Want: Hair Removal

When some people think about history, they think about battlefields and treaties, voyages of discovery and royal dynasties. It’s true that these things are important, but they’re only part of the story—and not the interesting part, if you ask me. I think it’s the day-to-day details of real life that are most fascinating, and that’s why I find Youman’s Dictionary of Every-day Wants so cracktacular. It’s a snapshot of a moment in a time, focused in tight on just the spots I want to see. I have a pretty good idea what Ulysses S Grant was up to 1872—but what was his maid doing? His wife?

Well, today’s entry might have been taking up some of their time: DIY hair removal. Modern straight razors and rudimentary safety razors had been around for at least a hundred years at that point, and waxing techniques date back to the ancient Egyptians. But although depilatory shenanigans were nothing new, in 1872 the nearly hairless body Americans are now accustomed to wasn’t yet in vogue. Men shaved their faces or had well-kept(ish) facial hair, but women weren’t key players in hair removal until the first half of the twentieth century, when tops turned sleeveless, hems got high, and the advertising industry started telling us we needed a shave.

But maybe Mrs. Grant had an unsightly ’stache, or even an unfashionably low hairline. In which case, she may have read this:

 

  

The ingredients sound pretty terrifying, but come right down to it, is pitch so different from wax? And can you guess what the depilatories on the market today are made from? You got it: Nair’s ingredients include Calcium hydroxide, also known as slaked lime, and Sodium hydroxide, or lye. (One thing you won’t find at your local CVS, however, is the arsenic Youman thoughtfully notes can be avoided by picking depilatory recipes 3 and 4.)

This entry points out that waxing is more painful than depilatory creams, but I'm not sure it’s right. With modern techniques, at least, waxing is a quick burst of intense pain. The chemical burns that seem to inevitably accompany Nair, on the other hand, are the gift that keeps on giving—days later you can still be hurting. It’s hard to imagine getting better results from an indifferently mixed, homemade, feather-destroying substance that’s left on the skin however long it takes to dry.

The Dictionary of Every-day Wants is full of reminders of a world that was, and that this world wasn’t so different from the one we know. Just remember: Even if it never came up in high school classes, personal grooming is still part of history.

Want: Help Running Errands

Contributing blogger LAW comes through for us  once again with this gem from the recesses of the Dictionary of Every-day Wants.

My frequent shopping companion on the weekends is my dog. Accustomed to such routine excursions, she waits patiently in the car, windows rolled down slightly to give her fresh air, while I go to the supermarket, pharmacy, or hardware store. Her role is a passive one since in our society dogs are generally barred from supermarkets and all but the occasional dog-friendly emporium.

How different from Youman’s day, when marketing was done daily and on foot, and your dog could be not only your companion but an active helper and participant. Under the attention-getting heading of “DOGS, Teaching to go Errands,” Youman gives the sensible, pragmatic advice we’ve come to expect, and also reveals himself to be a kind and considerate pet owner.

“It is an excellent plan,” he begins, “to teach all dogs … to carry baskets or parcels when accompanying their masters.” The training process is “very simple, consisting of merely placing the articles in the dog’s mouth, and when he lets go of it give him a slight box on the ear and replace the article in his mouth.” A handle basket is just right, being “of such a form as to be grasped easily by him without hurting his mouth or teeth” and light enough so as to be “never more than he can easily carry.”

Clearly, this wouldn’t work for the average basset hound or dachshund—dogs that are just too low to the ground to hold a basket clear. [But think of the saddlebag space!—Ed] Even a larger dog wouldn’t be able to safely carry a week’s groceries, or even a day’s groceries for a big family. But for small-scale, daily shopping, this must have been a win-win for dog and owner alike. Youman notes that “most dogs will take a real pleasure in carrying articles in this manner.” It’s not hard, he says, to teach the dog to carry a basket of food—whether people food or dog food—without being tempted to steal. In kindly fashion, he advises that “if a dog ever deserves a reward for well doing he certainly does in this case, for it is too bad to tantalize him with the smell of some dainty and then not to let him finally have something for his good conduct.”

Eighteen seventy-two comes alive for me most vividly, though, in Youman’s final suggestion: “Suppose you wish [your dog] to go to market for you of a morning; take him with you regularly for a few mornings, letting him carry the basket. In a few days he will understand when you start where it is you propose to go, and will, perhaps, run on ahead and arrive there some minutes before you do.” In a world without cars, trucks, and traffic, it was actually safe for the dog to do so. How I’d like to walk out the door some Saturday morning, hand my dog her basket, and give her the command Youman recommends. “Tink,” I’d say, “go to market!”

Too bad Youman didn't include any helpful tips on this trick, which would definitely change my life for the better.

