Marta, unpromising as her appearance was, had shown considerable aptitude for cooking, but about the house generally she was rather hopeless. She had succeeded already in breaking two of the pretty ornaments Molly had on her bureau, and therefore the latter had decided to trust her to touch nothing that required careful handling. She was hopelessly mixed, too, about laying the table. The breakfast was laid as for dinner, and vice versa, and the result was that Molly did not depend on her to do either, it being easier to do them herself. When she had kept house a few years longer she learnt that to do things herself was, in spite of the proverb, the way not to get them done well by any one else. But the trouble was so slight she did not think it worth while to struggle against it.
She meant to have exactly the same dinner as last Tuesday, only she had shoulder of lamb roasted instead of breast. She stood by while Marta cut the shoulder out, and then read over the recipe for tomato soup, and lemon pie, pastry for which was left from the chicken pie made on Saturday, and then left her to cook the dinner alone, while she went to Mrs. Lennox according to her promise.
She found that lady busy ironing. She looked white and exhausted, and yet there was a large pile of little clothes all trimmed by the mother’s industrious fingers, and, alas, trimmed so much.
Yet who could not understand a mother’s desire to see her children dressed prettily, when it cost only a few hours more time, a little more fatigue to make them so? and how few are able to blend beauty and strict simplicity, although when it is blended the result is more charming than any dictate of fashion?
“Let me help you iron for an hour. We need not begin cooking just yet, if you saved the mutton broth, as there is no gravy to make.”
“Yes, I saved it, but you mustn’t think of ironing,—please don’t.”
“I’d like it. I am not expert, but every little helps, and your instruction will do me good. Let me go on with that ruffle, while you get something I can’t do. My Marta is ironing to-day, but by the look of things I’m afraid I shall have to learn, myself, in order to teach her, if she proves teachable.”
“Ironing I have learned to do pretty well from necessity. I only wish I had been brought up to do everything, it would all have come so much easier to me.”
“But it seems to me you can do so many things well,” said Molly. “You sew so beautifully, and this ironing would shame most people who have been brought up to do it.”
“Yes, I can do anything I make up my mind to do; so can most people, I think.”
“Yes, and that is why if an educated woman is forced into unaccustomed fields of work she does it better than those who are professedly working-women,—better in every case where sinew is not the chief desideratum.”
“Only,” rejoined Mrs. Lennox, “she works with brains and hands too, and that is why the work tires her so much more than those who work mechanically.”
“I suppose so. I am a strong young woman and have never known a day’s sickness, yet I am tired to death after a couple of hours in the kitchen, while Marta, who has been doing the hard work and has been on her feet hours longer, is fresh, and has to go on working while I can rest. Yet that thought makes me very tolerant of a servant’s shortcomings, seeing my own limitations.”
Molly was busy ironing the ruffle of a child’s petticoat as she spoke, and Mrs. Lennox said, partly in explanation perhaps: “I dare say you think I’m foolish to trim my children’s clothes and make myself so much work; but if you use cheap materials they look really quite mean without it. Mr. Lennox constantly quotes the beauty of simplicity, and points to the pictures of English children, as if I couldn’t see the beauty as well as he. But simplicity is costly or dowdy. A shilling calico or crossbar made ‘Kate Greenaway’ fashion would look a poverty-stricken effort, while in linen or fine nainsook or India muslin they are charming. Flimsy materials won’t hang well unless they are trimmed; at the same time I do think I am wearing myself out for the sake of appearance, and often resolve that I will never make or iron another ruffle.”
Molly had no experience as a mother of a family to offer poor strenuous Mrs. Lennox, whom she found a much brighter and more sensible woman than she had at first supposed. Yet she felt that the ruffle question was a very serious one.
“I hardly dare say anything about the matter, because I have so little experience, but I do feel that you are not strong enough to do such ironing as this; and yet, as you say, poor material plainly made looks mean. How would it be to give up wash goods for every-day use and wear dark blue flannel for a while? Even wealthy people do that at the seaside, and one flannel frock will cost no more than the four calico ones that take its place.”
“I have thought of it, and I do believe I will make an effort another summer; but when you’ve so many children the frocks come down from one to another, and the only one I have ever to get new for is the eldest, but next year I’ll get her a flannel frock and see how it works; but though light flannel is really cool, she will fancy she’s hot if she sees her sisters in cotton.”
“Now, if you’ll tell me where your cold meat is, I will show you how the cold mutton may be made a very nice dish.”
The meat and broth were soon before her, and by her direction Mrs. Lennox peeled and sliced two large onions and put them on to boil.
“What vegetables did you intend having?”
“I’ve been so busy ironing that I did not think of anything but potatoes, though Mr. Lennox does like a second one.”
“I see you have cabbage in the garden, and corn.”
“Yes, but the corn is too old, and the cabbage there is no time for; besides, we have it so seldom, because I have to cook it in the morning so that the terrible smell may be out of the house before Mr. Lennox comes home, he is so fastidious; though, I must say, the smell of cabbage is something any one not fastidious might object to.”
“How long do you boil it?”
“Oh, two hours, sometimes more.”
“Do you mind my boiling it to-night?”
Mrs. Lennox stared. She had some confidence in Molly, yet cabbage for dinner—and it was now after five—was something absurd.
“But it won’t be done.”
“Oh yes, I see the kettle is full and boils. I am quite sure you won’t believe me unless I show you; but I do assure you there is no unpleasant odor about, cabbage boiled as the English boil it, and in Europe it is considered the most wholesome of vegetables.”
