BY SUSAN HAYES WARD.

CHAPTER III.—THE DINING ROOM.

The central work-room of the house is the kitchen. There labor is continuous. There three times a day, year in and year out, the meals must be cooked, and the pots and pans washed. Slovenly work there tells all over the house. An ill-regulated kitchen involves poor cookery and waste, and cheapens the most artistically arranged dining room. But the importance of good, careful and intelligent cookery hardly comes within the limits of this article.

It behooves us, however, to insist upon it that the room where so much of the necessary work of home is carried on, should be airy, sunny, cheerful, well stocked with the implements essential to the lightening of kitchen labor, and adapted in every way to the comfort of its occupants.

A good farmer supplies himself with tools and machines for his farm work; but his wife often toils with cracked stove, green wood, and a scant supply of kettles and pans, when only a slight outlay would save her many weary steps and much worry of mind.

The kitchen should have painted walls that can be readily washed. Indeed, every surface in the room should be washable. There should be plenty of closet room, a large sink, a large work-table, comfortable chairs, at least one easy chair, a shelf for books, and room in the window for a few plants if desired. A picture or two would not be out of place if protected by glass, nor an occasional motto—like the charge to the German cook:

Or the admirable rules for home living which Dr. Watts wrote for children:

There are many small houses where either kitchen or sitting-room has to serve also as dining room. Any sensible woman can make shift to get along comfortably in this way and eat her bread and honey with the queen in the kitchen when necessity compels, so long as she has neatness and despatch for hand-maidens. One large, light room is often far better than two small dark ones; but where a room does double duty there can hardly be unity in the arrangement and furnishing.

To my question, “What is of most importance in the dining room?” a man made answer, “the kitchen,” and a woman, “the outlook.” No doubt the provision of wholesome and abundant food for her family is the housewife’s first duty, but while fully endorsing the masculine paradox, we must not ignore the woman’s plea for a cheerful outlook.

If possible, the dining room should have as good a view as the house affords. Let it look out on the orchard, the sea shore, or the distant hills, rather than the stable or the clothes line. The view of a terraced, box-bordered garden, of a tulip bed and apple blooms, as seen from an old-fashioned country house dining room is one of the sweet memories which childhood has stored up for the enrichment of my coming years. Three times a day the household gathers here to take the goods the gods provide them, and then, if ever, they should enjoy a little leisure, and be in the mood to appreciate the best of the out-of-door world that surrounds them. A good view is better than pictures or stained glass for a dining room; but when a good view is out of reach and an unsightly one is unavoidable, then stained glass comes to our aid. If that darkens the room too much, ground or cathedral glass panes can transmit the light, surrounded by a border of color. That would be over-leaping the obstacle; but it can be quietly set aside by means of a pretty sash or half-sash curtain of Madras muslin or any pretty, thin, colored curtain material. A curtain is a simpler, franker, and consequently better solution of this difficulty than any of the pasted-on, semi-translucent, paper cheats that simulate stained glass

Let honest poverty hold up his head and hang up a width or two of ten penny Turkey-red calico by the aid of button rings and a brass wire, so that it can be drawn across the lower sash, and if the color be in keeping with the room, it will look better than anything more pretentious and less true. Good stained glass, such as Mr. Tiffany or Mr. La Farge devise, is very beautiful, but like Adolphus’s tea-pot, it has to be lived up to throughout the room, and so is more expensive than in its first cost. The fine view, however, involves no extra outlay, and beside adding good cheer to that which the housewife spreads upon her board, it is no inconsiderable factor in the table-talk of the year, helping not a little in the entertainment of guests.

The dining room should also be conveniently near the kitchen, either in point of fact, or made practically near in the case of a basement kitchen by a “lift” or dumb waiter. The kitchen should not open directly into the room, or all the kitchen odors will abide there. An intermediate pantry or entry way shuts off many of the smells of cooking, and a small slide through which dishes can be passed serves to the same end, as it obviates the necessity of keeping the door ajar while food is carried back and forth.

How to light the dining room is a question of some importance. There should be light enough to show the table to advantage, but it should be possible to darken the room with shutters or blinds in the inevitable summer warfare with flies. A room looks better, artistically, where the light enters from but one side. Cross lights are the artist’s abhorrence.

