Hints and Hacks, part 1
A Supper Buffet for Ball or Reception from Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, 1923 edition.
I love a handy hint. There are things I’ve read or heard somewhere in passing that changed the way I do things forever. Some are practical, some are motivational and some are interpersonal. Many of them are things I figured out independently. I’m not going to say I invented them because this kind of vernacular knowledge is for anyone to stumble across and share, that’s the whole point of it.
Last year I started compiling a spreadsheet of handy hints. I’d had an idea to have a macro in my work email that would randomly insert a hint after my signature, so that all of my emails would be worth reading. That project is shelved for now, and this post is not going to be a list of my favourite hints. Despite having so many that I’ve absorbed over the years that have become second nature, when I go deliberately looking for hints the results are absolute draff. I was using google and chatgpt to try to pull large lists of hints, life hacks, or whatever other search terms I could think of to add to my spreadsheet. A few made the cut, but that’s out of hundreds of repetitive, anodyne or impractical pieces of advice. “Try to wind down before bed” isn’t what I would consider a handy hint, more like common sense advice for someone who’s barely functioning.
I turned to books to try to strike hint gold, borrowing a book by a famous American columnist. I read the whole thing and found it even more irrelevant, to a degree that gave me a whole new perspective on the genre. The most alienating hint was something along the lines of, make a small cleaning kit to keep in each of your bathrooms so you don’t have to carry your cleaning supplies between them. I was confounded by this. Which demographic is wealthy enough to have multiple bathrooms, but can’t afford to employ a cleaner, or does their own housekeeping for the love of the game? Does anyone really live like that, or is there some aspirational fantasy at play? More on this later. As I read Heloise’s Household Hints I understood that this genre of information has many names and comes from wildly different eras and cultural contexts. It seems people are always interested in advice on how to live, not in the grand moral sense, but in the culturally-specific, fine-grained day-to-day battle of being clean, organised, socially correct and efficient. The more I read the more I found about some of the topics I keep returning to - labour, class, the roles of women, the public and domestic spheres.
From household hints to protips and life hacks, each era reveals much about society at that time.
Household Management
The handy hint has its origins in texts on household management. This topic has been written about since ancient times, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus (c. 362 BCE) being one of the earliest examples. I haven’t read this, but in that historical context the “household” would include slaves and a farm, with the advice addressed to the patriarch assumed to be firmly in control of these subordinates.
Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), Isabella Beeton.
The “household” in the more modern sense is the topic of prolific writing from the Victorian era. One of the most influential texts in this genre is Beeton’s Book of Household Management. This was written at a time when the English middle class was expanding rapidly and a huge population shift was taking place from rural to urban residence. Beeton’s opens with two chapters on housekeeping, The Mistress and The Housekeeper. The rest is filled with an insane number of recipes (around 2,500) that the book is mostly known for in modern times.
In the introduction to the 2000 Oxford edition of Beeton’s Nicola Humble goes into a lot of interesting context for this book which is mostly remembered as a piece of nostalgia. At the time the book was hugely influential on people’s home lives. Humble suggests that our modern breakfast/lunch/dinner was started by Beeton’s. Isabella Beeton is said to have disliked her husband eating out at gentleman’s clubs and not coming home for dinner, so she pushed the idea of the evening meal as the main meal of the day and a family occasion (historically people in England had their main meal at midday and some light supper in the evening). Isabella Beeton was a journalist and her husband Thomas was a printer. Isabella sadly died giving birth to her fourth child at the age of 28, so she never lived to become the wise matron that the book suggests. She was of course a working woman, the paradox for any woman writer who praises domesticity and places the feminine sphere squarely in the home. Isabella and her husband churned out a number of successful books and most likely did the writing together. I think it’s fair to say they were hustlers. After Isabella’s death Thomas kept adding plagiarised recipes to Beeton’s and releasing new editions, which is how it came to be the tome that it is today.
