The Household Budget

A weird thing happened last night, all my cookery books came tumbling down off the shelf, and one of my books which belonged to my mother is a cook book called : The "Royal Hostess", and it belonged to my mother before she got married, it has her maiden name imprinted on the cover, and inside it says "PRINTED IN SOUTH AFRICA PUBLISHED BY ROYAL BAKING POWDER (PTY.) LTD.  FIRST EDITION 1953", which makes it 57 years old.

I have used this book since a child and got some of my baking recipes out of it, but the thing about this cook book is just what it says, it is a Hostess book and it tells you what cuts of meat to buy at the butchers, etc. It is really interesting.  When the book fell the hard cover became detached, so I need to stick it back together somehow.  Anyway, I was paging through the book and came across a section right at the back that says "The Household budget", and it's all kinds of tips on how to plan your budget.  So I was just skimming through it when I got to the last paragraph on the page that read:

                                A good housekeeper will put out the day's (or week's if preferred) requirements regularly and not leave it to servants to help themselves to stores.  Native servants are notoriously extravagant, but they will usually co-operate in economies if approached in the right way.
                               Put out weekly supply of their food - sugar, porridge, samp or beans, etc., and tell them that it must last a week.  Show them how to measure out by cup the amount for each day.  In small households - where only one servant is kept - it is false economy to buy separate amounts of meat etc. for the servant, and to cook an entirely separate meal.                                 
Once or twice a week the servant can be given an extra amount of meat to cook as he or she likes, but generally it can be planned that there is sufficient left over from the family meal for the servant.

I was quite taken aback with it, thinking oh my goodness this cook book actually is quite racist, but then I looked up the work "servant" and Wikipedia told me the following:

Servant is an older English term for "domestic worker", though not all servants worked inside the home.

So it's not just South Africa that had servants, they had them all over the world, even in Ireland in the last century, wealthy families had servants.

I suppose having come through the whole apartheid thing and everyone being so politically correct it just seemed strange to read it in print.  Interesting.

Remembering

It's hard to believe that the 9/11 attacks on America happened 9 years ago today, it's also hard to believe that my mother passed away 8 years ago today.

I still remember where I was on 9/11, we had only been living in Ireland for less than 3months, I was hunting for that job (seems I do that a lot), my mother and father-in-law were visiting Ireland from South Africa, but were doing a bit of touring and had gone up north.  We were living in a small 2 bedroomed apartment, and I was busy cleaning the floor, I decided to put the TV on for some reason and I had it on Sky News, as I was watching they were talking about the plane that had smashed into the first of the twin towers, I grabbed the phone and immediately phoned D to tell him what was happening and while I was talking to him on the phone another plane smashed into the other twin tower.  To me it felt like the world had gone mad, but that is now all history, but never to be forgotten history.

On Friday night I was switching between channels and there were a lot of programs about 9/11, it's actually heart wrenching some of the stories that have come out.  Amazingly though, most of the stories seem to be about New York, which of course was the major disaster - however it seems that the media forget about those who were in the Pentagon and the other airplanes that were involved in this disaster.  My heart goes out to all those families who suffered loss on that day, because only after the passing of my mother do I realise how much you can actually miss a family member so much.

My mom passed away on 9/11 8 years ago, my mother like most mothers was very wise and taught me a lot of life skills, things that I hope to pass on to my daughter one day.  The thing I miss most about my mother is that she never got to know her youngest grand daughter who was born 8 months after she left us.

Forever in our thoughts!  (The lady on the right).