Part 8 — HOUSEHOLD HINTS.
Reading edition
Under no circumstances whatever should bread be thrown away. Some can be baked hard in the oven, and then crushed with a rolling-pin and put away in a glass bottle or tin to use when frying chops or fish. Delicious puddings can be made also by soaking stale bread and crusts in milk, and beaten up when quite soft with eggs and mixed with raisins, candied peel and some spice, and baked. These can be eaten either hot or cold.
Thin clean paper should never be thrown away, but kept in a kitchen drawer, for wiping out saucepans and frying-pans, and wiping butter off knives, to save cloths being cut by the latter.
Very early potatoes are often very unwholesome, having been forced by the aid of chemicals and not grown naturally.
Separate days should be arranged for cleaning the silver and brass articles in a house, and separate cloths and dusters used for them.
A hard broom should be kept in every coal-cellar to sweep up the loose coal each time coal is fetched, otherwise it is taken up on the shoes and carried over the house.
Soiled linen should never be kept in bedrooms, but in a basket outside on a landing, or in the bath-room.
It is a pity to throw away clean paper-bags. They should be kept together and given to some small tradesman who will be glad to use them again. Old newspapers should be given to some poor invalid who will be glad of something to read, or sent to the workhouse or hospital.
The plug in a lavatory basin should not be left out, as it is liable to let sewer gas into the house.
Flowering plants and their seeds should be planted with the growing and not with a waning moon.
After cooking is done, the dampers of a kitchen range should be shut in to save the coals.
Cultivate the grace of thoughtfulness for others. This is invaluable in a household, and makes the wheels go round smoothly. Want of consideration for others, and thoughtlessness, is the source of much trouble.
Game and fowl bones should never be given to pet dogs. They cannot digest them, and such bones have been the cause of painful deaths.
A fruitful source of friction between the servants of a household is the unauthorised use of each other’s dusters, brooms, etc. To avoid all such unpleasantness, the cook and housemaid should have a completely independent and distinct set of things, and kept in different places; they should also be of a different colour or pattern, so as to be easily identified by the owners. The cloths should be returned clean each week to whoever presides over the linen cupboard, and fresh ones given out. It is bad economy and worse management to use the same cloths over and over again.