Beeton’s switches back and forth between passages addressing the mistress of the house and addressing the servants, the latter indicated by switching to a smaller font. The sequence of the first two chapters hint that many readers would be both mistress and housekeeper. At the time “housekeeper” specifically meant a senior servant who supervised lower ranking servants, looked after the household accounts and managed supplies. In today’s language the equivalent would be more like a household manager, which I have only ever heard of through Real Housewives who employ one (in that context the house manager is almost their social equal! They get a chyron and get to speak on camera!) The employment of servants increased dramatically from the 1830s and many women would have been the first in their family to do so. This created a need for literature on how to manage servants, but also more broadly how to live up to the aspirational self-image of the middle class.
Because of the large demographic shifts of the time a lot of the new middle class were deeply insecure about their position. Highly detailed instructional material on how to maintain a certain standard of domestic life is a clear manifestation of this. The new urban household would have required backbreaking labour to keep on top of industrial soot and grime and get through the tasks we now take for granted with labour-saving appliances. Along with practical fare Beeton’s contains a few aspirational fantasy recipes such as truffles dressed with champagne, which seem to exist more for dreaming about than actually making. If you recall Heloise’s hint about cleaning your many bathrooms, this is a recurring trope in domestic instructional literature. In modern times with our unfettered access to commodities and labour-saving devices making full-time servants redundant for most people, what are the new objects of middle-class envy? What was once the household is now real estate, and it’s the location and square footage that are relevant rather than the choice of furnishings, the efficiency of the domestic servants or the habits of the mistress. You don’t see many people being transparent about how many staff they employ, in fact the new cult leaders of domesticity must hide it. The image of the woman at home cooking with organic ingredients and raising a half dozen unvaccinated children relies on the invisibility of the camera person, the social media manager, probably a couple of nannies who are needed to care for the kids, as the “housewife” influencer mother is in fact a working woman after all.
Household Hints (1881), Emma Whitcomb Babcock
Babcock was another working woman - a book reviewer, magazine contributor, novelist and the founder of a public library. Throughout this text she quotes Goethe, Thoreau and George Eliot and promotes reading and intellectual growth for women. And yet she also claims that “one of the best things about housekeeping is that it requires the exercise of the highest faculties of the human mind”, which I find clangingly disingenuous. This book is for women who do their own household labour. Most of the content is recipes but there’s a section of miscellaneous hints, which I would count as an early example of my beloved handy hints. I haven’t figured out an exact definition of them yet but I’d say a good one would be succinct, thrifty, inventive and effective.
There’s also a section at the end of Household Hints called “talks upon various subjects” in which Babcock expounds on her views, often in frustrating and contradictory ways. To be clear, when she encourages the housewife to read to improve herself, she is talking about reading for a few minutes at a time between finishing the morning chores and starting on dinner. When it comes to work she actually says a lot that I agree with: you need to have a system to stay on top of your work; don’t be a little bitch about what you need to do because having a shit attitude will only make the work harder. She also advocates extensively for the rights of children and observes that physical punishment is always about parents being unable to control their emotions (correct imo). Husbands don’t figure largely in the book, but she does advise young wives that they should stand up for themselves from the get-go when their husband starts being an asshole.
This all sounds pretty sympathetic, but remember this is all in the context of essentially unfree labour. Contra Babcock’s assertion about housework being intellectually fulfilling, she has a wry digression about women’s predilection for rearranging the furniture for seemingly no reason, which she calls a necessary and harmless stimulus for the woman who spends so much of her time in the house. “What conscientious woman will say that she has never felt an insane desire to open the window and throw away her dishes after having washed the same cups and plates three times a day for a few years?” Besides the mind-numbing tedium, don’t forget the grueling physical labour. One of Babcock’s hints is for the woman who has been slogging so hard in the kitchen that when it comes time to sit down for dinner she is too tired to eat (common occurrence according to Babcock). She suggests beating a raw egg with a little sugar and drinking it half an hour before dinner to prevent feeling too faint to eat. Get those gains sis. And if you let the work get to you, you’re not only letting your family down but will make yourself homely. “How many faces once lovely are transformed by the addition of those wicked little lines about the eyes and mouth which come from having fretted over necessary work!” (incidentally this is why my employer should be paying for my botox). The last word in Household Hints is a caution for young women entering into marriage and motherhood which reads kind of ambivalently. Babcock warns that to fulfill these roles you must “sacrifice lesser aims”, give up “delightful occupations”, and that the mind “once unfettered will be at liberty no more”. You will have to be available for “constant care” until the day your husband dies. Babcock advises girls to take their time before deciding to enter into marriage - but the only alternative she offers is staying at home with their parents, which she characterises as a perpetual apprenticeship for women who don’t have the strength of character to “reach out of yourself and ask for larger duties”.
