VDOMESTIC SCIENCE SEVENTY YEARS AGO

Housekeeping is vastly simplified since the days when my mother washed her teacups and spoons every morning. I love the old way; however, I do not practise it. If my grandchildren were to see the little wooden piggin brought me on a tray after breakfast, and see me wash the silver and glass they would think grandma has surely lost her mind. That purely domestic housewifely habit lasted long after my mother had passed away. It still is the vogue in many a New England household, but no doubt is among the lost virtues South. When I was a young lady and occasionally (oh, happy times!) spent a few days with the Slocombs, I always saw Mrs. Slocomb and her aged mother, dear old Mrs. Cox, who tremblingly loved to help, pass the tea things through their own delicate hands every morning. So it was at Mrs. Leonard Matthews’, and so it was in scores of wealthy homes.

Though we had ever so many servants, our familybeing a large one, my semi-invalid mother, who rarely left her home and never made visits, did a thousand little household duties that are now, even in families where only one or two servants are kept, entirely ignored by the ladies of the house. After a dinner party or an evening entertainment, and my father was hospitably inclined—much beyond his means—my mother passed all the silver, glass and china through her own delicate fingers, and we did not, as I recall after all this lapse of years, have anything of superlative value. It was not a matter of thrift or economy on her part, but a matter of course; everybody did the same.

After a visit to a New England family several years ago I was telling a Creole friend of the lovely old India china that had been in daily use over three generations. The reply was: “Oh, but they did not have a Christophe.” No doubt they had had several Christophes, but they never had a chance to wash those valuable cups. In the days of long ago housewives did not have negligées with floating ribbons and smart laces. They had calico gowns that a splash of water could not ruin.

A New Orleans Yard and Cistern.

Household furniture—I go back full seventy years—was simple and easily cared for. Carpets were generally what was known as “three-ply.” I don’t see them now, but in places, on humblefloors, I see imitation Brussels or some other counterfeit. The first carpet I ever saw woven in one piece, like all the rugs so plentiful now (and that was at a much later date) was on the parlor floor of the Goodman house, on Toulouse Street, the home so full of bright young girls I so loved to visit. There was no concern to take away carpets to be cleaned and stored in the summer. Carpets were taken to some vacant lot and well beaten. The neutral green on Canal Street, green and weedy it was, too, was a grand place to shake carpets; no offense given if one carried them beyond Claiborne Street where were no pretentious houses. Then those carpets were thickly strewn with tobacco leaves, rolled up and stored in the garret, if you had one. Every house did not boast of that convenience.

Curtains were not satin damask. At the Mint when Joe Kennedy was superintendent, and his family were fashionable people, their parlor curtains were some red cotton stuff, probably what is known as turkey red; there was a white and red-figured border; they were looped over gilt rods meant to look like spears and muskets, in deference, I suppose, to the military side of that government building, for there were sentinels and guards stationed around about thatgave the whole concern a most imposing and military air.

I remember at the Breedloves’ home there were net curtains (probably mosquito net), with a red border. They were thought rather novel and stylish. There were no madras, no Irish point, no Nottingham curtains even, so one did not have a large variety to choose from.

People had candelabras, and some elaborate affairs—they called them girandoles—to hold candles; they had heavy crystal drops that tinkled and scintillated and were prismatic and on the whole were rather fine. The candles in those gorgeous stands and an oil lamp on the inevitable center-table were supposed to furnish abundance of light for any occasion. When my sister dressed for a function she had two candles to dress by (so did I ten years later!), and two dusky maids to follow her all about, and hold them at proper points so the process of the toilet could be satisfactorily accomplished. Two candles without shades—nobody had heard of shades—were sufficient for an ordinary tea table. I was a grown girl, fresh from school, when I saw the first gaslight in a private house, at Mrs. Slocomb’s, on St. Charles Street. People sewed, embroidered, read and wrote and played chess evenings by candlelight, and except a fewnear-sighted people and the aged no one used glasses. There was not an oculist (a specialist, I mean) in the whole city.

Every woman had to sew. There were well-trained seamstresses in every house; no “ready-mades,” no machines. Imagine the fine hand-sewing on shirt bosoms, collars and cuffs. I can hear my mother’s voice now, “Be careful in the stitching of that bosom; take up two and skip four,” which I early learned meant the threads of the linen. What a time there was when the boys grew to tailor-cut pantaloons! Cut by a tailor, sewed at home, what a to-do there was when Charley had his first tail-coat; he could not sit on the tails, they were too short, so he made an uproar.

