Isabella L. Bird - "The Hawaiian Archipelago"

John Lothrop Motley - "The Life of John of Barneveld, 1613 15"

Evelyn Scott - "Precipitations"

Herbert Jenkins - "The Life of George Borrow"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: The American Woman\'s Home

C >> Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe >> The American Woman\'s Home




There is no country where an ample, well-furnished table is more easily
spread, and for that reason, perhaps, none where the bounties of
Providence are more generally neglected. Considering that our resources
are greater than those of any other civilized people, our results are
comparatively poorer.

It is said that a list of the summer vegetables which are exhibited
on New-York hotel-tables being shown to a French _artiste_, he
declared that to serve such a dinner properly would take till midnight.
A traveler can not but be struck with our national plenteousness, on
returning from a Continental tour, and going directly from the ship
to a New-York hotel, in the bounteous season of autumn. For months
habituated to neat little bits of chop or poultry, garnished with the
inevitable cauliflower or potato, which seemed to be the sole
possibility after the reign of green peas was over; to sit down all
at once to such a carnival! to such ripe, juicy tomatoes, raw or cooked;
cucumbers in brittle slices; rich, yellow sweet-potatoes; broad
lima-beans, and beans of other and various names; tempting ears of
Indian-corn steaming in enormous piles; great smoking tureens of the
savory succotash, an Indian gift to the table for which civilization
need not blush; sliced egg-plant in delicate fritters; and marrow-
squashes, of creamy pulp and sweetness; a rich variety, embarrassing
to the appetite, and perplexing to the choice.

Verily, the thought must often occur that the vegetarian doctrine
preached in America leaves a man quite as much as he has capacity to
eat or enjoy, and that in the midst of such tantalizing abundance he
has really lost the apology, which elsewhere bears him out in preying
upon his less gifted and accomplished animal neighbors.

But with all this, the American table, taken as a whole, is inferior
to that of England or France. It presents a fine abundance of material,
carelessly and poorly treated. The management of food is nowhere in
the world, perhaps, more slovenly and wasteful. Every thing betokens
that want of care that waits on abundance; there are great capabilities
and poor execution. A tourist through England can seldom fail, at the
quietest country-inn, of finding himself served with the essentials
of English table-comfort--his mutton-chop done to a turn, his steaming
little private apparatus for concocting his own tea, his choice pot
of marmalade or slice of cold ham, and his delicate rolls and creamy
butter, all served with care and neatness. In France, one never asks
in vain for delicious _cafe-au-lait_, good bread and butter, a
nice omelet, or some savory little portion of meat with a French name.
But to a tourist taking like chance in American country-fare, what is
the prospect? What is the coffee? what the tea? and the meat? and above
all, the butter?

In writing on cooking, the main topics should be first, bread; second,
butter; third, meat; fourth, vegetables; and fifth, tea--by which
last is meant, generally, all sorts of warm, comfortable drinks served
out in tea-cups, whether they be called tea, coffee, chocolate, broma,
or what not.

If these five departments are all perfect, the great ends of domestic
cookery are answered, so far as the comfort and well-being of life
are concerned. There exists another department, which is often regarded
by culinary amateurs and young aspirants as the higher branch and very
collegiate course of practical cookery; to wit, confectionery, by which
is designated all pleasing and complicated compounds of sweets and
spices, devised not for health and nourishment, and strongly suspected
of interfering with both--mere tolerated gratifications of the palate,
which we eat, not with the expectation of being benefited, but only
with the hope of not being injured by them. In this large department
rank all sorts of cakes, pies, preserves, etc., whose excellence is
often attained by treading under foot and disregarding the five grand
essentials.

There is many a table garnished with three or four kinds of well-made
cake, compounded with citron and spices and all imaginable good things,
where the meat was tough and greasy, the bread some hot preparation
of flour, lard, saleratus, and acid, and the butter unutterably
detestable, where, if the mistress of the feast had given the care,
time, and labor to preparing the simple items of bread, butter, and
meat, that she evidently had given to the preparation of these extras,
the lot of her guests and family might be much more comfortable. But
she does not think of these common articles as constituting a good
table. So long as she has puff pastry, rich black cake, clear jelly
and preserves, she considers that such unimportant matters as bread,
butter, and meat may take care of themselves. It is the same inattention
to common things as that which leads people to build houses with stone
fronts, and window-caps and expensive front-door trimmings, without
bathing-rooms or fireplaces, or ventilators.

