Teach your maid to be dainty

It seems that many people have what you might call domestic help these days – someone to assist with the housework, someone to do the ironing, someone to help or ‘do’ the garden, look after the children, walk the dogs, valet the car… but I’m not sure many people would have a person in the house all day doing all the cooking, cleaning, serving, washing etc, not many people have maids and servants.

It used to be that even quite ordinary people would have a maid, an unmarried girl or woman living in the house. I can’t imagine what that would be like, and even though I’ve read so many books which are set at the time when domestic servants did live in, it just seems so alien!

I was looking at my Modern Practical Cookery book; it was published in the 1930’s, but I guess from the way some of it is written, and some of the advice – particularly on household management is given, that these chapters come from something much older.

There is a whole part of a chapter on Training a Maid. it starts with explaining the duties of a maid when afternoon visitors call, or when it’s a formal At-Home day. There are instructions on what a maid should do when dinner guests arrive, helping them with their hats and coats and then ‘taking them down and announcing them to their host and hostess.‘ It’s even suggested that the ‘mistress’ should have a rehearsal with the new maid so she won’t be nervous.

The advice continues for waiting at table; this can be a tricky moment – apparently! It is in the matter of waiting at table that a maid so often becomes nervous and blunders’.  Poor girl! I think any of us would become nervous and blunder! The advice continues, course after course, sauce boats, drinks, sweeping the table of crumbs, re-laying the table for dessert each plate with a doyley and finger-bowl and a knife and fork, and finally coffee.

Teach your maid to be dainty in small things. Point out that if the traycloths  and doyleys are free from stains it makes the meals so much more appetising. If she has to do the dishing up, the dishes and sauce-boats should be wiped round the edges with a cloth before serving.
The salt in the salt-cellars should be tidied and the mustard-pots also cleaned round the edges.

All that is enough to make anyone nervous! Once the guests have departed, and the tables cleared and everything prepared for breakfast, before she can retire for the night, there are still duties to perform:

Last thing at night, a well-trained maid will take the quilt off the bed, turn it down, remove the night attire from its case, and arrange it on the turned-down sheet. She will put a hot-water bottle in the bed if required.

Thank you and goodnight! … but of course the maid has to be up early to bring tea, biscuit and a slice of bread-and-butter to the master and mistress, pull up the bedroom blinds, run a bath, put the bath mt down, and then go to wait for the letters, parcels and newspapers to arrive to bring them to the mistress on a salver ‘which is kept in the hall for that purpose’…

How the other half lived… and in some cases still do!