San Antonio daily light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1886-1907, 1889-01-10
MEALS FOR THREE CENTS.
HOW IT is DONE AT THE FIVE
POINTS HOUSE OF INDUSTRY.

Over Five Hundred Regular Boarders-A
Plain but Substantial Bill of Fare-it-
tie Girls Who Cook wen-Theory and
Practice.
The House of Industry during a year, it
was declared, gave 449, 293 meals to children
at a cost Of 2 1915 cents per meal A Sun
reporter became interested to know what
kind and how much of dinner could be
furnished for three cents. He went down TO
the Five Points House Of Industry and had
talk with Superintendent William F, Bar
nard, who has presided over the House of In
dustry for so many years.
ITO begin with" said Superintendent Bar
nard, "we have about 270 children living
here in the house and PAS who come here to
the school. The children in the house get
three meals day, of course, and those who
come to the school get variously one or two
meals. These children are all between the
ages Of and Is, and few of them are over IS.
We don't aim to take in anybody over 10, but
some Of our boys and girls have STAYED with
us till they are Is years old. In addition to
these we have good many grown women
staying with us all the while. who have no
homes and who want situations as domestics.
W. keep them until they can find work.
snow, we have breakfast here at z O'Clock,
dinner at IL o'clock and supper at 5 o'clock
The breakfast and supper consist of bread
and butter and coffee The coffee has milk
and sugar in it. At odd times during the
week there is added to this stewed prunes or
apple sauce and sometimes crackers and
cheese. Always on Sunday nights the chill.
dren get cake of some kind, and fruits in the
season. There is something extra every Sun
day night.
THE BILL FOR EACH DAY.
"Now l will give you the regular bill Of
fare for dinner for each day in the week:
Monday, mutton stew; Tuesday, mutton
soup; Wednesday, stewed beef, or occasion
ally baked beef pie; Thursday, corned beef;
Friday, fish of some kind, or fried liver; Sat
urday, roast beef; Sunday, corned beef.
With these we always serve potatoes or tur-
nips, and sometimes both, and always green
vegetables of some kind.
There is no certain portion of food given
to each child at a meal. The children have
all they can eat, and they are not stinted.
Thanksgiving, and Christmas and New
Years, of course, are feast days Then we
give the children turkey and chicken, with
cranberry and apple sauce and all sorts of
vegetables, with celery and apples and all
that sort of thing. For dessert we have pies
Of every kind, with cheese and coffee The
feast days generally last for two or three
days each, in fact, for we always have more
on hand than can be consumed in single
day. Most of the food on these DAYS, of
course, is contributed, but we are still put to
a good deal of extra expense then, and all
this is counted in our general estimate of a
meal for three cents.
1.-THE quality of the food is always good.
Our bread is the best we can buy. We have
bought it for years Of one baker, who sells it
to us at the rate of a six-cent loaf for four
and one-half cents. Our girls cook some, but,
of course, they can't cook enough to feed all
the mouths here. Throughout the year we
have various kinds and amounts of fruit and
vegetables and food contributed, but we can't
rely on this, and we don't.
eve try to make this as little of an 'insti-
tuition as possible l abhor an institution
where the children all wear uniform or
certain kind of dress, and are known by num-
bers and wards in and out to their meals and
to bed, and all that sort of thing. That seems
to me about as heartless and cruel as the
poverty the children lived in before they
came here. So far as possible we tryto learn
the children's names and call them by these
We have no marching or military business,
and have never heard it said that we didn't
have good order When the bell rings for
the meals the children are generally in their
play rooms They flock into the dining room
as fast as they can, and a merry scene it is,
too. They do not sit at the tables, but stand,
We have this arrangement because we can
get more at the tables this way. They don't
wear any sort of uniform. In buying cloth
for clothes for the children we always get as
varied colors as we can. 1t is our aim to
make this as much of real home as we can
We can't come anywhere near our ideal, be-
cause we have to deal with children in a
mass. We can't individualize in our govern
ment and treatment as parent can Still,
we peg along on this plan so far as we are
able.
CLASS IN COOKING.
During the summer we had a teacher
here from one of the cooking schools up town
to instruct our girls in cooking. 1t wasn't
with the idsa of helping us exactly, but with
the idea of helping the girls, may be, to OBJ
tain situations. confess was little skep-
teal about the experiment. for, mind you,
these are al very young girls, hardly any of
them over IL years old, and they have come
out of poverty stricken places, where they
didn't get much of notion about refined
cooking or about any cooking at ALL
well, there was a class of sixteen of them
formed, and after the teacher went away
was anxious to see what they could really do.
divided them up into squads of four each,
and put e.Nh squad, day after day, into our
private kitchen, where the meals for those of
us in charge here are prepared. No one was
allowed in the kitchen but the girlS-no one
was allowed to come near the kitchen. Well,
rrirlS nicrlnt