Living on a Little

"It does seem strange, when one thinks that we are eating scrag of mutton and beef stew right along, to buy things cheaper still for dinner, doesn't it?"

"Oh, we have not had those things right along! We had chicken last week, once, and the week before we had a pot-roast which I recall with pleasure this minute. But I admit the accusation in part, for you know we have had the dinner-parties to make up for. Ordinarily, I do not manage quite so closely. But if for a week or two you have calf's head once, and a dinner or two of beef shin and such things, you will cut down wonderfully on your meat bill. You can have also a dinner of one Frenched tenderloin, and another of scrag of mutton with barley, and a third of half a pound of chopped beef made up into meat cakes with a brown gravy. If you eke out with odds and ends of things in croquettes, with heavy soup before it, I should think you could save nearly two dollars in the one item of meat, and no one the wiser. Then once have a main course of salt codfish, freshened and creamed and baked with crumbs, in place of meat, and another time have baked beans, just for a change. If it is summer-time you can have a very good dinner dish of an eggplant. Cut it in two sidewise, take out the centre and salt it, and put it under a weight to extract the juice. After an hour or so take it up and chop it and mix it with an equal quantity of seasoned bread crumbs and a small cup of chopped nuts. Heap this in the shell and bake it with a covering of crumbs and butter. It is just as nourishing as meat and not so heavy, though it is a distinctly substantial dish. Of course you must be careful to get a very cheap eggplant, or you save nothing, but I am supposing now you live where gardens are plenty; perhaps you can walk out and pick one in your own.

"To go with the meats, possibly we can find some spring vegetables that cost no more than winter ones would. Naturally we cannot buy asparagus, nor yet new peas, but I fancy we may pick up some cheap new beets or carrots. If not, we will just go on having winter ones, but we will try and serve them in vegetable croquettes, or cream them and bake them with crumbs for a change. And then we can certainly have greens of ever so many kinds, and nothing is more wholesome in the spring than greens."

"I simply despise them," said Dolly with a sniff of disdain.

"You will not despise mine, my child; I learned how to cook them in Paris and they are good enough for an epicure. Write down my words of wisdom on this subject. Take any sort of green thing you can get, beet-tops, spinach, sorrel, lettuce, escarole or cress; wash them well in several waters, and do not drain them very dry; put them in a covered saucepan without water, and turn and press them well from time to time till the juice flows. Take them up then and put them twice through the meat-chopper; never try and chop them in a bowl or they will not be good, but instead, coarse and stringy. After they are a smooth pulp, put them on the fire, and add seasoning generously: salt, pepper, lemon juice or a very little vinegar, and a little cream if you have it. With sorrel, which is the very best of all greens, do not put in any acid; with spinach, add a little nutmeg. Then, when the whole has cooked for five minutes, take it up, put it in a very hot dish, and serve at once; you will have a new dish you will certainly like."

"How about potatoes?" inquired Dolly after she had written this down and marked it with a star as "extra good." "No new potatoes for us, I suppose?"

"Unluckily, no. I hate to keep on using old ones, but I always do until that happy day when I find the price is exactly the same for new or old; then I change over. But do not have potatoes all the time; boiled rice is cheaper when you are cutting down expenses. And when you can buy some vegetable cheaper than potatoes, have neither, but have two fresh vegetables instead. That makes a good change in spring and summer."

"And how about salads?"

"Just as soon as you find young dandelion leaves and cress and cheap lettuce, cut off soups and have those instead. But do not buy them unless you can really save money by doing so; there is a danger you may not think of. Usually soups are cheaper."

"And desserts?"

"Eggs are cheap just now, so depend somewhat on them. That is, make a sweet omelet of two, for one night, and for another have prune puff. For that you take the white of one egg, sweeten it and mix with the pulp of half a dozen cooked prunes; chill this and serve it in glasses. Or, put it in small brown baking-dishes and put it in the oven for five minutes, and serve it hot in the same dishes.

"Have a sweet soufflé sometimes, too. Beat the white of two eggs light, fold in a little powdered sugar, and put it in a buttered dish with spoonfuls of jam or orange marmalade dropped in here and there. Set this in a hot oven as you go to dinner, and it will be just ready when it is time for dessert.

"The next night after you have had either of these, have baked custard. Mix the slightly beaten egg yolks with a little milk and sugar, and put them in cups or small moulds and bake them in a pan of water. You can vary them by putting in jam or by making the sugar into caramel, or adding a little bit of rice. Or, use up the yolks by having them scrambled with milk for breakfast.

"And if you live in the country, Dolly, have lots of rhubarb for spring desserts. You can serve it one day in a deep tart with pie-crust on top, and little tartlets made from the left-overs. On another you stew it in a little water, and put in the sugar as it is just done, because it does not take as much then as if it went in at first. Then, while it is hot, add enough dissolved gelatine to set the whole and pour it into a mould. Serve with part of the juice as a sauce, which you kept out on purpose.

"Speaking of this jelly suggests also coffee jelly and prune jelly and things of that kind, for they do not take butter or eggs; but I rather think I told you of those when we were studying desserts. However, I can remind you of them now, can't I?

"When strawberries are cheap, get one boxful and divide it. Serve part the first one night with a plain soft corn-starch pudding. The second night, slightly crush the rest and sweeten them. Make just a little bit of baking-powder biscuit dough and mould several rather thin biscuits; bake these, split them, and put in the berries between two layers, and you have nice individual shortcakes. In that way one box will make two desserts, while otherwise you might not find it enough. Of course if you had a garden you could go out and pick some berries and serve them in their natural state, but I am telling you how to manage if you have not such luxuries as home-grown fruit.

