house, because every cook is experimenting nowadays, and you constantly hear of new things."
"I am sure I shall love to do up fruit; it looks so pretty when it is in the glass, and you feel so rich when you see it on your shelves."
"The worst of it is that it is the poetry of cooking, and all housekeepers love to do it up, love it not wisely but too well. They buy when they ought not, and put too much money in both fruit and sugar. Often they have to keep a lot over from year to year, which is not at all a good idea. So be on your guard and do not rashly buy and do up everything in sight every summer. Of course this one year, when we are economizing so in vegetables and milk, we can affordto spend more than usual in other things. Then, too, most of the fruit is right in our own garden, which is a wonderful stroke of good fortune and probably will not come our way twice. And I brought out that barrel of cans and glasses from town, so we shall not have to buy as many as we would otherwise; we shall have to buy some dozens, however, I am afraid."
"Don't you think we ought to do up some fruit for Aunt Maria, Mary?"
"Indeed I do. I am not sure whether she will like the idea,—though I hope she will like the fruit,—but I think we had better get out her own cans and fill them with the old-fashioned things she will be apt to enjoy, such as cherries and strawberries and quinces and watermelon rind. It will be fun to leave her some things, and goodness knows we ought to, after all we have had out of her garden."
"Do you ever do up vegetables?"
"I seldom have done that, but we must this year. We will do up some peas and corn and succotash, and string-beans and tomatoes, anyway."
"I thought vegetables didn't keep well if you did them up yourself."
"Get a good rule to begin with; you can get a perfect one by sending to Washington to the Bureau of Agriculture. Then sterilize your cans, and you won't have a bit of trouble. Spoiling used to be thebane of a housekeeper, for five times out of ten things would sour, and she could not tell what was the matter; but sterilize the cans, and you will be all right."
"And do you think you save a lot by doing up vegetables?"
"Of course you do—heaps of money; you can see how that is at a glance; and they are so much better than what you buy, too. Tomatoes I just peel and salt a little, and put in cans and stand them in a cold oven; then I make a fire and leave them till the tomatoes boil. I keep one extra canful ready to fill up the others from as I take them out, because they shrink a little as they cook; then I put on the covers. They come out six months later just as though they had just been gathered. You see how easy that is, especially as you scald the tomatoes instead of taking off the skin with a knife, as you do with fruits. String beans and peas I can so you would not know them from fresh ones. I pick them over and put them on in cold water and simmer them fifteen minutes; then I drain and measure them; to a quart of either I put in one level teaspoonful of salt and one of sugar, and to each four quarts one of soda; then I put them back in the kettle, just cover them with hot water, cook five minutes and can them in glass jars."
"Oh, Mary, that reminds me—pickles! You haven't said a word about those."
"To be sure. Well, I do up few of those, because we like sweet pickles made from fruit better than sour ones of vegetables; but you can make some tiny little cucumber pickles if you like, and chow chow, and chili sauce, and a sort of mince made of green tomatoes and cabbage and all sorts of things. You can study up on pickles, later on, and ask people who like to do them up about recipes, and decide, as time goes on, what you want. We have undertaken so much this summer that, except for chili sauce and a few jars of other things, I do not think we shall do much in the pickle line. Pickles are really not economical, because they do not serve as a food, as fruit and jellies and jams do; they are only a relish, after all. Still, they help out, especially at luncheon, so put up some when you keep house, by all means."
Picking over the strawberries and starting the process of preserving them, making up jam out of the smaller and poorer berries, and a hurried trip down town for more sugar, together with getting lunch and cleaning up the kitchen after all the work was done, consumed most of the day. It was not until toward night that Mrs. Thorne began to make preparations for dinner, and then she found that the beef left by the butcher had evidently not been kept in the ice-house, but had been exposed on the counter, and it had a distinct odor which was anything but pleasant.
"No wonder he drove off in such haste after he gave me the bundle," said Dolly indignantly. "Whatever shall we do, now, Mary? Go down-town for more?"
"No, it's much too hot, and we are too tired. We shall have a supper of some kind. Let me see; what can we have? I'm really too used up to think."
"Iced tea for one thing; that is made and ready, at least. But the kerosene-stove has got to be filled before we can cook anything, for the oil gave out just as we finished the last strawberry."
