One year

Dear blog,

You are one year old today. To celebrate, I doctored this photo of a decidedly unhistorical chocolate beet cake. I hope you like it.

It's been quite a year! In one year of blogging, I have...

• worked with two cookbooks and started a third
• learned what salt pork is
• discovered the joys of cooking with animal fat
• tried and failed to make cornbread
• decided to eat more mindfully (a co-resolution with Josh)
• cooked with fish, shrimp, veal, chicken, pork, and a rabbit despite said resolution
• survived a snowstorm using my mad hearth cooking skills
• shared the tools needed to cook over a hearth fire, if others should wish to survive snowstorms
• started a container garden (and fallen in love with it)
• studied colonial Williamsburg
• survived a school trip to Washington, D.C.
• considered (and discarded) historical cleaning methods
• had only one complete cooking disaster that I couldn't eat

Dear blog, it's been much more fun having lovely readers along for the ride. Truly, thank you for reading, friends. It's such a blast to discuss historical cooking methods and weird foods with you.

Here's hoping the next year is just as fun!

Love,
Abby

When cleaning house

Ah, spring! The daffodils are blooming, the grass is green, the air is crisp, the snow is falling...

Yes. Although it's the end of March, New England thinks it's still time to throw down a healthy mix of snow and rain. What a dirty trick, after 70-degree weather a few weeks back.

No matter. Spring has a sense of newness about it, a feeling of being able to start over again. Maybe that's why I got the urge to clean house recently. After a few weekends of hosting friends, dashing down to D.C. to meet fiances, and preparing to lead an upcoming field trip, I was ready for a quiet couple of days at home.

So last weekend I decided to hold a mini-spring cleaning in my apartment. I swept out all the nooks and crannies, discovered that my baseboards do indeed collect dust, and wiped down my sinks and dish rack. I took my winter clothes to the dry cleaner's and washed three loads of laundry. Then I settled down to all that schoolwork that still awaited me. By the end of the weekend, I was exhausted, but my apartment looked better for it.

But like the last time I deep cleaned the apartment, I started wondering what spring cleaning had been like before women had washing machines and vacuum cleaners. So I turned to Maria Parloa's Young Housekeeper (1894) once again. She didn't disappoint.

Miss Parloa introduced her chapter on seasonal cleaning with the following:

"The season of house-cleaning is greeted with different degrees of welcome, or horror, by the different members of the family."

Sounds intimidating, right? Well, with good reason. Miss Parloa goes on to describe in great detail how to clean the various rooms of the house. Here's a paraphrased list (with commentary):

1. Wait until you don't have to light daily fires for warmth (so you can clean the furnace and stove). I guess March is not really the time to start.

2. In the cellar, remove the cinders from the furnace, then clean the whole furnace in pieces. Sweep the whole room (including the ceiling!), then whitewash the walls. I am so glad I live in an apartment.

3. In each room, brush and wipe all storage boxes and closets, then saturate with naphtha to keep out bugs. Line each box with new paper before replacing the stored goods. I suppose I moved some of my winter clothes to storage boxes...but since I'd recently cleaned all of them in the January moth scare, this was as far as it got.

4. Brush down the furniture, then place outside the room. You wouldn't want the furniture to get dirty!

5. Brush down the walls, ceiling, and windows of each room. Sweep the floor, wash the windows, woodwork, and the floor. Let dry for an hour, then replace all the furniture.

6. To clean carpets, remove the carpet tacks with a tack-lifter, then roll up the carpets in old sheets. Take the carpets outside and beat them on both sides, then let them lie on the grass until the room is ready. I don't even know where to start with this one. I guess carpets were held down with tacks before the days of rubbery carpet liners--that makes sense. But tack-lifters? You need a whole different tool just to pick up the carpets?

7. Clean the floor of each room once the carpet has been removed. Sprinkle the floor with wet sawdust, then sweep it up. Clean all surfaces with a broom covered with flannel. Wash the floors with lime water to make the floorboards "whiter and sweeter." Parloa also includes a recipe for making your own lime water (unslaked lime and water). This is getting awfully serious, friends. I am suddenly grateful that there are companies who spend all their time making cleaning products so I don't have to.

8. In bedrooms, take each bedstead apart. Pour naphtha into the grooves of each piece to prevent bedbugs. Dip the ends of slats into a bowl of naphtha. The only time I plan on taking my bedstead apart is when I move. That thing is tricky.

9. When you replace the carpet, rub the soiled spots with naphtha and flannel. Then wipe the carpet with ammonia water (that you have also made yourself). How did these people not die of naphtha poisoning?

