Cookery and housekeeping

No. I.- Husband, wife, two children under four years of age. Four maid-servants. A late dinner. No. 2. — Husband, wife, five children under fourteen. Three maid-servants. Early dinner. No. 3. — Husband, wife, three or four young children. Three or four maid-servants. Early dinner. No. 4. — Husband, wife, eight or nine children under seventeen. Three maid-servants. Early dinner. These are all very modest households, where children are numerous and means small. Visitors and dinner parties are of course not included in these averages. An Englishwoman living at Paris, with several children, several servants, male and female, calculates sixteen shillings per head per week as the average expenditure. Two meals a day, preceded by a cup of tea or coffee and a roll or a bit of bread as early breakfast, are, however, the rule of masters and servants in France. For a household where a handsome table is kept, and there is neither stint nor excess, one pound per head per week may be accepted as the fair expenditure. The mistress of the household should know what she means to spend, and should let the cook or housekeeper know that she has to deal with an intelligent and fair-judging mistress. The ' consumption books,' with columns for entering daily items and the additional meals for guests, are a help to the mistress, but are not very acceptable to a cook. The larger the establishment EXPEXSES OF A HOUSEHOLD. 49 the greater is the necessity for some such means of control. In the calculation of how the sum spent per week is to be apportioned, a minute examination must be made of the requirements at each meal. The practice of having mutton chops and cutlets at breakfast and luncheon, as well as at dinner, will add largely to the butcher's book ; yet no blame is due to the housekeeper for such increase. The ordering or accepting a menu in which all the dishes contain cream, will make the demands on the dairy exorbitant (to say nothing of the demands on the digestive system of the guests). The profuse use of eggs, and dishes composed of eggs, at breakfast, lunch, 5 o'clock tea, and dinner, will explain the many dozens of eggs per week in the henwife's book. Let there be a fair computation in each case — butter and milk and groceries, as well as the articles just noticed — and then, either as dictator or director, see that the computation is not exceeded. The substitution of a simple inexpensive dish for a complex and costly one is an advantage both for the purse and the digestion on many occasions. Whilst the weekly expenditure is kept within fixed limits, the occasion of a ' feast ' may call for and justify an expenditure as legitimate in its excess as the frugality of every day. The information as to the cost of living at colleges and clubs, with estimates varying from 145-. to I/, per week, does not throw the required light on the cost of eating in a household, because in the calculations of such establishments the wages of the cook 50 EXAMPLES OF EXPENDITURE. and of the other servants, the cost of coal and gas, and other items, are considered. The following estimates and comments are the result of enquiries made with a view of obtaining the result of individual experience in households where some attention is paid to the subject. The allowance for servants per head per week is as follows : —