Mary looked apprehensive. "It did? My dear, that was the last drop in the house, and they won't deliver anything after four o'clock. And there's not a single stick of wood sawed, either, for that miserable boy, who promised to come back after handing in the berries, has never appeared at all."
"What will you do? Dick is sure to come home ravenous."
"There's the chafing-dish, blessings on it! And the alcohol bottle is full; even if all the other fuels have given out, that remains. We will stir up something in that and have a salad. Always have a chafing-dish, Dolly; there are times when life would not be worth living without it."
The emergency shelf of the pantry yielded a can of salmon, and this was drained and the bones removed, and a white sauce made for it in one of the pans ofthe dish. It was to be reheated and the fish put in it in the chafing-dish on the table. With this was to be bread and butter and iced tea.
"For a salad, Dolly, get those string-beans I cooked and set away this morning. Put them on lettuce and add French dressing; that will be very nice. For dessert I meant to have strawberries, but the very idea of them is nauseating after working with them all day."
"I should rather think so—strawberries, indeed! No, for once I am going over to neighbor Thomas' and borrow; that is the proper thing to do in the country, and I dare say they have felt slighted that we have not been before. Probably they think we are proud. I know they have more cream from that Jersey cow than they can possibly use, and I have an idea of a dessert I can make up all alone. Mary, do you think we shall ever be able to have a real live cow of our very own?"
"If we were going to live in the country the year around, I think somehow or other we ought to manage to have one. We should have to pay for hay and things in winter to feed it on, and get somebody to milk it, though, and I remember to have heard that caring for the milk was no small consideration when one has a small family. I rather think, when you counted up the first cost of a good cow and added the price ofits care and food, you would find it was cheaper to buy milk; but wouldn't it be perfectly delightful never to have to economize on it? Think of the cream soups and ice-cream and custards and fresh cream cheese and everything else! Well, Dolly, dear, run along on your errand, for if we continue this subject you will see me dissolve in tears."
Their neighbor proved to have a bowl of cream she did not need and was glad to let Dolly have, and in a moment the cream-whipper was at work, and presently a mass of stiff whip was ready, sweetened, flavored and laid lightly on a cold glass dish. Then going to the pantry, a small paper box was found among the cracker boxes sent from town. This was full of lady-fingers. Half of it was used for the dessert, as they were split and arranged around the cream, and there was a most delicious mould of charlotte russe. As half the five-cent box of cakes was left over, this cost but a veritable song, thanks to the neighbor's kindness, which, by the way, was repaid later on by the gift of a strawberry shortcake.
Mary was getting the chafing-dish ready to light for the second time the moment the latch of the garden gate announced her husband's home-coming. Meanwhile she gave Dolly a talk on its uses.
"Always have a chafing-dish in the house," she began seriously. "When you need it at all, you needit dreadfully. Now, in a place like this, where you may be caught unawares at any moment with no fuel, you can see that we simply could not do without it. Of course in town we have the gas-stove, and that cooks just as well as this, but even there a chafing-dish is a good thing to own. On Sunday night, for supper, it is more fun to cook with this than it is to stir up things in the kitchen. Then, too, when you have people in during the evening, it is nice to have them sit around the table and chat while you get up a little supper with it. You can have so many good things in it, too, such as lobster, creamed or Newburg, and scrambled eggs mixed with green peppers or tomatoes, or creamed haddie, or cheese fondu or rarebit. And with sandwiches and coffee and salad, you can see you can have a really beautiful supper, the coffee in the machine on the sideboard or on one end of the table, the salad ready in its bowl, and the chafing-dish and hot plates in front of the hostess."
"Yes, of course it is fun to use one. I know lots of girls who make a regular business of learning how to make new things; they take cooking lessons on them."
"I know they do, but sometimes I am inclined to think they overdo that matter. You should not take a chafing-dish too seriously, in my opinion. It is invaluable in an emergency, and good at other times,but after all it is better to learn to cook on a range, and make all sorts of things, and then you can easily add on the chafing-dish cookery. In other words, it is an informal utensil for informal occasions, not for every-day use."
