Profit from the Experience of Others

Every housewife has her own particular way of preparing certain kinds of food, or cleaning household utensils, or arranging her vessels. This way came about through acquisition, or experience, or invention. The housewife new to the task may take years to test it out or discover it. But “The Woman's Voice,” in the service of the purpose for which it was founded, and to save the new housewife time, wishes to pass these experiences on, ready-made and clear, to its gracious lady readers under this new section: “Profit from the Experience of Others.” It therefore urges every lady zealous for her community to send in whatever information she has on this subject, so that the service may embrace the whole of woman's kingdom. The magazine has set aside, for every suggestion it publishes, a quarter of a Lebanese lira as aid for Palestine, to be paid to the Permanent Palestine Office in Beirut:

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I put the subject before some ladies at an evening gathering, and asked one of them: Have you a “trick” that you discovered yourself in your own house, or learned from its discoverer, which you would like me to pass on to the sisters in the pages of “The Woman's Voice”?

She said: How many times do you wash your hands when they are full of the smell of kerosene, and do you end by removing the smell entirely? I said: More or less, if I wash them over and over with soap. She said: Put a little olive oil on your hands where the kerosene is, then wash them with soap a single time, and the smell disappears completely.

Her maid, who was serving us the coffee, said when she heard the conversation: And how do you remove the smell of onion from the hands? I said: With lemon or tomato — and the stain goes as well. She said: No — I remove it with the very thing that was the disease itself: burn the onion skins and cup their smoke between your hands.

Mrs. J. Nahhas laughed and said: She is right. When I cook stuffed squash, I clean my hands with its scrapings — that is, the seeds I have scooped out from inside it.

Mrs. Rawda said: So that the rice of a stuffed chicken will suffice when there are more than four at the table, I boil the chicken by itself, and with its gizzard and its liver I prepare as much rice as I need.

In another gathering I put the same question, and Miss Daoud came forward to enumerate her discoveries in the world of beauty:

She said: I use a single color on my cheeks and my lips, by putting cream on my cheeks first and then rubbing a little lipstick over it.

And to shape my eyebrows in an easy, painless way, I coat the brows with vaseline a little while before plucking the hairs.

And to set my hair at home, I avoid too much dampness in it, and so achieve my aim.

Mrs. Najjar came forward and said: I bought pieces of red straw cloth by the uqiyya, so it cost me little; I cut it into rectangles, then joined them one to another with the counted stitch — that is, cross-stitch — in blue thread, and scattered over these rectangles stars in the same stitch and thread. And so I had a table cover, with its napkins, handsome and worthy of the household and of friends.

As for flowers: to preserve their splendor I plunge them in water up to the neck the moment they reach me, and after two hours I distribute them among the vases.

Mrs. N. said: I have discovered that the best way to keep my boy from swearing is to make nothing of the importance of the swear-word when he says it, and to laugh at him as though he were praising me; then he gives up those words to come out with others, and so on, until he forgets what he learned from bad company.

And my daughter, who is three years old, asked me: Why the demonstrations? — on the day the students marched for Palestine. I said — my aim being, on the one hand, to explain what was hard in it for her, and on the other, to guide her toward a partisanship that does no harm: The Zionist Jews beat the little Arab children who are like you, and these big boys are going on to beat them.