Those who go into the country looking for summer board in farm-houses
know perfectly well that a table where the butter is always fresh, the
tea and coffee of the best kinds and well made, and the meats properly
kept, dressed, and served, is the one table of a hundred, the fabulous
enchanted island. It seems impossible to get the idea into the minds
of many people that what is called common food, carefully prepared,
becomes, in virtue of that very care and attention, a delicacy,
superseding the necessity of artificially compounded dainties. To
begin, then, with the very foundation of a good table:

--_Bread:_ What ought it to be?

It should be light, sweet, and tender. This matter of lightness is the
distinctive line between savage and civilized bread. The savage mixes
simple flour and water into balls of paste, which he throws into boiling
water, and which come out solid, glutinous masses, of which his common
saying is, "Man eat dis, he no die," which a facetious traveler who
was obliged to subsist on it interpreted to mean, "Dis no kill you,
nothing will." In short, it requires the stomach of a wild animal or
of a savage to digest this primitive form of bread, and of course more
or less attention in all civilized modes of bread-making is given to
producing lightness. By lightness is meant simply that in order to
facilitate digestion the particles are to be separated from each other
by little holes or air-cells; and all the different methods of making
light bread are neither more nor less than the formation of bread with
these air-cells.

So far as we know, there are four practicable methods of aerating
bread; namely, by fermentation; by effervescence of an acid and an
alkali; by aerated egg, or egg which has been filled with air by the
process of beating; and lastly, by pressure of some gaseous substance
into the paste, by a process much resembling the impregnation of water
in a soda-fountain. All those have one and the same object--to give
us the cooked particles of our flour separated by such permanent
air-cells as will enable the stomach more readily to digest them.

A very common mode of aerating bread in America is by the effervescence
of an acid and an alkali in the flour. The carbonic acid gas time
formed products minute air-cells in the bread, or, as the cook says,
makes it light. When this process is performed with exact attention
to chemical laws, so that the acid and alkali completely neutralize
each other, leaving no overplus of either, the result is often very
palatable. The difficulty is, that this is a happy conjunction of
circumstances which seldom occurs. The acid most commonly employed is
that of sour milk, and, as milk has many degrees of sourness, the rule
of a certain quantity of alkali to the pint must necessarily produce
very different results at different times. As an actual fact where
this mode of making bread prevails, as we lament to say it does to a
great extent in this country, one finds five cases of failure to one
of success.

It is a woeful thing that the daughters of our land have abandoned the
old respectable mode of yeast-brewing and bread-raising for this
specious substitute, so easily made, and so seldom well made. The
green, clammy, acrid substance, called biscuit, which many of our
worthy republicans are obliged to eat in these days, is wholly unworthy
of the men and women of the republic. Good patriots ought not to
be put off in that way--they deserve better fare.

As an occasional variety, as a household convenience for obtaining
bread or biscuit at a moment's notice, the process of effervescence
may be retained; but, we earnestly entreat American housekeepers, in
scriptural language, to stand in the way and ask for the old paths,
and return to the good yeast-bread of their sainted grandmothers.

If acid and alkali must be used, by all means let them be mixed in due
proportions. No cook should be left to guess and judge for herself
about this matter. There are articles made by chemical rule which
produce very perfect results, and the use of them obviates the worst
dangers in making bread by effervescence.

Of all processes of aeration in bread-making, the oldest and most
time-honored mode is by fermentation. That this was known in the days
of our Saviour is evident from the forcible simile in which he compares
the silent permeating force of truth in human, society to the very
familiar household process of raising bread by a little yeast.

There is, however, one species of yeast, much used in some parts of
the country, against which protest should be made. It is called
salt-risings, or milk-risings, and is made by mixing flour, milk, and
a little salt together, and leaving them to ferment. The bread thus
produced is often, very attractive, when new and made with great care.
It is white and delicate, with fine, even air-cells. It has, however,
when kept, some characteristics which remind us of the terms in which
our old English Bible describes the effect of keeping the manna of the
ancient Israelites, which we are informed, in words more explicit than
agreeable, "stank, and bred worms." If salt-rising bread does not
fulfill the whole of this unpleasant description, it certainly does
emphatically a part of it. The smell which it has in baking, and when
more than a day old, suggests the inquiry, whether it is the saccharine
or the putrid fermentation with which it is raised. Whoever breaks a
piece of it after a day or two, will often see minute filaments or
clammy strings drawing out from the fragments, which, with the
unmistakable smell, will cause him to pause before consummating a
nearer acquaintance.

