Show IYESOF THE WORLD How the Women of Different Nations do Housework V SOME VERY CURIOUS KITCHENS A Samoan Cooking Stove and the Boiling Baskets of AlaskaThe Divided I Skirt of Slam i I WASHINGTON Sept 24 1S90 Special correspondence of THE HJRALDI have spent this week among the housewives of the world The National Museum has cooking utensils of every nation and every tribe and you may see within it how women wash and iron boil and bake stew and steam all the world over A picture of a Samoan kitchen has just been received and there are complete outfits of Japanese and Chinese houses with models of the women working away within them The Samoan range is a hole in the ground and i the cooking is donl With red hot stones When the people want feast they dig a hole as big as a cider barrel fill it with wood and cover it with stones They light the wood and when the stones are red hot they pull them to one side and clean out the hole They then put a layer of the hot atones in the bottom of it ana upon this layer bananas chickens and vegetables wrapped in leave are laid Another layer of red hot stones is put on top and on this is another layer of eatables and so on till the hole is filled Upon the top a fire is built and the whole steams and cooks away until the lightly dressed Samoan lady pronounces pro-nounces the dinner cooked It is said t9 boa bo-a feast for a king HOW THE ALAf KAXS COOK The Alaskans also cook with stones and there are boiling and baIting baskets in the museum brought from the Esquimaux The boiling baskets are of course waterproof and the wrter is heated dropping red hot stones into them They are of about the bize of a peck measure and are as beautiful t as any fancy work basket j ou will find in the United States The baking area are-a little larger The food is put into them I and is roasted by hot stones being rolled around over them The shaking the bsi s ket keeps it from burning and the people get j fat upon such food Among some of the tribes a small cast iron stove has been lately introduced It stands in the centre of the room and the fuel is often made of seal oil The chief food is fish and the kindling is grass The women are the woodcutters of the family but they are the washwomen only so far Its their own clothes t concerned Everyman in Alaska washes his own clothes and ironing is i practically unknown THE TVASHEimOlZX OF THE WORLD Every nation washes its dirty clothes differently from every other nation The hardest worked washerwomen of the world are the Koreans They Dave to wash about a dozen dresses for their husbands and inasmuch in-asmuch as every man wears pantaloons or drawers so baggy that they could come up to his neck like those of a clown they have plenty to do The washing is usually done i in cold water and often in running streams I and there is here in the museum a Korean ironing board and irons The board is i nothing but a block of wood and the irons are two paddles The clothes are laid on the wood and are pounded with these pad tiles until they shine llae a shirt bosom fresh from a Chinese laundry The best dressed people of Korea are the men They wear the most delicate colored gowns of cotton and silk of red light blue pink and green and it takes a woman half her time to do the washing You hear ths pounding going on day and night in any Korean town and it is one of the queerest characteristics of the Koreanpeople The Japanese rip their thpthes apart for every I washing and they iron their clothes by spreading them out on a flat board and leaningtbis against the house to dry The sun takes the wrinkles out of the clothes and some of them have quite a lustre The Japanese woman does her washing out of doors Her washtub is not moro than six inches high and is about as big around as the averae dishpan She has never heard of a washboard and she gets the dirt out of the clothes by rubbing them to and from between her hands She some ames uses Japanese soap which is full of crease and she works away in her bare feet If the weather is warm she will pull 1 ler clothes down to her waist and will feel 1 jo shame though the street bo full of peo Vie No blueing is used and as for boiling nit the dirt in a tin boiler this is auknown The Chinese girls do their washing in much the same way save that there is not so much publicity about it and the pretty shorthaired beauties of Siam wear their gowns on them into the big river and wash them while taking their bath When they ret through they trot up the steps of tnelr floating houses and wrapping a clean sheet around their bodies they slip off the wet clothes from under it i ana wring themout to dry Many of the Indian girls bathe in the ssme way ia the Ganges and the washing In Egypt is usually usu-ally done by the men The Egyptian washerman stands nakedon the banks of the Nile and slaps the wot clothes with a noise like the shot of a pistol on the smooth stones at the edge of the running water l and such fellow wpmea as wash 1 1 a pound the dirt out of their clothes in the same way The Scotch girls tramp the dirt outof the washing with their shapely feet tucking their dresses above the knees as i they tread the suds and the Frenchwomen French-women pound the dirt out with paddles jften slapping the clothes upon stones as the Egyptians SOME CURIOUS KITCHENS The Japanese kitchen is always supplied