In city houses a conservatory built out on one side gives a pleasant suggestion of the woods and out-of-doors, and at the same time gives the right effect of light and shade to the room. Kerosene lamps are not ornaments to the dining or tea table. They are cumbersome, malodorous, and their room is better than their company. A chandelier over the table, burning gas or holding lamps, is the easiest and cheapest arrangement, but not the most picturesque. The prettiest light of all, and probably the most expensive, as the prettiest things are apt to be, is given by wax candles from tall candlesticks. Four of these judiciously arranged on the table will give an abundance of light for those seated about it, if additional light be provided for the rest of the room by a lamp on the sideboard or in side sconces.

A dining room should not be too warm. It is an old boarding house trick to so heat the dining room as to take away all appetite for food. The room should, in fact, be kept a little cooler than the rest of the house, partly because the lower temperature provokes appetite, and in part because on leaving the table it is natural to feel a sensation of chilliness, the blood of the body being called aside to the business of digestion, so that it is comfortable after eating to step into a room a few degrees warmer than that in which one has been seated.

The color of the dining room depends upon its size, exposure, and upon whether it must do double duty as sitting room, or library. Dark, rich furniture and wall-hangings have been the rule for dining rooms for many a year. The larger the room, the more elaborate, rich and dark can be the furnishing, but a dark room that hardly gets a glimpse of sun throughout the year must be made sunny by plenty of yellow in woodwork, or walls; bright, sunny pictures with gilt frames; and by the glitter of brass or of the pretty, yellow English ware with which the china shops are aglow this year. For rich wall effects Japanese or leather paper is good, Lincrusta better, the latter being a comparatively new material, in substance something like linoleum, washable and very durable (so the manufacturers assert), having figures raised upon it, and coming in good designs and colors. With elaborately decorated walls, plain curtains are called for. Where the walls are to be furnished freely with oil paintings, let the pictures supply the decoration, and let the walls be as unobtrusive as possible—only ensuring that they are of a good back ground color; sage, olive-green, olive-brown, or dull red, in paint or paper.

Family portraits, if good, are not out of place in the dining room; but poor, old photographs in bungling, black walnut frames should be preserved in the private apartments of those who value them. They are never decorative; nor are pictures popularly known as dining room pictures much more pleasing. The effigy of a silver salver of leaden hue loaded with fruits of all climes, with a decanter of wine and a half empty glass, of fishes hanging by their gills, or dead ducks, each from one web-footed leg, is not nearly so attractive as a good portrait, landscape, genre picture or flower painting, however good practice the manufacture of such studies may be in the art schools. I know a dining room where, outrivaling some amateurish fruit painting, an engraving after Rosa Bonheur of a shepherdess with her sheep has been a daily delight for years, and another where the only picture space in the room, that directly over the mantel shelf (the walls being darkly paneled), is filled with a water color copy of Sir Joshua’s “Angel Choir” that seems fairly to light and hallow the air around it, like the glories round the heads of saints.

An over-mantel is appropriate in the dining room if anywhere, as it affords shelf room for choice china or glass that ought to be seen. A little ingenuity can go a great way in dressing up a commonplace shelf so that it shall have dignity and importance. I have known one to have a very aristocratic air which was only an adaptation of part of a four-post bedstead, graceful, slender posts standing on either side of the fireplace, built up with shelves of varying width and length.

If books in every room are a prime necessity, as our model home-maker assures us, then there should be at least one book-shelf in each room.

“Pray what is that book-shelf for?” asks the visitor while seated at the dinner table in “The Poet’s House,” which Mr. Scudder has described for us. “Books of reference,” said Stillwell, promptly. “It’s extraordinary how many little questions come up for discussion at the table, questions of dates, of names, of quotations. So I keep a dictionary, a book of dates, a brief biographical dictionary, a dictionary of poetical quotations, and one or two other such books at hand. It is the sideboard to our mental feast. We don’t keep everything we possibly need on the table itself.” And others beside poets would find such a shelf of great convenience.

