Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson, Harry Bates (Illustrator)

From Barnes & Noble

The Joy of Housekeeping...Really!

Cheryl Mendelson paints an amusing picture of the beginnings of her passion for housekeeping: "My domestic education was a battlefield in a subtle war between my two grandmothers." Indeed, her Italian grandmother kept rooms airy and light with flowers sprouting in porcelain pots on windowsills. Her Anglo-American grandmother, on the other hand, kept rooms shaded almost to darkness against real and fancied harmful effects of light and air. Mendelson's own housekeeping habits fall somewhere in between the two. The result is a contemporary interpretation of the art of housekeeping. From germ consciousness to the finer points of cleaning and laundering, Mendelson warmly and expertly shares her knowledge of how to keep house.

In Mendelson's first selection, "Food," she begins with a discussion about "The Whys and Wherefores of Home Cooking," because "good meals at home satisfy emotional hungers as real as hunger in the belly." Mendelson claims that most people eat out not because they lack the time to cook but because they don't know how to cook well enough to make good quick meals. She then teaches us how. From "Kitchen Culture" to "Safe Food," Mendelson covers topics such as stocking and organizing a kitchen, washing and preparing food, cooking and storing food safely, and cleaning and protecting kitchens against bacteria. An extensive chart on food storage provides specific guidelines for the proper shelf life of dry, refrigerated, and frozen foods, as well as fresh produce.

Mendelson's second section, "Cloth," is based on her philosophy that "the emotional warmth and security of a home depends...on cool sheets, soft carpets...and thick towels." Unfortunately, she claims, while most people today know what they like once they feel a particular type of cloth, they don't know how to look or ask for these fabrics or how to care for them once they bring them home. With this in mind, she provides a comprehensive discussion of the fabrics found in homes today, from clothing and linens to carpet and upholstery. In addition to her descriptions, she uses black-and-white line drawings to illustrate the construction of different fabrics and includes chapters on natural fabrics (linen, cotton, wool, silk) and man-made fabrics (rayon, nylon, polyester, spandex, and blends). Other chapters cover laundering tricky items, sanitizing the laundry, and removing stains from fabrics.

Mendelson's section on "Cleanliness" begins with "The Air in Your Castle," a chapter on the importance of keeping your home ventilated, as well as monitoring temperature, humidity, and air pollution. In "Dust and Dust Mites" she specifically attacks the problem of dust, since "dust under the sofa becomes dust in the nose, the eye, the soup," and provides directions for vacuuming, sweeping, and dusting the home. Mendelson also takes up, rather heatedly, the problem of germs and bacteria: what they are and how to get rid of them. She provides a glossary of sanitizers and disinfectants and provides guidelines for the use of each one, and she offers alternatives such as recipes for homemade cleaners and includes helpful suggestions for how to gather the appropriate clothes, rags, and tools for each cleaning project.

And finally, just in case you've run out of things to clean, she gives instructions for how to properly care for bathrooms, windows, pipes and drains, woodwork, textiles, walls, ceilings, floors even china, crystal, metals, and jewelry -- anything and everything in a home that might need cleaning.

The final sections of Home Comforts are shorter but just as thorough. In "Sleep," she provides an intimate portrait of the bedroom, a place for "sleeping, lovemaking, dressing, and undressing," and claims that "keeping dust down in the bedroom does more to promote health and comfort than any other cleaning in your home (with the exception of the kitchen)." She provides detailed instructions for how to make a bed, stock comfortable sheets and blankets, keep closets aired and cleaned, and even includes some "housecraftly helps for insomnia."

Mendelson's interest in keeping house is certainly a passion. But lucky for us, it's one she's willing to share. Home Comforts is available for anyone and everyone with an interest in the home and the comforts we find there.

—Lara Carrigan

From the Publisher

The classic bestselling resource for every American home. Choosing fabrics, cleaning china, keeping the piano in tune, making a good fire, folding a fitted sheet, setting the dining room table, keeping surfaces free of food pathogens, watering plants, removing stains — Home Comforts addresses the meanings as well as the methods of hands — on housekeeping to help you manage everyday chores, find creative solutions to modern domestic dilemmas, and enhance the experience of life at home.

Further topics include: Making up a bed with hospital corners, Expert recommendations for safe food storage, Reading care labels (and sometimes carefully disregarding them), Keeping your home free of dust mites and other allergens, Home safety and security, A summary of laws applicable to the home, including privacy, accident liability, contracts, and domestic employees and more in this practical, good-humored, historic, philosophical, even romantic, guidebook to the art of household management.

USA Today - Katy Kelly

Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts is the ultimate how-to book for homemaking.

Newsweek

It's an extraordinary achievement that has no peer in this century and may well have none in the next.