With running water and the cooking stoves shown in the museum would bo laughed at by an American housewife They are lit tle affairs about two feet square and the average stove cooks but one dish at a time They are heated with charcoal and in both Japan ana China a great deal of cooking is done with little round balls made of coal dust mixed with mud The Chinese and the Koreans do a great deal of their cook ing on kangs The kang is an immense ovenlike ledge built in one side of the house upon which the family sleeps during a cold night and in holes in which the cooking is done by day I once stopped in a Chinese inn and took a notion to go into tha kitchen whore my meal was being cooked I found twenty dirty Tartars sleeping on one end of the stoveand ° though the mutton was sizzling away over the open fire my appetite rapidly disappeared at the sight The Burmese cookingstove is a box filled with ashes in which a tiro is made and the food is cooked upon the coals No meat is eaten and the Budd hists fear they may be masticating the bodies of their reincarnated ancestors if they eat anything that has had animal life The priests carry this rthetextent of straining all the water they drink and the chief diet is rice A LOOK AT A TLTIKISU KITCHEN In both Turkey and Egypt the houses of the better class have a sort of cooking range made of stones and consisting of a number of little holes under which fires i may be built The floor is alVa s of stone and the cooking utensils are of copper An crdinary harem usually has two cooks and the Sultan has about five hundred cooks The last Sultan before this one took his meals at all sorts of hours and his chef was ischained to the cooking stove Just now the meals of the Sultans palace arc cooked about a mile from where they are eaten and the average beauty cats her soup cold There are no more hospitable people in the world than the Turks and the Turkish housewife always sets an extra plate Some of the funniest kitchens I ever saw were those of the Jews Jerusalem These people aro very poor and the average family fam-ily has only one room Tho kitchen is outside out-side this room in the porch and it consists j of a little boxlike pen just high enough to stand in and baldly big enough to tura around in The cooking is done on a charcoal char-coal fire and no meat is eaten unless the animal is kil ed in the presence of a rabbi The Jewish women of Jerusalem will not touch cheese milk or butter after she bas s eaten meat though if she has eaten the butter first she dont object to putting the meat in her mouth afterwards A great many of their dishes are cooked in oil and I I the pastry mode by a Jewish wife in the landof Palestine would ruin the stomach of an American tramp THE HOUSEKKEPCItS Of ASIA I believe the Japanese women are the best housekeepers of the world They are certainly the most cleanly and a Japanese girl has more cleanliness in her little finger than the prudish woman of Holland has in i her whole body The Dutch are always scrubbing their floors and their pans Ttey tie up the tails of their cons at night in order that they may not get dirty while resting on the dusty floor where they sleep and they are sticklers for clean linen ana wood The Japanese girl l makes no fuss about being clean She takes a bath a couple of times a day in boiling water and her floors shine so that you can see your face in any part of them Shj will not allow you to come into her house with your shoes on and she covers the floor with the whitest and softest of mats These mats are made of fine straw They are an inch thick and they are pleasanter to the bare feet than the finest of carpets Even the poorest of the people have something of this kind and there is no woman i in Japan too poor to be clean It Is different in China The Chinese Chi-nese have a horror of cold water and they are the greasiest and dirtiest dirti-est of mortal Many of them wear their clothes until the grease and dirt has changed their hue and I have seen gorgeous gor-geous yellow silk gowns with a stripe of dirty grease two inches wide made by the cue resting against the back When you call upon Chinaman and taking dinner with him instead of napkin you will be handed a towel dripped in warm water to run over your face and after you arc through it will be dropped back iu the water and handed to the next guest Among the lower classes of the Chinamen there is little cleanliness of houses The grease and dirt allowed to fall on the floor from the table and the dogs and cats are the broom Tho Siamese woman has a hole in the floor through which she sweeps the dust of her floating house into the river She usually sleeps on the floor and this is so with most of the women of the far east TIlE BEDROOMS OF THE OIIIENT The bedrooms of the Orient are far dif ferent from those of Christendom Fully half the women of the world sleep upon the floor or the ground and even the richest of the ladies of Asia have never known the luxury of hair mattresses and spring beds Most of these Mongolian beauties dont know what a feather pillow means and there is in the museum a Japanese pillow consisting of a lump of wood about the size of loaf of bread with a piece of soft paper tiedtm the top of it and so made that it will just fit into Yum Yums neck and prop her head off the floor The Japanese girl never needs