Want: A Rental House

I purchased my first home about two years ago, drunk on HGTV’s House Hunters and giddy with visions of the $8,000 tax credit available at the time. I have to say it’s a good thing I like the condo where I ended up, because my nerves are shot when it comes to house hunting: the only way I’m moving out is in a pine box.

It’s no wonder I feel this way. I had four different addresses in 2008, including my mother's house, where I spent a month living out of boxes and sharing a bed with a blanket-hogging basset hound. And then there was finding a place I could afford on the salary of a single, liberal-arts-degree-holding employee of a nonprofit organization, followed by the delights of convincing a banker to lend me a boatload of money to actually buy it. It’s a miracle I lived to tell the tale, quite frankly.

According to the Dictionary of Every-day Wants, housing stress is nothing new. “The choice of a house is in importance second only to the selection of a friend,” Youman wrote with his characteristic authority. And as is so often the case, much of his advice on the topic is just as practical today as was in 1872.

Pick a house in a nice neighborhood, but not one that’s trendy and expensive. Make sure everything works. Avoid lawsuit-happy slumlords. Really, what more information do we need than that?

Although the past few years may have been less fraught if we’d followed more of Youman’s advice, a few key issues have changed since his day. For example, Youman says that inclusive housing costs shouldn’t be higher than one-sixth of your total income, or about 17 percent; today’s personal-finance rule of thumb is that it’s okay to pay 30 percent of your income (or even more!) for housing.

There’s a good reason for this change in proportions: the extra money we spend on housing was already spoken for in our great-grandparents’ budgets. In the nineteenth century, it’s estimated that people spent up to 75 percent of their income just to eat. On the other hand, about 12 percent of the average American’s salary was spent on food in 1998, thanks to modern farming practices and transportation.

Having seen The Silence of the Lambs at an impressionable age, I can’t argue with Youman’s preference for living far away from a slaughterhouse or tannery. His advice wasn’t solely rooted in the ick factor, though: he clearly considered the right location a matter of good health. No matter what era you live in, there are certainly lots of reasons not to live near polluters like mills and chemical works. But Youman’s real concern is something even more fundamental.

The theory of germ-borne illness was just coming onto the world stage when the Dictionary was probably being written. Before it was universally accepted, sickness was blamed on miasma—foul smells and stagnant air, just the things you would find in mosquito-breeding mill dams and near overcrowded burial grounds, some of the very places this entry warns renters against. (For more on the changing understanding of illness, read Steven Johnson’s Ghost Map, a fascinating detective story about an 1854 cholera outbreak in London and the search for its cause.)

It turns out that the more things change, the more they really do stay the same. Fellow watchers of Selling New York, my second favorite real estate show, will realize that a close cousin of the miasma theory lives on even today in the form feng shui. On the show, a real estate agent frustrated by a property’s nasty reputation brought in a feng shui practitioner to spiff up the place before a potential showing.

Want: More Time

In the 140 years since the publication of the Dictionary of Every-day Wants, America has changed a lot. We’ve gone from steam to oil to electricity, from snail mail to e-mail to text messages. But there’s one fundamental thing that hasn’t changed, and maybe never will—the day is just too short for accomplishing everything we want to do.

Youman began his venerable book by acknowledging that fact: “every hour, every minute has its money value.” Pitched as an “aid to the progressive hurrying spirit of the age,” the Dictionary isn’t so different from the Real Simple magazine that shows up in my mailbox each month. Youman gives tips for keeping the kettle clean (insert an oyster shell before use!); Real Simple gives tips for storing grocery bags for reuse (use an old tissue box!). The family resemblance between the two isn’t so hard to spot.

I could use a bit more time in my day, too, so I’ve decided to scale back on the publication schedule of this blog. While a new topic every day was a noble goal, it’s not really sustainable: A thoughtful post can take hours to prepare, and I’m not really interested in producing any other kind.

So for now, expect two entries a week—Monday and Friday. In the meanwhile, you could always do some extracurricular reading of the Dictionary on the slightly evil (yet completely addictive) Google Books.

Keep in mind, though, the lesson I learned the hard way after devouring an entire advent calendar’s worth of chocolate one December 1st. Savoring something is best done slowly—one bite at a time.

Want: Fewer Stones

Being a native of the Internet, common interests have inspired me to meet a number of people from around the country that I first knew online. It turned out that I didn’t fit their preconceived notions about residents of northern New England: I’ve never seen a live chicken up close, I don't have lift tickets hanging from my jacket’s zipper, and I'm not particularly emotional about maple syrup.

But even I can’t completely avoid a relationship with the land and its history, if only because it’s everywhere I look—often in the form of long-abandoned stone walls.

From beside the highway to the middle of the woods, they’re leftovers of New England’s agricultural past. Once upon a time, some farmer cleared those rocks from his pasture and used them to build a wall nearby. According to Robert Thorson, founder of the StoneWall Initiative, it was estimated in 1939 that there were more than 250,000 miles of stone walls in the northeast.