The fermentation of flour by means of brewer's or distiller's yeast
produces, if rightly managed, results far more palatable and wholesome.
The only requisites for success in it are, first, good materials, and,
second, great care in small things. There are certain low-priced or
damaged kinds of flour which can never by any kind of domestic chemistry
be made into good broad; and to those persons whose stomachs forbid
them to eat gummy, glutinous paste, under the name of bread, there is
no economy in buying these poor brands, even at half the price of good
flour.

But good flour and good yeast being supposed, with a temperature
favorable to the development of fermentation, the whole success of the
process depends on the thorough diffusion of the proper proportion of
yeast through the whole mass, and on stopping the subsequent
fermentation at the precise and fortunate point. The true housewife
makes her bread the sovereign of her kitchen--its behests must be
attended to in all critical points and moments, no matter what else
be postponed.

She who attends to her bread only when she has done this, and arranged
that, and performed the other, very often finds that the forces of
nature will not wait for her. The snowy mass, perfectly mixed, kneaded
with care and strength, rises in its beautiful perfection till the
moment comes for filling the air-cells by baking. A few minutes now,
and the acetous fermentation will begin, and the whole result be
spoiled. Many bread-makers pass in utter carelessness over this sacred
and mysterious boundary. Their oven has cake in it, or they are skimming
jelly, or attending to some other of the so-called higher branches of
cookery, while the bread is quickly passing into the acetous stage.
At last, when they are ready to attend to it, they find that it has
been going its own way,--it is so sour that the pungent smell is plainly
perceptible. Now the saleratus-bottle is handed down, and a quantity
of the dissolved alkali mixed with the paste--an expedient sometimes
making itself too manifest by greenish streaks or small acrid spots
in the bread. As the result, we have a beautiful article spoiled--bread
without sweetness, if not absolutely sour.

In the view of many, lightness is the only property required in this
article. The delicate refined sweetness which exists in carefully
kneaded bread, baked just before it passes to the extreme point of
fermentation, is something, of which they have no conception; and thus
they will even regard this process of spoiling the paste by the acetous
fermentation, and then rectifying that acid by effervescence with an
alkali, as something positively meritorious. How else can they value
and relish bakers' loaves, such as some are, drugged with ammonia and
other disagreeable things; light indeed, so light that they seem to
have neither weight nor substance, but with no more sweetness or taste
than so much cotton wool?

Some persons prepare bread for the oven by simply mixing it in the
mass, without kneading, pouring it into pans, and suffering it to rise
there. The air-cells in bread thus prepared are coarse and uneven; the
bread is as inferior in delicacy and nicety to that which is well
kneaded as a raw servant to a perfectly educated and refined lady. The
process of kneading seems to impart an evenness to the minute air-cells,
a fineness of texture, and a tenderness and pliability to the whole
substance, that can be gained in no other way.

The divine principle of beauty has its reign over bread as well as
over all other things; it has its laws of aesthetics; and that bread
which is so prepared that it can be formed into separate and
well-proportioned loaves, each one carefully worked and moulded, will
develop the most beautiful results. After being moulded, the loaves
should stand usually not over ten minutes, just long enough to allow
the fermentation going on in them to expand each little air-cell to
the point at which it stood before it was worked down, and then they
should be immediately put into the oven.