It’s frustrating to read a strong and intelligent woman perpetuating such shite. How can you have such empathy for children and then condemn them to this if they happen to be female? Anyway as for the hints, some of them are anachronistic (put in a raw egg or a piece of fish skin when you’re brewing coffee to “settle” the grounds) and some are still in circulation today (hang curtains close to the ceiling in a low room to make it look higher).
Household Management (1918), Florence Nesbitt
This was a weirdly comforting read after Babcock. Florence Nesbitt drew on her experience as a social worker and dietitian to write this practical book on meeting a family’s nutritional needs on a small income. The book is actually addressed to fellow social workers and advises “the visitor” on what kinds of questions to ask and how to intervene in the family’s diet and spending habits without antagonising the mother. As such it doesn’t really fit the “Handy Hints” tradition, but it does illustrate the socioeconomic changes that affected households around this time.
I find the scientific approach to home economy a lot more modern and relatable than the moralistic instruction of the Victorian era. Hopefully Nesbitt wasn't a eugenicist or anything because I kind of like her. Her goals were ensuring that low-income families have warm and adequate housing, nutritious food in sufficient quantity and suitable clothing without any frivolous spending. I think in the present day the number one goal for most families would be having healthy children and unfortunately inadequate housing is as relevant as ever. A lot of the clients she talks about in her case studies were on Mother’s Pensions, a state-level welfare programme that took off during and after WW1. Many were recent European immigrants.
Nesbitt cites examples of maternal habits which needed to be corrected, some of which I found quite charming to read about. Italian mothers let their children drink coffee and one juvenile delinquent was found to be drinking 9 to 12 cups per day. Italians in general had little meat in their diet and when their favoured “hard Roman” cheese became too expensive, they refused to switch to American cheese. Poles ate too much meat. Mothers wasted money on prepared cereals such as cornflakes, which only led to their children refusing to eat grain mush once they’d had a taste of luxury. Reading about the way families really lived in very difficult times (war widows, new immigrants, crazy inflation) is a good antidote to the impossible standards set for the bourgeois wife and mother.
By the sounds of it Nesbitt’s interventions were meaningful and effective. Beyond budgeting and nutritional advice, some families would be moved to more suitable housing, such as upgrading to a kitchen that they could actually cook in. Written at a time when calories and “vitamines” were little-known terms, the nutritional advice seems fairly solid by modern standards, except for the insane amounts of milk that she insists everyone drink (3-4 litres per day for a family of 4). I guess it must have been dirt cheap compared to meat and eggs? I don’t know, I really don’t get the hype (says the woman who sometimes drinks whey protein twice a day). Nesbitt mentions that a typical social worker would be looking after 60 families and visiting each of them at least once a month, which sounds like a huge caseload. She acknowledges that the wages of unskilled workmen at that time were insufficient to support the average sized family, and I was thrilled to see a mention of early calculations of a living wage!
With the necessity for thrift, the decline in employment of servants, and labour-saving appliances just beginning to take off, homemakers in the early 20th century would have had a lot on their plate just looking after the basic necessities of the home and balancing the budget. Next time we'll look at the mid 20th century, aka the zenith of the household hint.
How much milk is too much milk? Sound off below Purgies!