Mrs. Lennox listened politely.
“I will get a cabbage, of course.” She left the kitchen for the purpose, and Molly smiled. She knew Mrs. Lennox was thinking what others less polite had said to her, “but we like our cabbage very well done,” as if Molly must prefer it half raw.
Molly had cut from the bones of roast and boiled mutton quite a large dish of meat, and the onions being tender she poured off the water from them, put to them a table-spoonful of butter and one of flour, with salt and pepper. As she was stirring them about, Mrs. Lennox brought in the cabbage, and cutting away leaves and part of core as Molly directed, laid it in water, and half filled a good-sized pot with boiling water and set it on the range.
“For your six-o’clock dinner it must be well drained and go into that water at half past five.”
“I obey unquestioningly, but I confess to strong doubts as to whether we mean the same thing by boiled cabbage”—laughing.
“I know we don’t,” said Molly maliciously. “Will you look at this? I am going to pour in a half pint of the broth, which I find you did flavor with vegetables.”
“Yes, I’m not so ungrateful as to neglect your instructions, after the success of our Saturday night’s dinner.” (It should be mentioned that on Sunday Mrs. Lennox had come to tell Molly how good it was, and how much enjoyed.) “There was some left, very little, and a little kidney from yesterday’s breakfast; the children did not take any of that. This morning I warmed both together with a very little of that broth, and they made another good breakfast, and I felt that I had achieved something.”
“That was a splendid idea; so few people think what two or three odds and ends put together will do, though each may be so little as to be almost worthless alone. Real economical management lies in this dovetailing one thing with another. This is what English and Americans know so little, and the French so well.”
“I see that sauce is now like onion sauce, but less white.”
“It is onion sauce, made with broth instead of milk. Now we will lay the meat in and leave it to steep in this sauce at the back of the range, where it will keep at boiling-point but not boil. The last thing, add a tea-spoonful of vinegar or a few capers.”
Now the cabbage.
“Yes, I’m waiting for that miracle,” said Mrs. Lennox, coming with it in the colander, after shaking the water well out. “I shall lay the blame on your shoulders if Mr. Lennox’s olfactories are offended; he will forgive you anything, since through you we have lived better and spent a dollar less in three days. There is nothing truer than that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”
“Then we must take that path,” said Molly merrily. “The cabbage needs a table-spoonful of salt added to the water and a scant half tea-spoonful of soda.”
“I shall wait and see the success of the cabbage,” added Molly, laughing, when she had seen it boiling furiously, “although the meat is done, so I may iron another piece or two.”
Both took up their irons, and after a few minutes Mrs. Lennox exclaimed:—
“It is positively true!”
“What is?”
“That cabbage has no disagreeable smell.”
“No, but it would have if you left it on the stove to cook slowly for an hour or two. It is the long slow cooking in little water that ruins it and all green vegetables.”
Mrs. Lennox now prepared to lay the cloth, and when she returned to the kitchen Molly had taken up the cabbage and pressed it. It was bright pale green, streaked, where the heart was, with creamy white.
“Is that the cabbage? and is it done?”
“Try for yourself. You see it is far more tender than when slowly boiled, and is marrowy as spinach.”
“So it is; but how did you find it out?”
“I didn’t. I was told by an English lady. I had noticed that all English cooking-books gave twenty minutes to half an hour to boil cabbage, while ours always say two hours. And I noticed, too, it was never alluded to as a coarse, rank vegetable, and I asked an explanation from her, and she also told me she dared not eat cabbage here, for fear of indigestion; but I never yet found any one who believed me when I told them cabbage should only be boiled twenty-five minutes, nor can I induce them to try it. They all think that I prefer half-raw cabbage. Now I leave you to dress it as you like, for I must run home.”
“I shall just put pepper, salt, and butter on it, it looks so pretty,—and to think there is only a pleasant odor!”
When Molly reached home she found Marta looking very scared.
“What is wrong?” asked Molly, sure that some disaster had occurred.
Marta silently pointed to the soup, which looked like pink curds and whey; then, turning rather sulkily to the stewed tomatoes, she evidently expected to be scolded.
Molly said nothing for the moment, but opened the oven and found the shoulder of lamb beautifully brown, and other things doing well; she was heartily glad there was something to praise.
“You’ve made a mistake with the soup, Marta; but everything else looks very nice. That meat is done as well as I could do it. Now, in the first place, you were in too great a hurry. The milk and tomato were only to go together the last thing, but that hasn’t caused the milk to curdle. You cannot have read your recipe over as you made it, and have forgotten the soda?”
“No, I put the soda in.”
Molly felt she could not be speaking the truth, but when she tasted the soup, found she was.
“Well, I don’t understand this. Tell me exactly how you did it.”
Marta rehearsed her movements and then it turned out she had put the soda in last, after the tomato, and of course it had curdled before that. She explained this, told her to strain the soup, and then went to prepare the table quickly, for Harry would be home in a minute.
On the whole, although the soup was a failure, Molly was satisfied with Marta’s first unaided efforts. The lemon pie, in spite of her own admonition to handle the paste very little, she had pressed with her thumb round the edge, to make it smooth, no doubt. The consequence was, the paste was nice and short, but bore no resemblance to puff paste, either in appearance or in eating, but Molly had not expected anything better, and reserved comments until the next time, when she would again show her how to use pastry.