There should be at least a square of carpet in the dining room under the table, not only for warmth and the look of comfort, but to prevent the noise of chairs scraping over the bare floor. In other rooms small rugs scattered here and there may suffice, though one large rug is always more restful to the eye, but a table around which a family gathers, either in dining or sitting room should for these obvious reasons always stand upon carpet. Where the floor is carpeted throughout and a crumb-cloth or drugget used, pains should be taken in the selection of the latter to get the colors in harmony with those of the carpet. Cheap druggets as a rule are so glaring and crude in color that any carpet that respects itself loses tone at once, and appears thoroughly commonplace when forced into association with the blowzy things. The patient seeker, however, may be rewarded in his search by finding a “Bocking” or drugget that shall be as thoroughly becoming to his carpet as is the tidy morning apron to the neat-handed Phyllis who wears it. Since the days of King Arthur the round table has been held the most delightful for social and hospitable purposes. With a small family there is a cosiness about a round table that is very charming, but when one is forced to enlarge the circle a small, round table can not be expanded to the required circumference. A solid table seven feet long and four feet wide will seat six comfortably, and eight without crowding, and is of delightful dimensions to sit about of an evening, when work or study is toward. If such a table be used (an Eastlake table, our furniture dealers would call it, since Mr. Eastlake inveighed so severely against what he styled the “telescope” table) there should be two side tables made four feet long which could be of service in the room, standing against the wall, but on occasion could be used to enlarge the dining table. H. J. Cooper, an authority on house-furnishing, after speaking of Mr. Eastlake’s objections and suggestions, says:

“We do not find, however, any great revolution in the matter of expanding dining tables, and are inclined to think their great convenience will prove a barrier to any wide-spread reform.”

A good table should be polished, not varnished, and protected when not in use by a substantial cover.

Side tables are serviceable when one’s space or purse will not allow of a sideboard, but sideboards are useful articles of furniture, and look better when made of the same wood as table and chairs. They should be simple of construction, with straight rather than curved lines, smooth surfaces, and with drawers easily get-at-able and lightly pull-out-able.

The sideboard should hold the table linen for daily use, the daily silver and cutlery, teacups and saucers. If, in addition, it can find room for a convenient box of biscuits, pot of ginger, or any simple refreshment for the late worker who likes a bite before going to bed, so much the better will it serve its purpose as a sideboard. Our grandmothers kept here decanters and wine glasses, but in these days of the W. C. T. U. wine is seldom found standing out boldly in sight in the dining room. In addition to the sideboard a small table or a butler’s tray should be ready to hand to hold dishes or food that must be used in the table service.

Cabinets for the display of china, closets let into the chimney for the safe keeping of nice glass, should feel themselves at home here, while plaques and old china plates seem to belong of right to the dining room, and can be arranged over doors by means of a tiny balustrade, or on the frieze, or as over-mantel decorations, while choice cups and saucers can fill the cabinet spaces. In the breakfast room, where I am now writing (not my own), I have just counted fifty-nine pieces of glass or pottery which hang on the wall or stand exposed on sideboard, mantel or shelves, besides the tiles of the fireplace, two small cabinets, each holding a half dozen rare and precious Japanese cups and saucers protected by glass, and two large cabinets filled to overflowing with specimen china, and yet the room does not seem at all overstocked with ceramic treasures.

Growing plants are charming dining room ornaments, but will only thrive where a minimum of gas and furnace heat and a maximum of sunshine and fresh air is supplied, with regular attention as to water and shower baths. They are sure, however, to reward painstaking care.

Decorative china and plants, however, are luxuries, though less or more within the reach of all. A screen, though usually looked upon as a luxury, is in the dining room almost a necessity, and it can be bought or manufactured at home for a nominal sum. Many a guest has been well nigh martyred at table with a fire in the rear and sunlight to the fore, whose meals might have been made a delight by a careful adjustment of shades and blinds and the judicious intervention of a screen between chair and grate. Doors must needs be left open as servants pass back and forth, and a screen between the mistress’s chair and the door may save her from many an annoying influenza.

A thick, white cloth of felt or Canton flannel should be spread over the table before it is “set.” This not only protects the polish of the table top, but makes the linen cloth lie much better, and appear to the best advantage.