"Well, certainly to-night we needed it badly enough, and if Dick declines to saw wood this evening, as my prophetic soul says he will, we shall have to get breakfast on it too. What will you have?"
"Let me see. Are there plenty of eggs? I think we will scramble some, or, if we are short, we will cream codfish in the dish. The coffee I shall make in one of the two pans, too, since our machine is in town. Toast we can't have, and muffins are equally out of the question, but we will have berries, and bread and butter, and then our nice hot dish and coffee. That's a meal fit for anybody."
"And 'no trouble at all,'" quoted Dolly.
As summer went on the weather turned extremely hot, and the problem of keeping the little house cool and doing the work easily became a real study to the sisters. It was such a simple matter to allow the cooking to stretch itself out over so much of the morning that before they realized it they were tired out for the rest of the day.
In order to make things easier, they decided to rise a trifle earlier than usual, throw open all the doors and windows, and let the cool air in; then they would breakfast on the porch as usual, wash up the dishes, and set the house in order and close and darken it for the middle of the day. There would still be time to go down-town and market and do what cooking was necessary, and yet before noon everything would be out of the way. By careful planning they could manage the luncheons and dinner so that they could be ready in advance and the long afternoons could be devoted to rest and reading. Then between four and five o'clock the doors and windows were again thrown open. The dinner table was laid on the porch, justbefore the six o'clock train was due, and the dinner itself was put on in only a moment, thanks to the foresight of the morning.
One of the things upon which Mrs. Thorne laid great emphasis was the delightfulness of cold meals on hot days. When one rose jaded from a sultry night she felt it was not the time for codfish cakes or scrambled eggs. When luncheon was to be set out, things from the refrigerator were what one wished for, cold and comfortable. Even at dinner, the food on a blisteringly hot evening was cold; cold and appetizing, and quite as nourishing as though it had been heated.
They arranged these meals in this way: for breakfast, they cooked oatmeal or farina or some other cereal in the fireless stove all day, till it was a jelly; toward night they put this into a mould, cooled it, and then set it on the ice. In the morning they had first a pretty form of this cereal surrounded by red raspberries or sliced peaches, with sugar and cream; this, with toast and hot coffee, was all they wished for. Sometimes, when they tired of the cereal, they had a chilled salad of sliced tomatoes on lettuce, with a light French dressing, a curious breakfast dish, but one they found very refreshing in the heat.
On cooler mornings they had a first course of little melons, followed by eggs, muffins and coffee, or fried tomatoes in the place of the eggs.
For luncheon they had all sorts of things from the garden. Often the main dish was a vegetable salad,—string-beans or stuffed tomatoes, or cucumbers and tomatoes,—with freshly made cottage cheese bought from a neighbor, and bread and butter and iced tea, coffee or chocolate. Or, if the day was cool, they had the vegetable hot,—baked corn, or creamed peas, or tomatoes, baked, filled with crumbs and seasoning,—and for a second course there was usually fruit. Luncheons such as these were nothing to get up. The vegetables were prepared directly after breakfast. If they were to be served as salads, they were cooked, cooled and set on the ice; if hot, they were made all ready to put in the oven at the last moment.
Their cold dinners, however, were their pride. They found so many good things to have that they fairly hesitated which to choose for any particular night. Sometimes they began with clear soup. This, of course, was made the day before in the tireless stove, and only strained and put on ice the next morning for the second evening. On very hot days sometimes they put it in a small pail, and set this in another and larger one, with ice between, and put it back in the stove for the afternoon; then it came out full of splinters of ice, a most delightfully cool affair. Fruit soups they experimented with, but found they did not care for, so they clung to this clear bouillon when they had soup at all.
Usually, however, their dinner began with meat. This was made ready either the day before it was needed, or else it was prepared early in the morning. They had veal loaf sometimes, surrounded with sliced tomatoes and French dressing; or slices of cold mutton with peas in mayonnaise; or occasionally, as a treat, jellied chicken with the peas. Sometimes they had bits of lamb, cooked very tender with a knuckle-bone, and then made exactly like the jellied chicken, the meat turning out set in an aspic. Often peas were mixed with the lamb in the mould, and then a little gelatine was added to ensure its setting firmly. Usually, with the dish, they had dressed lettuce.
