Economy in Small Ways

1896

The little leaks in the household expenses, says the Jenness-Miller Monthly, are the most mischievous. The big ones are prominent enough to compel attention. Do you not, for example, trust all your tradespeople implicitly? You can't afford to do so.

The head servants in the Vanderbilt and Astor, and other wealthy families have among their chief duties that of weighing the household supplies. Dry goods measurements in the large shops are generally very accurate because the employes are under strict orders to be exact. But grocers and butchers will bear watching. Get for yourself or your kitchen priestess a set of measures and some scales, and after you and she have learned to use them, you will be amazed to see how much you have been paying for that you haven't had.

Even in the most reliable shops — so called — the weighing is very lax. Butchers claim that the deficiencies in their weights are all due to the waste in trimming. Very well, order the meat sent untrimmed. You will get fresher meat, and what you trim off will often give you nice bits for the stock pot, suet, etc. Try it and be convinced.

A quick-witted housekeeper says she has earned many a dollar in plumbers' bills by buying a force cup and learning to handle a wrench. Despite washing soda and potash, now and then something unmeltable slips through the sink strainer and clogs the pipe. All the more modern plumbing has a nut at the bottom of the "goose-neck," just below the sink. By setting a pan beneath this, and with a wrench loosening and then removing the cap, the obstruction will generally be found right there. Sometimes the force-cap applied over the strainer in the sink will be sufficient to clear the pipe without taking the cap off the gooseneck. If both fail, no harm will have been done, but one or the other, or both, succeeds often enough to make it worth while to exercise one's ingenuity a bit.