Many a good thing, however, is spoiled in the oven. We can not but
regret, for the sake of bread, that our old steady brick ovens have
been almost universally superseded by those of ranges and
cooking-stoves, which are infinite in their caprices, and forbid all
general rules. One thing, however, may be borne in mind as
a principle--that the excellence of bread in all its varieties, plain
or sweetened, depends on the perfection of its air-cells, whether
produced by yeast, egg, or effervescence; that one of the objects of
baking is to fix these air-cells, and that the quicker this can be
done through the whole mass, the better will the result be. When cake
or bread is made heavy by baking too quickly, it is because the
immediate formation of the top crust hinders the exhaling of the
moisture in the centre, and prevents the air-cells from cooking. The
weight also of the crust pressing down on the doughy air-cells below
destroys them, producing that horror of good cooks, a heavy streak.
The problem in baking, then, is the quick application of heat rather
below than above the loaf, and its steady continuance till all the
air-cells are thoroughly dried into permanent consistency. Every
housewife must watch her own oven to know how this can be best
accomplished.

Bread-making can be cultivated to any extent as a fine art--and the
various kinds of biscuit, tea-rusks, twists, rolls, into which bread
may be made, are much better worth a housekeeper's ambition than the
getting-up of rich and expensive cake or confections. There are also
varieties of material which are rich in good effects. Unbolted flour,
altogether more wholesome than the fine wheat, and when properly
prepared more palatable--rye-flour and corn-meal, each affording a
thousand attractive possibilities--all of these come under the general
laws of bread-stuffs, and are worth a careful attention.

A peculiarity of our American table, particularly in the Southern and
Western States, is the constant exhibition of various preparations of
hot bread. In many families of the South and West, bread in loaves to
be eaten cold is an article quite unknown. The effect of this kind of
diet upon the health has formed a frequent subject of remark among
travelers; but only those know the full mischiefs of it who have been
compelled to sojourn for a length of time in families where it is
maintained. The unknown horrors of dyspepsia from bad bread are a topic
over which we willingly draw a veil.

Next to Bread comes _Butter_--on which we have to say, that, when
we remember what butter is in civilized Europe, and compare it with
what it is in America, we wonder at the forbearance and lenity of
travelers in their strictures on our national commissariat.

Butter, in England, France, and Italy, is simply solidified cream,
with all the sweetness of the cream in its taste, freshly churned each
day, and unadulterated by salt. At the present moment, when salt is
five cents a pound and butter fifty, we Americans are paying, at high
prices, for about one pound of salt to every ten of butter, and those
of us who have eaten the butter of France and England do this with
rueful recollections.

There is, it is true, an article of butter made in the American style
with salt, which, in its own kind and way, has a merit not inferior
to that of England and France. Many prefer it, and it certainly takes
a rank equally respectable with the other. It is yellow, hard, and
worked so perfectly free from every particle of buttermilk that it
might make the voyage of the world without spoiling. It is salted, but
salted with care and delicacy, so that it may be a question whether
even a fastidious Englishman might not prefer its golden solidity to
the white, creamy freshness of his own. But it is to be regretted that
this article is the exception, and not the rule, on our tables.

America must have the credit of manufacturing and putting into market
more bad butter than all that is made in all the rest of the world
together. The varieties of bad tastes and smells which prevail in it
are quite a study. This has a cheesy taste, that a mouldy, this is
flavored with cabbage, and that again with turnip, and another has the
strong, sharp savor of rancid animal fat. These varieties probably
come from the practice of churning only at long intervals, and keeping
the cream meanwhile in unventilated cellars or dairies, the air of
which is loaded with the effluvia of vegetable substances. No domestic
articles are so sympathetic as those of the milk tribe: they readily
take on the smell and taste of any neighboring substance, and hence
the infinite variety of flavors on which one mournfully muses who has
late in autumn to taste twenty firkins of butter in hopes of finding
one which will simply not be intolerable on his winter table.

A matter for despair as regards bad butter is, that at the tables where
it is used it stands sentinel at the door to bar your way to every
other kind of food. You turn from your dreadful half-slice of bread,
which fills your mouth with bitterness, to-your beef-steak, which
proves virulent with the same poison; you think to take refuge in
vegetable diet, and find the butter in the string-beans, and polluting
the innocence of early peas; it is in the corn, hi the succotash, in
the squash; the beets swim in it, the onions have it poured over them.
Hungry and miserable, you think to solace yourself at the dessert; but
the pastry is cursed, the cake is acrid with the same plague. You are
ready to howl with despair, and your misery is great upon
you--especially if this is a table where you have taken board for three
months with your delicate wife and four small children. Your case is
dreadful, and it is hopeless, because long usage and habit have rendered
your host perfectly incapable of discovering what is the matter. "Don't
like the butter, sir? I assure you I paid an extra price for it, and
it's the very best in the market. I looked over as many as a hundred
tubs, and picked out this one." You are dumb, but not less despairing.