After this combination course of meat and salad, came dessert. They often had an ice or sherbet made from the fruit in the garden, costing nothing but the small amount of sugar used in making it and the ice used in freezing. This was alternated with some sort of mousse made in the fireless stove. Sometimes there was fruit jelly, raspberries, possibly, set with lemon jelly, moulded in a circle with whipped cream in the middle. Or there would be a chilled rice pudding; or peaches, cut up, sugared, and put in a pail with ice around them and set away till they were half frozen. These things, too, could all be prepared early in the day.
Usually, even when the weather was hot, the oneexception to the cold-food rule was the coffee, which they liked best hot at night as well as morning, but when they had had any mousse or ice-cream for dinner, part of this was sometimes saved, and late in the evening there came in tall glasses of iced coffee or chocolate with a spoonful of the cream in the bottom of each; a sort of ice-cream-soda they particularly fancied.
When the weather grew cooler these cold dinners gave way to hot ones. Then they had cream soups first, made with any vegetable they happened to have ready cooked from the night before; a spoonful of spinach, or a handful of beans, or the outer leaves of lettuce, all were used. Afterward came meat and vegetables, and then perhaps a berry tart or a custard or shortcake. However, whatever they had, they were certain to prepare it to the last possible spoonful in the morning.
The meat course at dinner was too often a problem, for the butcher continued all summer to exercise them in the virtue of patience. In the early part of their stay his shop was so far from sanitarily clean that they were obliged to tell him they could not trade with him unless he improved his ways. This he good-naturedly consented to do as far as in him lay. He put his meat in the ice-box instead of leaving it exposed on the counter; what there was out he covered with amosquito-netting. But as his ice-box was small, this meant that the meat could not hang long enough to make it tender; it was brought in one day by the farmers and put out for sale the next. All the beef was tough and stringy; the veal was apt to be far too young, and the chickens far too old. There was seldom any lamb to be had, and the mutton often had a curious flavor decidedly suggestive of wool.
To offset these difficulties, however, there were some advantages, advantages over the city market, even. By watching the calves brought in, Mary could select the largest one and insist that her meat must be cut from that. Then she would also secure the liver for almost nothing, and the sweetbreads and brains for a song; as she predicted in the winter she would find, the farming community did not appreciate these things as she did. The liver she roasted after larding it, and it made a delicious dinner, while the left-over appeared the next night as mock terrapin and was equally good. The sweetbreads and brains were of course among their choicest dishes. Sometimes on a Sunday night they had a salad of them served on lettuce with mayonnaise.
The mutton she bought occasionally, for it was cheap, too, but she always parboiled it before roasting it, and put considerable seasoning in the dish to disguise the woolly flavor she perhaps imagined shenoticed. Once cold, however, this disappeared, and the meat was a welcome change from the other things she could get.
Though the beef was really almost worthless in the condition in which it appeared in the shop, as it was coarse and tough and not ready to eat, this Mary also made palatable. She would buy a piece off the round, and put it through her own meat-chopper to ensure having it clean. This then appeared as Hamburg steak, surrounded by all sorts of vegetables, small piles of tiny carrots, little beans and fresh peas setting the brown meat off by their alternating colors. Or she cut the beef up into finger lengths and stewed it long and slowly in the tireless stove, putting in barley and tomatoes and other good things till it came out a delicious, rich, and nourishing stew. When she could get a beef's tongue, she always rejoiced, for one night it was braised with vegetables, and another the slices left over were set in an aspic jelly, and a third the rest was chopped, creamed and slightly baked, and the whole cost little as compared to what she would have had to pay in town, where tongue was an extravagant meat.
When a chicken could be found which promised to be tender, that was purchased, not at twenty-two cents or thereabouts, as it would have been in the city, but for fifteen cents. This was usually split upthe back and panned for Sunday dinner. When an old fowl was purchased for jellied chicken for hot nights, it was first stewed to rags, then imbedded in its own stock, strained and set with gelatine, and it came out tender in spite of itself.
As to fish, once in awhile they could get something from the river. A fish-man drove a wagon past the door, but as he asked city prices for what he had, and as there was always some doubt as to just what day the fish had originally appeared on sale, these they never purchased. The little perch and sunfish small boys brought straight from the water, strung on twigs and still dripping, they did buy, and found them excellent for a change, though after the skin and bones were removed there was little left of the fish.