Table linen should, so far as possible, be spotless. Fine damask is costly, but a clean, coarse cloth looks better than a fine one soiled and tumbled. It is true that table linen is worn more by washing than by use. Still it must be washed—at least that is the American theory. I have sat at a table in Saxony where the table linen bore the date of more than a century before, but there the wash was perhaps a semi-annual affair, and a breakfast cloth was made to serve from Easter till July, breakfast being only a simple meal of a roll and a cup of coffee.

We can lay down no further rule for the changing of table linen. It is perhaps better to keep breakfast and dinner cloths separate, the finer for dinner, that being the more formal meal; tea and luncheon can be served, if one wishes, without table cloth. If care be taken to lay a carving cloth or napkin under the meat platter, or a tea cloth where tea or coffee are to be poured, breakfast and dinner cloths can be kept fresh longer.

Some writers more nice than wise sneer at napkin rings, implying that no table linen should be used more than once without washing. But there are few families of any size that can afford such lavish laundry work. A family of six would require twenty-one dozen napkins in constant use, if given out fresh each meal. When the same napkin must serve for more than one meal, a napkin ring is the simplest and surest way of securing each person his own. Of course rings are only for family use, not for the transient guest, and they would be out of place at a dinner party.

Table cloths should be done up with a suspicion of starch, not enough to stiffen them, but with only so much as will make them iron well. Heavy linen looks and wears better than light. Large napkins are for dinner use. Delicate doilies of fine drawn linen work or silk embroidery are laid under finger bowls to protect the choice china plates on which the bowls rest. This doily should be laid to one side with the bowl, it should not be used as a fruit doily. I have seen an absent minded man roll up in a crumpled heap one of these delicate lace affairs costing five dollars, perhaps, and then carelessly wipe hands and moustache with it, while the mistress of the house looked on with an assumed placidity which spoke volumes for her powers of self-control.

The finger bowl is not an elegant affectation, but is a genuine comfort where fruit or sweets are served. Fruit napkins should be used to save large damask ones from stains.

If the first requirement for a well ordered table is cleanliness in damask and dishes, the second is tidiness and regularity of arrangement. If mats are placed under hot dishes let them lie on the square, and let the plates be put on at regular intervals, and in a straight line. A hotel waiter who flings plates and plated ware at the table by a dextrous twirl of the wrist is no model for the home table setter. Spoons for soup and dessert should lie to the right of the plate, knives above, forks to the left; this is the time honored usage, and it makes the labor of serving dessert easier if all knives, spoons and forks to be used during the meal are laid at the first by each plate. Tumblers stand to the right a little above the plate, butter-plates in a corresponding position to the left. Avoid the use of what are popularly known as “individual” dishes upon the table, such as butter plates, salt cellars, sauce plates, and so forth. This is another hotel fashion that should not find its way into the home. It is better to use a larger plate and take a greater variety of food upon it. The little butter dishes are really needed only with warmed plates; and beans, peas, corn, and other vegetables in separate dishes, about a dining plate, make a table look very untidy, and make extra and unnecessary work for the dishwasher. An English lady who visited me a year ago took home to London with her as an American curiosity a set of butter plates which, so she writes, she has not yet found opportunity to use, not having had any American visitors.

Steel knives are better, and where meats are to be served are more desirable in every way than plated ones, the latter being a device to save the labor of “scouring” with Bristol brick.

Flowers or fruit are never out of place upon the dining room table; a showy Épergne is not necessary, for a pretty growing plant always makes a good center piece, and a single rose in a slender glass adds flavor to the best cooked meal. My grandmother of blessed memory used to say that the simpler the meal the more pains should be taken to serve it daintily. Broiled salt pork and baked potatoes, according to her theory, could be so bravely set out upon the table as to make a meal fit for gods and men. A parsley bed is of special service in decking out a simple dinner, and celery tops are not to be despised.