Yet the process of making good butter is a very simple one. To keep
the cream in a perfectly pure, cool atmosphere, to churn while it is
yet sweet, to work out the buttermilk thoroughly, and to add salt with
such discretion as not to ruin the fine, delicate flavor of the fresh
cream--all this is quite simple, so simple that one wonders at thousands
and millions of pounds of butter yearly manufactured which are merely
a hobgoblin bewitchment of cream into foul and loathsome poisons.

The third head of my discourse is that of _Meat_, of which America
furnishes, in the gross material, enough to spread our tables royally,
were it well cared for and served.

The faults in the meat generally furnished to us are, first, that it
is too new. A beef steak, which three or four days of keeping might
render palatable, is served up to us palpitating with freshness, with
all the toughness of animal muscle yet warm.

In the next place, there is a woeful lack of nicety in the butcher's
work of cutting and preparing meat. Who that remembers the neatly
trimmed mutton-chop of an English inn, or the artistic little circle
of lamb-chop fried in bread-crumbs coiled around a tempting centre of
spinach which may always be found in France, can recognize any family
resemblance to those dapper, civilized preparations, in these coarse,
roughly-hacked strips of bone, gristle, and meat which are commonly
called mutton-chop in America? There seems to be a large dish of
something resembling meat, in which each fragment has about two or
three edible morsels, the rest being composed of dry and burnt skin,
fat, and ragged bone.

Is it not time that civilization should learn to demand somewhat more
care and nicety in the modes of preparing what is to be cooked and
eaten? Might not some of the refinement and trimness which characterize
the preparations of the European market be with advantage introduced
into our own? The housekeeper who wishes to garnish her table with
some of those nice things is stopped in the outset by the butcher.
Except in our large cities, where some foreign travel may have created
the demand, it seems impossible to get much in this line that is
properly prepared.

If this is urged on the score of aesthetics, the ready reply will be,
"Oh! we can't give time here in America to go into niceties and French
whim-whams!" But the French mode of doing almost all practical things
is based on that true philosophy and utilitarian good sense which
characterize that seemingly thoughtless people. Nowhere is economy a
more careful study, and their market is artistically arranged to this
end. The rule is so to cut their meats that no portion designed to be
cooked in a certain manner shall have wasteful appendages which that
mode of cooking will spoil. The French soup-kettle stands ever ready
to receive the bones, the thin fibrous flaps, the sinewy and gristly
portions, which are so often included in our roasts or broilings, which
fill our plates with unsightly _debris_, and finally make an amount of
blank waste for which we pay our butcher the same price that we pay for
what we have eaten.

The dead waste of our clumsy, coarse way of cutting meats is immense.
For example, at the beginning of the season, the part of a lamb
denominated leg and loin, or hind-quarter, may sell for thirty cents
a pound. Now this includes, besides the thick, fleshy portions, a
quantity of bone, sinew, and thin fibrous substance, constituting full
one third of the whole weight. If we put it into the oven entire, in
the usual manner, we have the thin parts over-done, and the skinny
and fibrous parts utterly dried up, by the application of the amount
of heat necessary to cook the thick portion. Supposing the joint to
weigh six pounds, at thirty cents, and that one third of the weight
is so treated as to become perfectly useless, we throw away sixty
cents. Of a piece of beef at twenty-five cents a pound, fifty cents'
worth is often lost in bone, fat, and burnt skin.

The fact is, this way of selling and cooking meat in large,
gross portions is of English origin, and belongs to a country where all
the customs of society spring from a class who have no particular
occasion for economy. The practice of minute and delicate division
comes from a nation which acknowledges the need of economy, and has
made it a study. A quarter of lamb in this mode of division would be
sold in three nicely prepared portions. The thick part would be sold
by itself, for a neat, compact little roast; the rib-bones would be
artistically separated, and all the edible matter would form those
delicate dishes of lamb-chop, which, fried in bread-crumbs to a golden
brown, are so ornamental and palatable a side-dish; the trimmings which
remain after this division would be destined to the soup-kettle or
stew-pan.