As to groceries, there had been a good deal of trouble at first. The coffee and tea at the post-office-shop were too poor to use; the spices were distinctly stale; crackers were to be had only in broken bits from the common barrel. Butter was almost as expensive as in town, and not very good even so; too often it was pale, and the buttermilk exuded in tiny drops here and there. Eggs were a constant source of anxiety; they were not only much more expensive than they should have been, according to Mrs. Thorne's ideas, but they were of all ages, and so mixed at the store that it was impossible to decide which woulddo for breakfast and which would not, until, by breaking several, one after the other, it was found that all were about equally stale.
To make housekeeping easy, it was necessary to hunt up a farmer's wife who made really good butter and would promise to deliver it weekly. This arrangement proved the solution of that difficulty. Sometimes, when the weather was cool, Dolly would take the cream-whipper, and using the sweet cream she could occasionally get for a small sum, she would turn out enough delicious unsalted butter to make the next day's meals a delight.
The egg problem had to be solved in the same fashion as the butter problem. A farmer had to be found who would bring in a dozen eggs or more a week, provided he had them; too often he came supplied with only half as many as they wished to have, hens being obdurate at the time. This meant that they had then to be very economical for awhile, till the wretched fowls returned to business.
Most of the groceries had to be ordered from town, for their coffee and tea must be good, and a certain number of packages of crackers and fancy biscuit, with salmon, olives, spices, chocolate, gelatine, raisins and some tins of olive oil, were ordered with them. The staples, flour, sugar, rice, salt, corn-meal and such things, they bought from day to day, as they were needed, at the local grocery.
Ice continued to arrive on schedule time, but as it was almost as dear as at home, they had to use it carefully. The water was bottled and put on it in the refrigerator. Tea and coffee were treated in the same way, so that they could all be used without adding any ice from the block, except perhaps a small bit in each glass. They kept the one large piece carefully wrapped up, to prevent its melting, in defiance of the advice of most household teachers of housekeeping, who had declared that the truest economy consisted in letting the ice melt as it would, in order to best preserve the food. They found that the food still kept from day to day when the ice was wrapped, and just half as much had to be bought as when it melted at its own sweet will. When they had ice-cream they made only a small quantity at a time by having a little freezer, and breaking only as much ice as they really needed. They made more sherbets than any other frozen dainty, and for these they used fruit from the garden; raspberry, cherry and currant ices took little from the family purse. When cream was used, it was made into mousse, and of course frozen in the tireless stove. This useful article, by the way, was not brought from town, but constructed out of a wooden candy-pail with hay-filled pads; it took only a morning of the sisters' time, and no money at all to make.
One warm afternoon Dolly roused herself from a reverie in the hammock and suddenly said to Mary, "This place reminds me of the seashore!"
"Because it's so different, I suppose."
"Exactly; you have guessed it. The reason why I was reminded of the seashore in the first place, however, was the distant view I get from here of the fish-man's wagon disappearing down the road, and the thought of the shore suggested the summer we all spent there together before you were married. I was wondering whether you knew much about housekeeping then, and how you found living there compared with living here."
"I really did not do any housekeeping then, but four years ago Dick and I spent three weeks there visiting a friend, and I learned all about the way prices ran from her; she was a splendid manager, too."
"Well, what do you think of the difference between it and this place?"
"It's as wide as the sea itself. In the first place, unless you go to a very primitive spot, you will find the fish is nearly all sent to town, and you must pay city prices for what you can get. That is the first great disillusionment you meet with. Bluefish and lobsters and all, even down to flounders, are no longer cheap if the place is near enough a railroad to permit an easy shipment to town. Clams are usuallyan exception, and if you can live largely on these, you will find they cost little. We used to ring the changes on chowder, minced clams on toast, and clam broth."
"Do you mean hard-shelled clams or soft?"
"Hard shell; quahaugs, they are called locally. Soft-shell clams you can dig yourself in many places; and if you go to the seashore, do try and find out in advance how the supply is, for freshly dug clams that cost nothing, and can be steamed or made into clam fritters and other good dishes, are indeed a boon to those who must live on a little by the sea."
