Cheryl Mendelson - Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House

HOME COMFORTS

The Art and Science of Keeping House

CHERYL MENDELSON
HARRY BATES
Carla Bolte
Empire Design

SCRIBNER
1230 Avenue of the Americas New York,
NY 10020

An extraordinary achievement that has no peer in this century and may well have none in the next.

Newsweek

Whats appealing about Cheryl Mendelson is that she makes no assumptions about what high-thread-count linens, antiques, silver, and Miele vacuum cleaners people have. She is concerned instead that they have a well-run household. And she is full of revelations.

Amanda Hesser, The New York Times

Not only illuminating but also, most surprisingly, crisply entertaining.

Wall Street Journal

This is a practical book about how you make the bed and make a comfortable home. It gives the reader all the information needed for the hands-on running of a home.

The Boston Globe

Home Comforts has a lot of answers to questions Ive had, questions I never thought to ask, and answers to questions that have been asked of me.

Laura Shapiro, Time

[The] bible of good housekeeping.

People

This generations most important book on the subject.

Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic

This extraordinary book is to be read for its wise counsel, its authoritative advice, and its illuminating insights into the management of the domestic realm. As if that were not enough, it is beautifully written.

Witold Rybczynski, author of A Clearing in the Distance, Home, and City Life

Writing with a warm over-the-fence intimacy and humor, Ms. Mendelson makes housekeeping into an art, most successful when it appears effortless. Its hard to think of a better housewarming gift. Practiced homemakers who dont need their skills explained simply will enjoy a friendly chat.

Stanley Trachtenberg, Dallas Morning News

I loved Home Comforts! Theres a mountain of information in these pageseverything from how to sort laundry to keeping fabrics from fading and from choosing the right lightbulb to create a special mood to making your own environmentally safe cleaning solutions. Heres a book that makes you want to go home again.

Letitia Baldrige, author of Letitia Baldriges Complete Guide to the New Manners for the90s

Ive decided to let someone else besides Martha Stewart advise me on how to run my house. Cheryl Mendelson has written a handy resource that answers all my housekeeping questions giv[ing] dignity to the day-to-day job of keeping a house running.

Jann Malone, The Richmond Times Dispatch

Mendelson opens our eyes to the homes we inhabit yet know so little, to the fascinations of food and fabric, dirt and bugs, air and light. Home Comforts is a unique and absorbing book.

Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking

In this entrancing book, Cheryl Mendelson restores keeping house to its rightful place as the custodian of the peace, order, comfort, and sanity of our lives. And in so doing, she helps to restore dignity, value, and craft to the work that creates and sustains the private space that nourishes our humanity.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, author of Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life and Feminism Without Illusions

Mesmerizingand, in its own way, revolutionary.

Chicago Sun-Times

SCRIBNER 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Text copyright 1999 by Cheryl Mendelson

Illustrations copyright 1999 by Harry Bates

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

First Scribner trade paperback edition 2005

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales: 1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com

Designed by Carla Bolte, based on a design by Empire Design

Set in FFScala and Meta Plus

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mendelson, Cheryl (date).

Home comforts : the art and science of keeping house / Cheryl Mendelson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Home economics. I. Title.

TX145. M38 1999

640dc21 99-37555

CIP

ISBN 0-684-81465-X

eISBN 978-0-743-27238-4

ISBN 978-0-743-27286-5

0-7432-7286-2 (Pbk)

The publisher gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint the following:

From A Good Enough Parent by Bruno Bettelheim, copyright 1987 by Bruno Bettelheim.

Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

Illustrations by Bonita Bavetta, from The Anatomy of a House by Fayal Greene.

Illlus. by Bonita Bavetta. Copyright 1991 by Fayal Greene. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

For Edward, who made a home with me

When you keep house, you use your head, your heart, and your hands together to create a homethe place where you live the most important parts of your private life. Housekeeping is an art: it combines intuition and physical skill to create comfort, health, beauty, order, and safety. It is also a science, a body of knowledge that helps us seek those goals and values wisely, efficiently, humanely. Such knowledge is drawn from practical experience, family traditions, the natural and social sciences, and many other stores of understanding and information.

Some of this skill and knowledge is directed toward keeping the home clean, but cleaning is only a part of keeping house, and in modern homes an ever-smaller part. Keeping house has always encompassed knowing and doing whatever is needed to make the home a small, living society with the capacities to meet the needs of people in their private life: everything from meals, shelter, clothing, warmth, and other physical necessities to books and magazines, music, play, facilities for entertaining oneself and others, a place to work, and much more. This book contains practical how-to-do-it material on many of these subjects, for both novices and those experienced in keeping house, and, because keeping house is a labor of love, it devotes space to its meanings as well as to its methods.

I am a working woman with a secret life: I keep house. An off-and-on lawyer and professor in public, in private I launder and clean, cook from the hip, and devote serious time and energy to a domestic routine not so different from the one that defined my grandmothers as housewives. When I want a good read, I reach for my collection of old housekeeping manuals. The part of me that enjoys housekeeping and the comforts it provides is central to my character.

Until now, I have almost entirely concealed this passion for domesticity. No one meeting me for the first time would suspect that I squander my time knitting or my mental reserves remembering household facts such as the date when the carpets and mattresses were last rotated. Without thinking much about it, I knew I would not want this information about me to get around. After all, I belong to the first generation of women who worked more than they stayed home. We knew that no judge would credit the legal briefs of a housewife, no university would give tenure to one, no corporation would promote one, and no one who mattered would talk to one at a party.