to shake up her pillow and it is her neck rather than her head that lies upon it The same kind of pillows are 0 used in China and Siam and as to the average aver-age Indian woman of Hindustan she docs I i not know what a pillow means You could buy her whole wardrobe for a dollar and a half and she sleeps on the floor while her husband cuddles himself up in spoon fashion on the bed The Korean pillow is about eight inches square and a foot long I have seen some that were two feet long They are as hard as though they were flatirons flat-irons wrapped in cloth and there is nothing comfortable about them The Egyptians use larger pijlows and the beauties beau-ties of the harems sleep on large divans and these are often covered with Turkish rugs The richest woman in China whose I husband died worth 50000030 has a bed fully six feet square It is made of teakwood teak-wood and it is covered with ropes instead of a mattress The old lady lies on a canvas can-vas sheet stretched tightly over this and she does not know what springs are The Japanese sleep on the floor They have thick comfortables which they spread on the floor at night and which they pack away in cupboards In the daytime and constitute the bed The Burmese also sleep on the floor but they usually spread down mats instead of comfortables and their pillows are of bamboo The same discomfort of sleeping arrangements prevails pre-vails all over the cast and there is not a washstand in any Asiatic bedroom xo BART SEWING on DISH WASHING There are many things however that the Asiatic girl Is free from The Burmese woman never has to wash dishes There is ond common dish for the Whole family and at the end of the meal each member takes his own owl up to the water bucket and washes it out and lays it aside for tho nest meal A Siamese woman has no trouble in making baby clothes She lets her boys go naked until they are ten and the little girls are clothed in a string and a piece of copper cop-per about as big as the palm of your band I The little babies of the poor of India are also naked and tho average vcung Korean who is young enough to ride free in an American Am-erican street car if we could transport him to this country wears nothing but a little shirt that comes half way to his waist Asiatic wives never have stoves to black and Asiatic husbands arc freed from putting up the pipes Asiatic women have no windows to wash and the Indian wife has as a rule no floors to scrub If she is a good Hindoo and she wants to add a now beauty and a sanctity to her house she gets a lot of manure of the sacred cow and plasters it over tho floor and if she is a Siamese a Burmese maiden she sweeps out the dirt through the hole in the floor There arc no sewiuggirls to bother the average eastern woman and her back neer gets weak from running tho sewing machine In many of tho countries the sewing is done by men and the Hindoos and the Chinese make very good tailors The Japanese women sew but they use very large stitches and the fipe em broideries of China are all the work of the stronger sex THE WAltnitOKES O1 THE FAIt EAST These eastern women have not the same trouble in taking care of heir I clothes that our housewives have In the hill country of India until a few years ago there asa as-a tribe known as the Leaf Wearers They wore no more than Eve did after she had i had her interview with the snake and it i was not until the English forced thorn that they would put en duties The Samese woman has one strip of cloth which she wraps around her bust and over her shoulders and another which goes around her waist is pulled up between tho legs and tucked into the back As a rule she is i not troubled with shoes stockings and i she has never known the worries tithe e the corset and the skirt The Burmese girls are beautifully dressed They wear the finest of silks and they are the prettiest pretti-est girls in the world outside of tile Japanese Japan-ese and our AngloSaxon beauties The Japanese have large wardrobes aud many a woman in Japan has dozens of dresses which would be prizes in America and the cloth of which is hundreds of years old These dresses are most beautifully embroidered em-broidered and the most costly thing about the Japanese womans dress is her bustle There are figures in the national museum mu-seum representing Japanese women The drosses are always bound round at the waist with a wide band of silk or satin which is tied in the bacK with a great bow These bands or bows aro always of the finest material and they sometimes cost as high as a hundred dollars apiece The Japanese Jap-anese woman does her own shopping and the same is true of my lady of China Siam and Burmah It is not so in Corea for there the husband buys all the goods and he spends the most of the money on himself him-self He is the dude of the east and his wife is one of the typical Asiatic drudges and slaves She has a most unbecoming I costume and she has no rights that her husband is bound to respect The East Indian woman is to a great extent in a similar sim-ilar condition Her fags cannot be seen by other men than her husband and she is kept behind the curtain known as the pur dah The Turkish woman lis more privileges priv-ileges and though a eunuch always accompanies accom-panies her the lady of the harem goes to the bazars and shops for herself Miss GnU = DY an |