10. Repeat appropriate steps for downstairs rooms, and make sure to beat the draperies. Good Lord. We're only halfway done?

11. In the kitchen and pantry, remove all china and dishes from the cupboards, and wash and dry the shelves. Cover with new paper. Scour the tinware, tables, and sink. This is a little more like what I did last weekend...but it's pretty much the only similarity.

Then, when the young housekeeper is finished cleaning the house, Parloa also recommends that "the piazza and yard should be put in order." At that point, were any of them still standing? No wonder she recommends hiring extra help for the week (week!) of spring cleaning. I'm not sure how anyone could manage that by herself, much less keep the meals going for the rest of the family. Apparently whole families tended to dread spring cleaning because the woman of the house would be so harried, and because she could only provide cold meals (if anything). Poor husbands.

The moral of this story is practically banging me over the head. Thank goodness for modern conveniences, and for the fact that we don't have to worry about bugs to the extent that 19th-century families did. It's fun to read between the lines for details like that: dust seems to have been a big issue, too, given the sweeping of walls and ceilings. I'm guessing soot from the furnace and gas lamps would have built up in the house as well.

Now I'm curious to hear about your spring cleaning. What have you done (or what are you planning to do) to get ready for spring? Hopefully no one's going to haul out their tack-lifter...

the care of rooms

My apartment is located in a grand old house, the kind with high ceilings and ornate trim and bay windows. It's beautiful. I love coming home every afternoon, because I feel warm and cozy within the elegant architecture. There's something comforting about living in a beautiful place.

However, there's also something dusty about living in an old place. Cleaning--something I hate to do at the best of times--really has to be done once a week to keep the apartment looking spiffy. Most of the time I'm too busy to care about sweeping and dusting all the hidden corners. (Of course, when friends come to visit, that's another story.)

Recently, though, I was forced to face my least favorite chore. Last Friday I discovered that some moths had been having a grand old time with a few sweaters stored over the summer. Tragedy! It seems as though cedar chips actually stop working when they're a few years old, and I should have replaced them or sanded them or sprayed them with cedar oil to keep the moths away. But it was too late now, and I had to deal with the consequences.

I won't go into the details of my cleaning frenzy, except to say that my dry cleaners have never been so happy to see me, and that it is awfully difficult to find cleaning solutions that don't destroy the environment. Luckily the damage wasn't too severe, and my apartment is now (hopefully) moth-free.

Because I'm a nerd, though, my thoughts turned to history. When I interned at a living history museum, we watched clips from 1900 House, a fascinating documentary that follows an ordinary British family that lives in a period-accurate Victorian brownstone for three months. One of the first things the wife and mother discovers is that cleaning the house is never done and takes forever. So she hires a maid, who happily takes to the bizarre cleaning methods of the turn of the century. I remembered some entertaining clips in which the maid has to take apart all the beds in order to rid them of bedbugs.

Over the course of my long evening of domestic endeavor, I started wondering how a Victorian woman would rid her house of moths. Would she scald all her clothes in hot water and dry them in the sun? Would she use some form of poisonous naphthalene?* Would she turn to some other cancer-causing cleaning solution?

my 21st-century arsenal

I turned to that pillar of domestic wisdom, Catharine E. Beecher. Beecher was an advocate of women's education and domestic tranquility. In her book The American Woman's Home, which she co-wrote with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine described methods of designing and caring for a home that were far more modern than the 1869 publication date would suggest. Her recommendations for ridding clothes of moths were surprisingly innocuous:

"Airing clothes does not destroy moths, but laying them in a hot sun does. If articles be tightly sewed up in linen when laid away, and fine tobacco put about them, it is a sure protection."

Granted, Beecher was far ahead of her time. Just for kicks, I looked up another domestic advice book, Maria Parloa's Miss Parloa's Young Housekeeper. Parloa takes an entirely different tack:

"Soiled carpets and garments may be cleaned by sponging with naphtha. Buffalo bugs and moths can be destroyed with it. For stuffed furniture use naphtha freely. Put the article on the piazza and pour the fluid into it, being sure that every part is saturated. After a day or two, repeat the process, and I think you will find that both worms and eggs are destroyed."

Pour the fluid into it? Saturate the garment? What was she trying to do, suffocate her readers with the fumes? She does note that one should always keep the room well-aerated and not light any fires for a few days, however.

Lesson learned? Unless you're a follower of Catharine E. Beecher's wisdom, you'd probably hasten your family to an early death by trying to rid the house of moths. Man, do I love the modern age.

* the primary ingredient of old mothballs. Or, the ingredient that gives them that pungent smell.