HomeHaven Homemaking Lesson and BREAKFAST

Wonderful day to you! This Monday I will focus on what my copy of this 1926 book says about BREAKFAST. Last week I shared about Table Service in the Servantless House. Continuing with BREAKFAST from CHAPTER 1.

THE ART OF

Cooking and Serving

by Sarah Field Splint

Continuing with Chapter 1

BREAKFAST

In most households breakfast, on week days at any rate, is a scramble with everyone coming down at the last minute and wanting to be waited on at once. But it is the meal, too, that starts the day right or wrong for each member of the family and so you, the homemaker, manage to have the table looking pretty, to wear your most serene manner and to serve food that looks absolutely irresistible.

If the condition of your table top permits, you will use a small breakfast cloth or runner and place mats, which may be all white or embroidered or woven in gay colors. Their variety is infinite, ranging all the way from an excellent quality of brightly checked gingham to hand-wroven linen embellished with lace and Italian cutwork. The napkins are small, matching the color of the cloth or runner.

For the center of the table a bowl or vase with just a few flowers of the garden variety is better than a tight mass of formal hothouse flowers. Or fruits of several kinds piled together in a bowl make a colorful decoration. When neither fruit nor flowers are available you may devise a charming centerpiece of some tiny ferns combined with a bit of partridge vine or other colored woodsy thing in a bowl or delicate wicker basket.

At each place is a plate-breakfast size-a knife, fork, bread-and-butter plate, butter knife and a glass of water. Here again, you see, is our skeleton place arrangement.

But you are going to have grapefriut or baked apple for your first course. You will need a spoon for it-so lay it at the right of the knife. If you have children you will certainly serve cereal. A dessert spoon is the generally accepted implement for this food. Put it between the knife and fruit spoon. Boiled eggs would necessitate the addition of a teaspoon. This teaspoon would be given the place next to the knife, and the cereal and fruit spoons would be moved to the outside places, since it is considered more convenient for silver to be laid in the order of its use-the fork, spoon, or knife for the first course being found on the outside of the row, while the pieces for the last course are on the inside, nearest the plate.

If you pour the coffee at the table, as you probably will want to do, you will lay a teaspoon on each saucer before you pass it.

For breakfast in the house without a maid you will put the first fruit course on the table before your family assembles, so as to save yourself as many steps as possible after the meal has begun. The fruit plate or saucer will be placed on the breakfast plate. And just here the reason becomes perfectly evident as to why the breakfast napkin, neatly folded, must repose at the left of the place, just beside the fork. If it were put on the plate it would be covered by the dish of fruit!

The coffee service is beside your place. An electric percolator is a wonderful possesion, permitting, as it does, the coffee to be made on the table. But if one is not so fortunate as to own this convenient device, the coffee is strained in the kitchen into a well-heated china or silver coffee pot and brought to the table.

Toast or hot bread is usually served on a bread tray or in a basket which has been lined with a fresh napkin large enough to fold over the contents and keep them warm.

Alcove breakfasting for the small family is more and more popular as our living becomes condensed and simplified, and the breakfast alcove is being added to many new houses and apartments. The alcove is part of, or very close to, the kitchen and it makes the serving of the meal a much easier affair.

The setting of the alcove table is the same as that of the ordinary breakfast, but one has to

beware of crowding. It is well to call into play the tea-wagon or a small table on which the extra things may be placed. The used plate may be put out of sight on the lower shelf of the tea-wagon.

And, by the way, a tea-wagon is one of the best servants the servantless house can have. It may be trained to carry things to and from the kitchen under your guiding hand, or to stand faithfully beside the dining room table holding fresh china and silver for the last course on its upper shelf, and amiably receiving used plates on its concealed under shelf.

With a small family one may vary the breakfast, or the luncheon either, in many ways. The mistress of a perfectly charming little house in the country has a way of surprising her family occasionally by serving breakfast or luncheon on her spotless marble-topped kitchen table, which looks out over an expanse of green lawn. I shall never forget one breakfast there in her kitchen when I was a week-end guest in the Spring. We had golden popovers and home-made marmalade for breakfast and I looked out upon the glory of white and pink apple blossoms on the wide-spreading apple tree that presses close to the house. The kitchen is as immaculate as a drawing-room and its blue-and-white freshness adds to one's appetite. To achieve such an effect with a kitchen breakfast one cannot be a cluttery person.

Another homemaker frequently transfers breakfast on a warm day to the side porch with its lovely view of the winding river and the white church spire sailing out of the trees on the opposite bank. All three of her family lend a hand at the carrying and for the extra steps there is a soul-satisfying half-hour of matchless peace and beauty.

Thank you for joining me today.

I learned a thing or two.

NEXT WEEK I'll continue with BREAKFAST in Chapter 1. which will be ENTERTAINING AT BREAKFAST.

This has to be good!

God Bless and may you have great Breakfasts the rest of your life.

~Deanna~