"And how about groceries and such things?"
"They are all high; city prices again. You must really take down some good dry things yourself to help out, just as we do here. And butter and eggs are very expensive, for the climate at the seaside never seems to agree with either cows or hens; they are scarce. So eggs and butter and milk are all costly."
"And meat, I suppose, is, too."
"Meat is frightfully dear if you go to any place where it is sent down from the city. If it is not, but is bought at a butcher shop at the nearest place, it is the same sort of thing we get here—poor, distinctly poor, my dear."
"On the whole, then, you do not recommend the seashore as an economical place to spend the summer in."
"Not unless you go to an unfashionable place a long way off. Then if you get a furnished cottage, and can get clams by digging them and fish by catching it, or getting it of a fisherman who does not find it in demand elsewhere, you can really live on a little. Of course you will not have milk, nor eggs, nor vegetables nor fruit, except in homœopathic doses, but then, it will be cool and refreshing as to climate, and the rest will doubtless do your weary brain a great deal of good."
"Doubtless. But I think, as long as I am poor, I shall take my vacations among the hills; it must be cheap there."
"Then you must rent your apartment in town or board in the country, for you can't well rent two places at the same time. You can get a cheap place in certain farmhouses in the hills not too near the city, but often they are not so very comfortable, to our ways of thinking."
"But certainly, if I rent the apartment and take a small house, I shall find food cheap enough."
"Just about as it is here: vegetables and fruit will be cheap, and meat poor, and ice probably hard to be had. But milk will be inexpensive, and probably eggs and butter, too."
"The farther off you get the more it costs to live, if one is to go by prices in the Adirondacks, or similarremote spots. I remember going there once and staying in a camp, and everything had to be brought by pack, and I knew it must cost heaps to get such things as vegetables and eggs and city groceries."
"Yes, such places are costly if you try and live as you do at home. I believe the only way to manage is to accommodate yourself as far as possible to the place you are in. That is, here we do not send away for anything but groceries, and only one box of those in a summer; we eat the local meat, and if we had no garden we could buy vegetables of our neighbors. At the seashore you must live on what is there; not meat and vegetables, but fish you can catch for yourself and clams you can dig. In the hills, put up with discomforts and look at the sunsets. Don't try and have city meats, but when the farmer kills an animal, take what you can get of it and be thankful, and make it up on vegetables and blueberries and such things."
"But taking this summer as a whole and comparing it with life in the city and elsewhere, would you not say that the country is about the best place of all to live in? It seems to me that it is. Living has been very cheap this summer, hasn't it?"
"Yes, very, but remember that we pay no rent here, and have a garden. Suppose we hired a cottage and had to have a garden made. That would beanother story, for the first year at least. I suppose after that the garden part would be less expensive. Then remember that there are two of us to do the work; you alone without a maid would find it much harder to get along. And then in summer, it is lovely anywhere in the country, but think of this place in winter, with snow piled up high and nobody to dig walks except a husband who has only brief mornings and evenings to do it in. Then the problem of heating the house! No, I do not believe I should find it easy to live here in the winter."
"Oh, I did not mean here; I meant in some nice suburb not too far from town."
"Well, rents are high in any nice place, and you have to have a furnace man and somebody to shovel snow just as you would have here. Beside, food is always very expensive in a suburb; you have to pay city prices for everything."
"Well, is the last word that the city is the only place to live in economically?"
"Not at all. I hope I could live economically anywhere. But if you do live in town in an apartment, you get your heating done without trouble on your part, and you can buy any sort of food at any price you choose to pay. If you want cheap meat you can get it, and it will be of a good kind, not the poor stuff we have here. Vegetables and fruit are as cheap insummer in town as they are anywhere, provided you have to buy them in the country. You have to spend car-fares there, and here you have a commutation ticket to get. My mind is exactly where it was before we came out here for the summer. It is not the place you live in, it is the way you live that makes things come out even. Don't pay more rent than you can afford; don't spend more on your table than you can afford; watch your small outgoings; keep down Incidentals. If you observe these rules, Dolly, I am sure you will come out right in the end wherever you are. Live in the country if you choose; there are lots of compensations for the extra care of the fires and the snow in the winter. Think of the lovely summer we have had here. That would be worth a long cold winter, I really believe. Or, live in a suburb and have a good time socially—I believe you get more gaiety of a nice kind in a small place than in town. But if you do, be very, very careful, for it is extra hard there to live on a little. If you live in an apartment in town, economize all winter, for no one will be the wiser, and spend the money you save in an outing in summer of some sort. That is my advice after trying living in all sorts of places."
