The household (of the Detroit free press)

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The Household is an 1886 domestic encyclopedia edited by May Perrin Goff, connected to the Detroit Free Press. It is a sprawling guide to Victorian home life combining cookery with home decoration, needlework, gardening, entertaining, beauty care, and home medicine. Readers seeking only recipes will find a substantial cookery section covering breads, cakes, meats, fish, game, vegetables, preserves, pickles, and soups, but this sits alongside instructions for making baskets, raising canaries, pressing flowers, decorating parlors, staging amateur theatricals, and treating burns or croup. The book presents itself as a cyclopedia of practical hints for modern homes, aiming to help households of moderate means achieve tasteful, artistic domestic environments without excessive expense. Its scope reflects the ambitions of a comprehensive household manual meant to serve nearly every domestic need under one cover. For today's reader, it offers a detailed window into the material culture, social rituals, and daily labor of an American home in the 1880s, from dairy work and dish washing to wedding anniversary etiquette and dinner party menus. The mixture of cookery, craft, and medical content is characteristic of the genre and should be approached as a period artifact rather than a modern kitchen reference.

The book divides into two broad parts, Part I covering home decoration, crafts, gardening, and household management, and Part II covering cookery, as laid out in section 1's table of contents. Part I moves through bird-keeping and basketry, flower arrangement, needlework and fancywork, dairy and carving, entertaining and games, room-by-room decorating advice, kitchen management, laundry and cleaning, home medicine and invalid cookery, music and painting instruction, and nature crafts such as pressed flowers and taxidermy. The cookery portion, beginning around section 33, proceeds through bread and yeast, breakfast dishes, cakes and confectionery, desserts and beverages, fish, game, preserved fruits, meats, pies and puddings, pickles, poultry, salads and shellfish, and soups and vegetables, closing with a cook's time-table, weights and measures, and dining etiquette. Later sections return again to needlework and drawn-work embroidery patterns, showing the book's organization is thematic and cumulative rather than strictly alphabetical.