Library Journal

Unlike the shelves of short-cut manuals for people who don't enjoy housework, Mendelson's comprehensive book is for the person who wants detailed information on every aspect of setting up and maintaining a clean, well-functioning home. Building on the strong domestic skills she learned from her family, Mendelson, a lawyer, did careful research, incorporating current recommendations from experts. There are extensive sections on food, clothing, cleanliness, daily life, and safety, with information on negligence, domestic employment laws, insurance, and even the impact of clothing label laws on our laundry. Preferred methods are explained in detail, and some alternatives are offered for those who need to compromise. This is a valuable tool for today's masses, who aren't learning domestic skills from their elders. Readers with only a cursory interest or those wanting a highly illustrated guide may prefer Reader's Digest's Householder's Survival Manual (1999). Highly recommended.--Bonnie Poquette, Shorewood P.L., WI Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Weekly Editors Entertainment

Okay, so Mendelson does occasionally go over the top (the best way to scrub a floor, she says, is on your hands and knees), but this 884-page reference book is about much more than cleaning: It's about turning a house into a home.

Brill's Content - Alison Rogers

Although it's a reference work, Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House packs the punch of a major novel.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Desirable refrigerator and freezer temperatures; relative humidity...What foods should be stored in the refrigerator...Guidelines for refrigerator storage: how to store butter, coffee, spices, oils...Should you leave supermarket wrappings on?...Avoiding refrigerator odors; which foods cause and take odors...How to refrigerate produce; which fruits and vegetables should be placed in bags...When a cool storeroom would be better than a refrigerator...Refrigerating eggs, leftovers, fresh herbs, ROP or MAP foods...How long leftovers will keep...Freezer storage; which foods should not be frozen...Power outages

The refrigerator -- the reason we get to eat fresh foods all year long -- has taken the place of the hearth as a symbol of the comfort of food. The image of a woman's face lit by the fire as she stirs a cheerfully bubbling pot has been replaced by the image of someone's face lit by the refrigerator light as he or she peers in, looking for something to munch on. Fires and hearths were beautiful and inspired hundreds of poetic images, but few poets have composed verses about refrigerators, which are ungainly and ungraceful. In fact, to compare someone or something to the homely refrigerator is a common form of humorous derogation. The associative power of food, however, is such that, despite the refrigerator's aesthetic deficiencies, we are comforted by its hum much as people were once comforted by the crackling of the fire, and when we open a malfunctioning refrigerator to find darkness and warmth we feel an emptiness that is something like what people used to feel when the fire was dead and cold.

Despite how important our refrigerators are to us, practically and emotionally, most people probably underuse or misuse these splendid machines. Experts on home food storage would like us to rely on them even more than we have been accustomed to, and to be a bit more careful in doing so.

Refrigerator and Freezer Temperatures
Generally Speaking. To keep your food safe and ensure its long life, you must keep your refrigerator cold. The USDA says to keep your refrigerator at 40° and your freezer at 0°F. Other food-storage experts say that your refrigerator compartment is best maintained at temperatures above 32° and below 40°F, say 34-38°F. The ideal storage temperature for many refrigerated foods, in fact, is as close as you can get to 32°F without freezing. But according to the 1999 Food Code (a U.S. Public Health Service set of model regulations for food services without the force of law), studies show that home refrigerators are far too warm, with typical homes showing refrigerator temperatures between 41° and 50°F, one in four with temperatures over 45°F, and one in ten showing temperatures of 50°F or higher!

Because it is so important, and so difficult, to gauge whether your refrigerator is actually in the safe temperature range, get a thermometer for your refrigerator and another one for the freezer compartment. "Refrigerator-freezer thermometers," which register temperatures from 70°F down to -30°F, can be bought at a hardware store or home center. The thermometers will tell you quickly when something is going wrong and will help you select the desirable control setting. If you do not have a thermometer, you can tell that your refrigerator is too cold if milk or leftovers get ice in them. It is too warm if you notice that milk turns sour too quickly or that things do not feel quite cold to the touch.

Frequently opening the refrigerator raises its temperature, so you should avoid doing so unnecessarily. The refrigerator may also tend to warm up in hot, humid weather. The more foods you crowd into your refrigerator, too, the warmer the foods may be; crowding interferes with the free circulation of air. Aside from these factors, your refrigerator may also have warmer and colder regions inside, depending on its type and design.

Frostless and self-defrosting refrigerators tend to have uniform temperatures throughout. But the coldest place in many refrigerators is likely to be the bottom, because heat rises. The meat drawer is often thought of as the coldest spot, but it may or may not be so. In manually defrosted refrigerators, in which the meat tray is right under the freezer, this may be the case. (If you are in doubt, use your thermometer to find out.) The bottom of your refrigerator, too, may not be much colder than the top nowadays because fans in many refrigerators circulate the air and keep the temperature much more uniform. The difference between the bottom and the top of my own refrigerator is only one degree. Wherever your refrigerator is coolest, and at the back of the shelf, is where you should keep fish, fresh meats, poultry, and milk and other fresh dairy products, as well as any other foods that need cold temperatures. (Remember that fish spoils even more readily than meat; it should always be kept very cool.) Ideally, all these would be stored just above freezing, at 33° or 34°F. (Don't let them freeze.) But if your refrigerator will not keep things this cold, do not worry; they keep well as long as temperatures are at 40°F or below. Most leftovers should also be kept at 40°F or below.

Copyright © 1999 by Cheryl Mendelson