"A Very cheap, inodorous, and efficacious disinfectant, recommended by the physician in charge of a London hospital, and which our housekeepers will find valuable to destroy bad odors anywhere, as well as desirable for use in contagious diseases, is made as follows: Take half a drachm of nitrate of lead, dissolved in a pint or more of boiling water, and dissolve two drachms of common sal* in a pail or bucket of water. Pour the two solutions together, and allow the sediment to subside. The clear, supernatant fluid will be a saturated solution of chloride of lead. A cloth dipped in this solution and hung up in a room will sweeten the atmosphere instantly, and it will also have a similar effect on sinks, etc. This is worth remembering."--Michigan farmer and state journal of agriculture: Household--Supplement , 1884
NB: This is posted for nostalgia value only! Dewey's Treehouse takes no responsibility for people who take this seriously enough to clean their houses with nitrate of lead.
More thoughts from the Michigan Farmer:
"One of my neighbors makes as nice hop yeast bread as I ever saw, but she never seems free from the care and thought of it, and as soon as one batch is baked begins to make preparations for the next. Her husband said to me, not long since: "Bell didn't make as good bread for a while as Martha (his first wife) used to, but I told her more time and attention must be given to the matter, and now, it is all right." Poor girl! she's a slave to making bread for that family of seven, and sometime ere long I shall feel like scribbling on her tombstone, "Died of bread making." (If, indeed, she has a tombstone, though the first wife is not thus remembered.)" (from a letter about the benefits of salt-rising bread)
On the benefits of growing your own:
"By the working of the same principle under which the shoemaker's children go barefoot, farmers, with every appliance at their hand, rarely have a good kitchen garden. Possibly after the spring field crops are all in, a man may, as a great concession to his wife's "notions," and with the inward conviction that it is "all blamed nonsense," graciously consent to plow up the "garden," and put in a few rows of sweet corn, some onions, and a few peas and beans, with no particular care as to varieties, and no pains whatever to secure a succession. The seed once in the ground his whole duty is done, save for an occasional half day when he has no especial work for the hired man, and sends him to "hoe out the garden." The result is a bountiful crop of weeds and a few half-grown vegetables, and at the end of the season the deluded man is more than ever convinced that a good garden is a luxury for "bloated bondholders" only. He can reason clearly enough that if his cornfield is not properly cultivated, the returns will be proportionally small, but when it comes to the garden it is a foregone conclusion that garden "truck" should grow itself.... We are coming to understand more and more that the gospel of good food tends to promote that other gospel of good will to men; in other words, that good living keeps a man healthy and consequently good-natured.... it would give a goat the dyspepsia to live on bread, meat, potatoes, and pie and cake, the year round, as so many do. The man who "hasn't time" to make and tend a garden says he has not time to attend to one of the most important of duties, his own health and that of his family. We are vegetarians by nature; the race was born in a garden. The fresh vegetable food of spring, the "greens" and salads, are nature's antidote to the biliousness and torpidity of liver engendered by the winter's diet of greasy meats, buckwheat cakes and mince pie. The system craves the change of food, the jaded appetite is stimulated, healthy food gives healthy blood, of which comes strength and vigor....The flour, meat, butter, eggs and groceries that you don't eat when you have vegetables, will in nine cases out of ten pay for the expense of cultivation, not to mention the benefits of a healthful, plentiful and varied diet.... But even where vegetables can be bought, there is a noticeable difference betwen the fresh, crisp, dewy article, and that which is wilted and stale through handling and exposure in the market, a difference both in flavor and healthfulness."
"A garden is a godsend to the cook; it saves her both work and worry. Instead of baking her brains over a stove making pies, cakes and the eternal doughnut in the tropical July and August days, when the air outside fairly scintillates with heat and the air inside is ten times hotter, she gets a breath of fresh air as she gathers plethoric peas and beans, husks the nutritious sweet corn, and hunts out the yellowest "Golden Neck."There is a virtuous consciousness of well doing in every woman's heart as she sum mons her family to a dinner which she knows does her credit, which it is a husband's duty to foster and encourage. A good garden is a great incentive to good housekeeping, and only women know how much trouble and annoyance it saves."
On picky husbands:
"I've no patience with those men who require everything served just so; sick or well, hot or cold, in season and out of season, they must have a certain thing for a certain meal. One neighbor will have cookies to soak in his tea or coffee three times a day. Another, with an invalid wife, will not eat cold bread; only hot biscuit, gems, or pancakes are ever placed on the table."
"That article from the pen of Beatrix is excellent. I endorse every word of it except, perhaps, what she says about our not enjoying a guest's visit unless there is pie or cake in the house. Are we "cowards" because we conform to custom? Is it not said that " custom makes law?" There is no need, when people are well, that a woman's cupboard should be like Mother Hubbard's, neither will a women of sense be foolishly extravagant. Some women will drag their housework along till "ten o'clock at night" and even later, and those who do might as well fry cakes as anything else. When she says "I have memorized poems while paring potatoes," etc., I am interested at once, for I so often do likewise, and a pencil and paper are always at hand. It is well to catch these bright thoughts, for they oft take to themselves swift wings. Not boastingly, but in support of her theory, I may add that a sudden "inspiration," when in the midst of the Monday washing not many weeks ago, was thus written down, with but little delay to the work, which received a prize over all other competitors; and, that being the case, it evidently did not carry an aroma of "suds" to the editorial sanctum; but, waiting until arrayed in "good clothes" and with well sharpened pencil, I might have wooed the muse in vain."
Clipart found here
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