This is a practical guide to running a household in 1883. Marion Harland not only walks us through a number of important topics such as how to select and manage servants and organise a dinner party (best engage a good caterer), but also includes a number of recipes. Even today's listeners may find a new favourite dish among the recipes contained in this volume.
By : Marion Harland (1830 - 1922)
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It is not yet quite ten years since the publication of “Common Sense in the Household. General Receipts.” In offering the work to the publishers, under whose able management it has prospered so wonderfully, I said: “I have written this because I felt that such a Manual of Practical Housewifery is needed.” That I judged aright, taking my own experience as a housekeeper as the criterion of the wants and perplexities of others, is abundantly proved by the circumstance which calls for this new and revised edition of the book. Through much and constant use—nearly 100,000 copies having been printed from them—the stereotype plates have become so worn that the impressions are faint and sometimes illegible. I gladly avail myself of the opportunity thus offered to re-read and so far to alter the original volume as may, in the light of later improvements in the culinary art and in my understanding of it, make the collection of family receipts more intelligible and available. Nor have I been able to resist the temptation to interpolate a few excellent receipts that have come into my hands at a later period than that of the publication of the last, and in my estimation, perhaps the most valuable of the “Common Sense Series,” viz.: “The Dinner Year-Book.”
I am grateful, also, to the courtesy of my publishers for the privilege of thanking those to whom this book was, and is dedicated, “My fellow-housekeepers—North, East, South and West”—for their substantial endorsement of the work I have done in their behalf. A collection of the private letters I have received from those who have used the “General Receipts” would make a volume very nearly as large as this. If I have, as the writers of these testimonials assure me—“done them good,”—they have done me more in letting me know that I have not spent my strength for naught. I acknowledge with pleasure sundry pertinent suggestions and inquiries which have led me, in this revision, to examine warily the phraseology of some receipts and to modify these, I believe, for the better. But, by far, the best “good” done me through this work has been the conscious sisterhood into which I have come with the great body of American housewives. This is a benefit not to be rated by dollars and cents, or measured by time. I hope my fellow-workers will find their old kitchen-companion, in fresh dress, yet more serviceable than before, and that their daughters may, at the close of a second decade, demand new stereotype plates for still another, and, like this, a progressive edition.
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