Keeping Hearth & Home in Old Massachusetts: A Practical Primer for Everyday Living
by Carol Padgett
Category: Travel

Keeping Hearth and Home is a "how-to" book, but not for the modern-day folk. It's the book Great-Great-Grandmother grabbed off the shelf whenever the horse was constipated, when she was entertaining a person of high degree, or when she required directions for canning okra. The advice and voice are quaint now, and sometimes uproariously funny. But it tells me story of daily life in a time when the country was binding its wounds from the Civil War -- a time before electricity, telephones, cars, and shopping malls. Keeping Hearth and Home is more than a great cover to cover read. It's a book where readers can turn to any page and be totally amused and enchanted, not to mention edified. Learn how to rid mattresses of bedbugs, remove stains from Irish linen, and substitute squirrels for chicken in the stew. So welcome to the family household. Come indoors, pull up a fireside rocker, and listen to the Great-Great-Grandparents tell how they walked these same floorboards, sat in that very chair, and lived under this same roof. Most of all, discover how the everyday rituals of a bustling nineteenth-century home can bring history to life more vividly than ever. Everyone has prepared for the visit: cleaning iron moulds and cut glass...whitening ivory knife handles with sand and the walls with Paris White...scrubbing floors with sawdust and oiling them with linseed and burnt sienna. And the dining room table creaks with a feast of favorite dishes from recipes passed down through generations. With Keeping Hearth and Home on the coffee table, the wolf will never dare venture across the threshold, and the household will carry on flawlessly -- like a well-oiled wagon wheel. From the recipefor Virginia Verder (Bottled Milk-Punch) to the medicinal uses of Virginia Snake-Root, this book will delight readers with descriptions of daily life during the late 1800s.