I recall also how I cried when sister’s old red and black “shot silk” dress was made over for me, and I thought I was going to be so fine (I was nine years old then and was beginning to “take notice”). The goods fell short, and I had to have a black, low neck, short-sleeve waist. In vain I was told it was velvet and ever so stylish and becoming. I knew better. However, that abbreviated dress and those abbreviated tails did duty at the dancing school.

But we have wandered from house furnishings to children’s clothes. We will go upstairs now andtake a look at the ponderous four-poster bed, with its awful tester top, that covered it like a flat roof. That tester was ornamented with a wall paper stuff, a wreath of impossible red and yellow roses, big as saucers, stamped on it, and four strands of same roses reaching to the four corners of the monstrosity. The idea of lying, with a raging fever or a splitting headache, under such a canopy! However, there were “swells” (there always are “swells”) who had testers covered with silk.

I hear a rumor that furniture covered with horse-hair cloth is about to come to the fore again. Everybody in my early day had black haircloth furniture; maybe that was one reason red curtains were preferred, for furniture covered with black haircloth was fearfully funereal. However, as no moth devoured it, dust did not rest on its slick, shiny surface, and it lasted forever, it had its advantages. Every household possessed a haircloth sofa, with a couple of hard, round pillows of the same, the one too slippery to nap on and the others regular break-necks.

Door in the French Market.

Butler’s pantry! My stars! Who ever heard of a butler’s pantry, and sinks, and running water, and faucets inside houses? The only running water was a hydrant in the yard; the only sink was the gutter in the yard; the sewer was the gutter in thestreet, so why a butler’s pantry? To be sure there was a cistern for rainwater, and jars like those Ali Baba’s forty thieves hid themselves in. Those earthen jars were replenished from the hydrant, and the muddy river water “settled” by the aid of almond hulls or alum.

Of course, every house had a storeroom, called pantry, to hold supplies. It was lined with shelves, but the only light and air was afforded by a half-moon aperture cut into a heavy batten door. We had wire safes on the back porch and a zinc-lined box for the ice—nothing else—wrapped in a gray blanket, gray, I presume, on the same principle we children preferred pink cocoanut cakes—they kept clean longer than the white! Ice was in general use but very expensive. It was brought by ship from the North, in hogsheads.

For the kitchen there were open fireplaces with a pot hanging from a crane, skillets and spiders. We don’t even hear the names of those utensils now. By and by an enterprising housewife ventured on a cook stove. I have a letter written by one such, dated in New Orleans in 1840, in which she descants on the wonders achieved by her stove. “Why, Susan, we baked three large cakes in it at one time.” In the old way it required a spider for each cake.

There were no plated knives, but steel, and theyhad to be daily scoured with “plenty brickdust on your knife board,” but those knives cut like razors. There was no bric-a-brac, few pictures, nothing ornamental in the parlors. One house I remember well had a Bunker Hill monument, made, I guess, of stucco, and stuck all over with gay seashells; it was perhaps 25 or 30 inches high; it made a most commanding appearance on the center-table. When my sister made a tiresomely long call at that house it amused me to try to count the shells.

An old gentleman, called “Old Jimmie Dick” when I remember him, a rich cotton broker (the firm was Dick & Hill), made a voyage to Europe, and brought home some Apollos, and Cupids, and Mercuries, statues in the “altogether,” for his parlor. Jimmie Dick was a bachelor, and lived on Canal Street, near Carondelet or Baronne, and had a charming spinster niece keeping house for him, who was so shocked when she saw the figures mounted on pedestals (they were glaring white marble and only a trifle under life size) that she immediately made slips of brown holland and enveloped them, leaving only the heads exposed! I never went to that house but the one time when we surprised her in the act of robing her visitors!

I speak of houses that I visited with my grown sister. It was notcomme il fautfor a younglady to be seen too frequently on the street or to make calls alone. Mother was an invalid and made no visits. Father accompanied sister on ceremonious occasions. I was pressed into service when no one else was available. I feel I am going way back beyond the recollection of my readers, but some of the grandmothers, too old, mayhap, to do their own reading, can recall just such a life, a life that will never be lived again.

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