"Well, I'll consider the subject later on. Meanwhile, tell me truly: have you saved as much money as you expected to when we came out here?"
"Yes, quite as much. Meat has cost little, and vegetables still less, in spite of the wages of the weeding boy. Fuel has been low; milk less than in town, and butter and eggs no more here than there. Fruit has been almost nothing at all, and though we have done up so much, the sugar has not been so very expensive, because we bought that by the half-barrel and saved a good deal so. On the whole, I am more than satisfied, and we will have a snug little sum left over after we put back what we took out of Incidentals when we came."
"And next time we will have a cow and make all our butter," said Dolly.
"And we will surely have hens, too," said her sister. "That is, we will have them if we can; I am not sure we could invest in any for one summer alone, though I do sigh for plenty of eggs and broilers. I have heard, however, that hens are expensive and unsatisfactory in the hands of a novice, so we won't order any in advance."
When Mr. Thorne came home at night he had two letters in his pocket which proved of amazing interest.
One was Dolly's regular letter from South America, but it conveyed the joyful news that the end of probation was at hand and it was about time to begin ordering the trousseau for an early wedding. The other letter was from Aunt Maria, and said that her sisterwas ill and she should not return in the autumn, and the family was to have whatever they could take home from the garden. These things naturally made the breaking up of the little home very exciting.
"We will take all the potatoes," said Mary as they looked over the outdoor supplies still uneaten. "We will have those put in two barrels, and have one apiece for you and ourselves. The squashes we will take too, and the onions and turnips and beets, and all those things. The parsley we will plant in boxes for the kitchen windows, and the apples we will take every one."
"And may a mere man inquire where on earth you are going to store all these things in our flat?" asked her husband. "The barrel of potatoes can stand in the dining-room, to be sure, and the apples in the parlor, but the squashes and turnips will have to go in your dress-boxes under the beds."
"No, they won't. We will take everything to town that we can and divide them up. The janitor can keep our barrels in the basement and bring up one at a time, and I will put the other things in baskets and pile those one on top of the other in the corner by the refrigerator, or some other place."
"Some other place will be better," said Dick.
"Well, of course I realize that they will not keep forever, Dick Thorne, but I shall take every singlething I can find, for all that, and we will eat them up as soon as possible. Still, it is maddening not to have more room to store things in a city apartment. Now in the country we should have a root cellar, Dolly, and put lots of them out there, and have them come in all winter when we needed them. And of course potatoes and apples and squashes we could put down cellar and they would be all right there. Isn't it too provoking we can't do that way in town? I declare it is enough to make me determine to stay on here till spring."
"Do," said her husband encouragingly. "Shovelling snow is said to be the finest exercise in the world, and you can do it at odd moments when you are not stoking the kitchen fire. I should have to catch the early train in the morning, and it would be dark when I came back, so I could not help you, unfortunately, much as I should regret the fact. But I am sure it would do you all the good in the world."
"Some other winter," laughed his wife. "The next thing is to get Dolly married, and we must go back to get that over. Father and mother will be home soon, too, and that is another reason for our leaving. But it has been a lovely summer; we shall always remember it, I am sure."
"It has been a lovely year all through," said Dolly. "I can't tell you how grateful I am for your takingme in. And do you—now honestly, Mary—do you think I know enough to keep house all by myself?"
"I have my doubts, Dolly dear," her brother broke in. "On the whole I think Fred had better put off coming home for awhile. I shall write him to-morrow in any case, and I shall tell him so and save you the trouble."
"There won't be time for a letter to reach him, unfortunately," Dolly replied with a most becoming blush. "He is coming right away—about next week, he thinks. So, Mary, you see why I am anxious to know whether I can keep house or not. Do tell me honestly."
"I can conscientiously give you a diploma, my dear, so don't worry. You really and truly have learned to live on a little."