The heads of the household should face each other from the ends and not the sides of the table, if the meals are served English fashion, vegetables and meat being placed upon the table. No table can be set with any air of elegance when the meat platter or the tea equipage stand in the middle of one side. It makes comparatively little difference, however, when meals are served À la Russe, that is with meats and vegetables placed at side tables and passed by servants, while only fruit, bon-bons and ornamental dishes appear upon the board. The latter fashion seems to be obtaining in America, and an intelligent diner-out remarked in my hearing the other day, that fifty years hence no meats at all would be carved at table. This Russian fashion is pretty and wholly luxurious, as it removes all possible demands for service or helpfulness from those seated at table, and devolves it all upon servants. The fashion requires more and better trained servants than most of us have at command.

The bane of modern entertainments is the enormous number of courses that style makes essential. Women with but one or two servants at the most feel called upon to give luncheon or dinner parties, and course follows course, many of them sent away scarce tasted, and the home silver and china not sufficing for the occasion, must be eked out by borrowing or by expeditious washings between the courses. The giving of such entertainments by persons of moderate means exhausts nerves as well as purse. Let us wisely give up aping rich people’s ways, and aim for simplicity in our table service.

Colored table ware is cheerier upon the table than white. Very pretty English or American sets can be obtained at low prices. The Canton china (willow pattern) comes in good shapes, is of good color and standard design, and single pieces can always be bought to replace what has been broken, but

Or at least to chip at the edges, and for every-day use pretty crockery is good enough unless a painstaking and cautious hand wields the dish-mop. The more covered with decoration (design and color being good) the prettier will be the effect of the ware when in use.

It is not at all necessary to have all the dishes upon the table of the same style and pattern. Harlequin sets can often be brought together so as to combine harmoniously, and pretty single pieces can be bought marvelously cheap. Amateur painted china is generally too costly for daily use, and when good should be treated with respect.

Plain silver is on the whole better for plain livers than that which is more elaborately ornamented, and absolutely plain solid silver forks and spoons can never be out of taste, and can easily be kept tidy with whiting. Electro-silicon and patent cleaners of that ilk injure silver and are ruinous to plated ware.

The beauty of silver and pottery depends first upon their form and adaptation to use; secondly, upon their decoration. Delicate chasings and thin repoussÉ work are naturally as appropriate to silver as good shapes and flat decoration are to earthen ware.

As to glass, there is a crystal craze at present, and “hob-nail” glass glitters on all tables. Miss Lucy Crane, in her lecture on “Form,” says (and I quote freely because her words are timely):

“As the beauty of glass consists in its transparency and lightness, and its capability of being twisted or blown or moulded into a multitude of delicate forms, it early occurred to the manufacturing mind that if made thick and solid, and cut into facets it would resemble crystal; and thus it has come to be a fixed idea that hard glitter is its most valuable quality, so it is made inches thick, and pounds heavy, to enhance its brilliancy; and being one of the most fragile of substances, it must be engraved with people’s crests and monograms as if it were intended to carry down the name of the family for generations to come! Being of its nature transparent, it must be rendered opaque of set intention by coloring matter, and then painted and gilded! Since at its strongest glass can never be anything but fragile, at least let it keep the beauty belonging to fragility; since it is naturally transparent, let the light be seen streaming through it, sometimes delicately tinted, sometimes iridescent, and, instead of being cut, let it be blown and twisted into the thousand delicate shapes to which it easily lends itself, and of which in the Venetian glass of a bygone day, and in its present revival, there are such delightful examples.”

I saw last evening a handful of flasks on their way to the laboratory, whose soap bubble effects were far more beautiful than all the cold glitter of all the “hob-nail” ware that Sandwich has ever produced.

In a boarding house it may economize labor to set the table over night, but it is pleasanter and more homelike to have it set fresh and clean with the morning light; beside, to have the dining table clear of an evening is often a great family convenience.

The dining room affords grand opportunity for the domestic artist. The bread board, bread and carving knife handles, salad fork and spoon, all offer employment to the carver’s tool, to say nothing of cabinet, sideboard and over-mantel. Tiles for tea pot rests and all sorts of china call for the decorator’s skillful brush, while tea cloths and coseys, doilies, mats, centerpieces and carving cloths all await the embroiderer’s needle.

Arise, my young readers, and take your tools in hand, for home work is the fairest adorning of the homelike house.