Based on the following entry in the Dictionary of Every-day Wants, some of those stones may have been moved with the help of clever Dr. Youman.

This technique dates all the way back to Hannibal’s trip to Rome—he had to get those pesky elephants over the Alps somehow—and it turns out that it’s use in even today. (Don’t try this at home, kids! Stones sometimes explode when exposed to temperature extremes.)

By the time the Dictionary of Every-day Wants was written, New Englanders had already been moving West for at least fifty years. The stone walls I see practically every day are ghosts they left behind, abandoned homes and farms reclaimed by Mother Nature. Thanks to that eager beaver, the landscape around here is pretty different: In 1850, 30 percent of Vermont was covered by forest. Today that number is closer 80 percent.

Guest Want: Less Bad Poetry

Ever-erudite contributing blogger LAW reports from the depths of the Dictionary of Every-day Wants:

When, at the end of his book, Youman turns to “Writing for the Press,” he gives a ten-point list for what, and what not, to do. As we’ve come to expect from him, he begins by exhorting writers to take responsibility—for their grammar, spelling, and facts. Curiously, his second point is a warning: “Do not write poetry.” Whyever not? His response is brutal: “Ninety-nine one hundredths of the rhyme written is good for three things”—to give to friends, to use for kindling, or for pulp at the paper mill.

What may seem like simple literary prejudice on Youman’s part is easier to understand if we see what he was up against in the literary world of his day. An easy, and highly amusing approach, is through the memorable anthology compiled by the brother-and-sister team of Kathryn and Ross Petras, published in 1997 by Vintage Books as Very Bad Poetry. Unlike most other such publications, the Petrases focused on poetry that was written in good faith, by people who believed themselves to be poets. As they note in their introduction, “A compulsion to write verse, and a happy delusion regarding talent—that is the beginning of a very bad poet.”

Among the worst poets in Youman’s day was one William McGonagall of Dundee, Scotland, who self-published more than 200 poems in his lifetime. The Petrases quote McGonagall’s own description of how he began:

“I seemed to feel as it were a strange kind of feeling stealing over me, and remained so for about five minutes. A flame … seemed to kindle up my entire frame, along with a strong desire to write poetry … It was so strong I imagined that a pen was in my right hand, and a voice crying, ‘Write Write!’ So I said to myself, ruminating, let me see; what shall I write? then all at once a bright idea struck me.”

McGonagall was often inspired by current events of his day, such as the railway accident on the Tay River Bridge in 1879 (just a few years after Youman’s book appeared):

The Tay Bridge Disaster

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
’Twas about s
even o’clock at night,
And the wind it blew with all its might,
And the rain came pouring down,
And the dark clouds seem’d to frown,
And the Demon of the air seem’d to say-
“I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.”
…………….
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

 You can enjoy more of McGonagall’s memorably awful verse (which he referred to as his “poetic gems”) by visiting the website consecrated to him.

[Check back soon for more on Youman’s other 8 tips for aspiring writers. —Ed]

Want: Apple Slum(p)

The arrangement of Youman’s Dictionary of Every-day Wants is perhaps curiously genderless. In an era rife with books specifically for “ladies” and books specifically for “gentlemen,” the Dictionary intersperses without comment chapters devoted to traditionally masculine and feminine tasks—hunting with cooking and baking; farming with preserving food; carpentry with making clothes; and metalwork with washing, bleaching, and dyeing. Some specific chapters have even more all-encompassing appeal: the one devoted to toilet practices hops back and forth between freckle-bleaching methods for the ladies and whisker-growing techniques for the gentlemen.

It’s unclear just how Dr. Alexander Youman wrote with equal confidence about setting up a new beehive and finding the best homemade mascara, but he seems to have done so. Or was Mrs. Youman laboring quietly at his side?

As a lifelong New Englander I wish I could say I immediately spotted the potential typo in the title of today’s entry, but I’ve never heard of apple slum or apple slump. It seems to be a regional dish that’s still fairly common, a close (and tasty-looking) cousin to the buckles and crumbles that have become popular on the farmer’s market circuit around here. With the fluid nature of recipe titles over the years I’m not sure that we can call “slum” a error, but today this dish is definitively “apple slump.”

Youman’s recipe is painfully vague for cooks like me, who specialize in Kraft-based dishes. But for the day it was par for the course—standardized measurements and truly step-by-step recipes wouldn’t be common for another fourteen years, until the publication of Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-school Cook Book.

It turns out that apple slump was a favorite of Louisa May Alcott’s family; a fancy calligraphy version of the recipe is even sold online and at the gift shop of Alcott’s Orchard House. A number of modern cooks have posted about their experiences with the recipe, which are fun to read—from the foodie to the traditional to the Rachel Ray (!).