Miriam Lukken - Mrs. Dunwoodys Excellent Instructions for Homekeeping

The information herein is not intended to replace the services of trained health professionals or be a substitute for medical advice. You are advised to consult with your health care professional with regard to matters relating to your health, and in particular regarding matters that may require diagnosis or medical attention.

Copyright 2003 by Miriam Lukken

All rights reserved.

Warner Books, Inc.,
Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue,
New York, NY 10017

Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

First eBook Edition: April 2003

ISBN: 978-0-446-55638-5

A delightful and practical compendium of homespun advice, cleaning and etiquette tips, traditional recipes, and Southern wit, MRS. DUNWOODYS EXCELLENT INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOMEKEEPING will bring warmth, gentility, and order into your home. Today many of us yearn for the home-centered values of yesteryearhomemade desserts, family traditions, and sparkling clean rooms that radiate comfort and good cheer. Now you can bring the wise, unhurried ways and charm of an earlier time into the 21st century with:

Mrs. Dunwoodys Judicious Cleaning Hints:

Make every room in your house shine with homekeeping tips that include a recipe for organic furniture cleaner made from lemon and mineral oil and an easy way to help prevent tarnishing with a piece of white chalk in your silver chest.

Mrs. Dunwoodys Useful Notes from the Kitchen:

From choosing the freshest foods at the market to seasoning and cooking, delight your family with such delicacies as Big Mamas Baked Country Ham and Ambrosial Pecan Pie.

Mrs. Dunwoodys Advice on Etiquette:

Brush up on letter writing, table manners, and timeless social rules like Always stand at the doorway and wave good-bye until your departing guests are out of sight.

For Peter John,
the salt of the Southern earth.

Dear Reader:

What was an evening at home like, one hundred years ago? A simple homemade dinner enjoyed by the entire family at the kitchen table, where stories were told, lives were shared, and everyone listened to each other intently. This was followed by ajournment to the living room for games or study or reading by the firelight, and then early to bed, for the candle had faded, and day had turned to night.

Fast-forward to today, where speed is everything. A phone company promises to save you three seconds of your precious time to reach your caller. We fill our time with mindless television shows and are bombarded by advertisements appearing on buses, billboards, and T-shirts. In the grocery store, at the office, in traffic, in our homes, even in our microwaves, everything is fast and furious. Its as if we are under secret orders to go and consume and live at the fastest pace possible.

Our grandparents knew something we have forgottenGood things take time. Love is slow and lasts, tenderness takes patience, wisdom comes with age, and the tall majestic oak tree outside of my window took eighty years to reach its glorious height. In the length of days comes understanding.

Someone once said when an old person dies, a library is lost. How true! And yet we are too busy zooming into tomorrow to take time to look and listen to the past. Unlike our grandparents, we seem to be too distracted by life to take the time to teach and pass on our wisdom from one generation to the next.

Mrs. Dunwoodys Excellent Instructions for Homekeeping will help fill that void. This book is fashioned after the traditional notes nineteenth-century Southern women penned as a record of all they knew and thought meaningful. Practical and simple, reliable and trustworthy, these receipt books included everything from the nuts and bolts of day-to-day living to the rules of decent behavior in both company and conversation. These books were treasured and passed from one generation to the next. Part of what makes them so special is that most of what these women wrote is timeless and still very applicable to today.

Mrs. Dunwoodys Excellent Instructions for Homekeeping was written to provide todays reader with the advice and wisdom typical of these receipt bookspractical information often forgotten or not explicitly explained, such as how to care for the sick, which seems to be such commonsense information that no one today thinks to teach others how to do it. Yet clearly it is sound advice worth preserving and passing on to the next generation. There are also blank pages in the back of the book for you to begin your own receipt book by recording the advice and wisdom from your own family.

These days, as people spend less and less time at home, more of us are turning to outside services to meet our basic needs such as food, laundry, cleaning, comfort, entertainment, and social interaction. This greatly reduces the chances of our homes nurturing us and being a source of comfort and contentment. Our homes are more beautiful, expensive, and luxurious than ever, with more material goods and conveniences than Mrs. Dunwoody could have ever imagined. We pay more for them, and spend less time in them, and so homekeeping as she defined it seems to be a lost art, and not very important anymore.

As you read Mrs. Dunwoodys advice, perhaps you will begin to feel a little daunted by her effortless perfection and tireless attention to every detail. But dont despair, dear reader, for Mrs. Dunwoody is actually a character based on my great-grandmother and other inspiring Southern women who held the art of homekeeping sacred. If we view Mrs. Dunwoody as a source of inspiration, rather than a yardstick to measure ourselves by, we suddenly become more like her than we ever thought possible. In fact, after looking through several of these receipt books and reading and sifting through my own family papers, I can imagine her to be as real as any willful, charming Southern Belle ever could be.

In the spring of 1866 Caroline Dunwoody sat down at her kitchen table and penned the first entry in a notebook that would take her over fifty years to complete. Fleshed out with borrowed wisdom, recipes, and household tips and etiquette from women of her day, she had begun her receipt book during the devastating days in Georgia immediately following the War between the States. Life was hard and rations were terribly scarce, but the women of that time were very enterprising when it came to necessities such as cooking and housekeeping. They began to recognize that their old way of life was gone forever, and the world was not likely to ever be the same.

Mrs. Dunwoodys advice and words of wisdom were meant to be passed down to each generation of women as they married and took up housekeepingor homekeeping as she called it. Her instructions were meticulously written in her distinct style with such care and attention to detail that the notebook seemed almost holy, like a book with a soul of its own.

Mrs. Dunwoody was legendary in her family. Born in 1841 in Savannah, Georgia, and named Caroline (pronounced CARE-o-line) Anne Wylly, she was as smart as she was beautiful. Like most young women of any standing in her day, she attended a finishing school that provided a surprisingly well-rounded education. Her knowledge of geography and history was balanced by a perfect certainty of how to set an exquisite table and when and where to wear white gloves.

After completing her education, she met and married Charles Spalding Dunwoody, a promising young lawyer from South Carolina. They soon had six children and settled into a handsome, two-story house flanked with stately white columns in the west Georgia town of Glenn Cove. For a time, Charles Dunwoody represented the county in the state senate and house of representatives and was eventually elected judge of the circuit court. As Charles rose in stature, so did the couple. They were socially prominent and well known in the community for their hospitality. Since Mrs. Dunwoody had spent time in Washington, D.C., with her husband, she was considered well traveled by her contemporaries and therefore set the standards for much of the social scene in the small town.