"When we speak of cheap desserts, our mind naturally reverts to bread pudding, and we have already had that once. But to cut down its expense, serve it in small moulds instead of in one large one; individual dishes are a great economy for any sort of thing. And try having boiled rice croquettes with raisins in them; and have farina croquettes, too, cooked rather brown, and if possible covered with scraped maple sugar. Don't you think we might leave desserts now? I told you so much about them when we went over the subject."

"Yes, you may go on to breakfasts and luncheons if you have finished dinners. Can you really economize on those? It seems to me we have reduced them to their lowest terms already."

"Well, we have, just about. But for breakfasts I should cut out fruit altogether for a time, and make a breakfast of hot cereal, coffee and toast, or some good sort of muffin that did not take too many eggs. In winter you can have a hearty meal of fried corn-meal mush; you can either make that the day before you want it and slice and fry it in the morning, or you can stir it up and boil it freshly just before breakfast and fry spoonfuls of it while it is soft. I like it best that way myself, but you can try both ways. In summer you can have an excellent breakfast of cold cereals."

"They sound horrid."

"They are not horrid at all, but very good; we will begin to have them ourselves as soon as it gets warm enough. And besides cereals, I should see if I could not have some cheap hot breakfast dish to alternate with them; I suppose milk toast, or if you live where milk is plenty, cream toast, and codfish in lots of ways, especially in baked potatoes, or mixed with mashed potato in small dishes. Sometimes I should have codfish in fritters; brown puffy fritters, not flat greasy cakes. And I should have clams in that way, too, if they were cheap."

"How about luncheons, now? Did you say you could or could not cut down on those?"

"I think we cannot do much better than we have done, but I should keep trying all the time. I should have fried bread with jelly to eat on it, and baked beans, and farina cakes, and minced vegetables, hot or in salad. And in summer I should have creamed corn or peas on toast, and lots of salads of plain cooked vegetables. But be very careful not to try and cut down on your luncheons by doing without substantial dishes. No woman who does her own work can long keep up on bread and tea at noon without getting sallow and thin and anaemic; you simply must not try and economize on nourishing food, even though you cut down on everything expensive. Starvation is poor management."

"Well, leaving meals for a moment, do you try and cut down on other things, such as coffee, for example? Do you have a poorer quality to save money?"

"Never. I must have good coffee at any rate. But I will tell you what I do right along. I go to a very good grocery, one of the largest and most expensive sort, and there I ask for a good kind of coffee which is not as expensive as their highest grades. You will be astonished to find that all such places make a specialty of coffee which actually costs less than you can buy it for at your regular grocery, and it is infinitely better, too. One famous place keeps coffee for thirty-five and forty cents a pound and even more, and at the same time recommends what they call their 'best' coffee, at nineteen cents! It seems absurd, but that is a fact. I always use it, and it is the best I can buy. Never use cheap coffee, Dolly; it is horrid, just as bad butter is, or bad tea, or bad eggs. Go without, or have them good."

"Mary, did you ever think what you would do if you had to live on just a few cents a day? I have often wondered whether I could manage or not. Suppose for a time you had practically nothing at all, how would you manage then?"

"I suppose I should plan to have things to eat that would give the maximum of nourishment for the minimum of cost. Let me see. I should have corn-meal mush for one breakfast, because that contains fat and is very nourishing. For another, I should have boiled rice, I think. For luncheons I should have split pea purée, or a thick bean soup. For dinner I should have a dish of creamed codfish, let us say; or, I should have whole wheat bread and a baked apple instead of the fish. And I should have macaroni and cheese, too. I know people who have tried these things say you can live easily on beans and lentils and whole wheat bread and a certain amount of fruit, apples or bananas or figs, and I can quite believe it. Of course, if only one could have plenty of milk, the rest would be easy."

"Easy, but not pleasant. I should hate to have to have such monotonous food, so I hope Fred's income will never be less. I like a pretty dinner table and a dainty dinner. Cereals may be all very well as to nourishment for the body, but I think the spirit suffers. I don't mean spirit, either, exactly. But you get the idea, don't you?"

"The general poetry of life, I suppose you have in mind. The dinner table with candles and china and glass and good things to eat gives an air of refinement to life. Well, I agree with you that they are worth having, too. We can economize in the food, but we cannot dispense with the graces of the dinner."

"If we cut down too much, you see I am afraid things will not be quite as nice as I like to have them."

"I don't believe in doing it all at once, but in cutting down a trifle here and another there, day by day, till you can afford better things. I am sure it would give one a most uncomfortable moral jar to suddenly drop from very comfortable living to lentils, or to anything corresponding with your idea of the 'scrags of mutton' which you are perpetually holding up as the very embodiment of inelegance! Better not go in for too much luxury any one day; have things economically nice right along and save a little margin so you will not have to cut down at all. Unless, indeed, you cut for entertaining, as we are doing now; then do it imperceptibly, and don't tell of it, and all will go well.

"And now that is my last word. I find reducing expenses has a most exhausting effect on me. Let's go down-town and lark a bit and refresh our jaded spirits, and when we feel equal to it, we will come back and cook up a dinner that will not cost half as much as it will seem to cost, judging by its looks and taste."