A classic bestselling resource for every household, Home Comforts helps you manage everyday chores, find creative solutions to domestic dilemmas, and enhance the experience of life at home. “ Home Comforts is to the house what Joy of Cooking is to food. ” — USA TODAY Home Comforts is an engaging and comprehensive book about housekeeping. It is a lively and readable guide for both beginners and experts in all the domestic arts. From keeping surfaces free of germs, watering plants, removing stains, folding a fitted sheet, cleaning china, tuning a piano, lighting a fire, setting the dining room table—this guide covers everything that people might want to do for themselves in their homes. 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, this is a practical, good-humored, philosophical guidebook to the art and science of household management. "The bible of good housekeeping." -- People " Home Comforts is to the house what Joy of Cooking is to food." -- USA Today "Mesmerizing -- and, in its own way, revolutionary." -- Chicago Sun-Times "An extraordinary achievement that has no peer in this century and may well have none in the next." -- Newsweek "There's only one book to own if you want to be serious about your housekeeping: Cheryl Mendelson's magesterial HOME COMFORTS." -- Dwight Garner ― The New York Times Cheryl Mendelson is a Harvard Law School graduate, a sometime philosophy professor, and a novelist ( Morningside Heights and Love, Work, Children ). In 1999, she authored the classic bestselling resource for every American household, Home Comforts . Born into a rural family in Greene County, Pennsylvania, she lives in New York City with her husband. Chapter One: Beginnings My Secret Life I am a working woman with a secret life: I keep house. An off-and-on lawyer and professor in public, in private I launder and clean, cook from the hip, and devote serious time and energy to a domestic routine not so different from the one that defined my grandmothers as "housewives." When I want a good read, I reach for my collection of old housekeeping manuals. The part of me that enjoys housekeeping and the comforts it provides is central to my character. Until now, I have almost entirely concealed this passion for domesticity. No one meeting me for the first time would suspect that I squander my time knitting or my mental reserves remembering household facts such as the date when the carpets and mattresses were last rotated. Without thinking much about it, I knew I would not want this information about me to get around. After all, I belong to the first generation of women who worked more than they stayed home. We knew that no judge would credit the legal briefs of a housewife, no university would give tenure to one, no corporation would promote one, and no one who mattered would talk to one at a party. Being perceived as excessively domestic can get you socially ostracized. When I made hand-rolled pasta for a dinner, I learned the hard way that some guests will find this annoying, as they do not feel comfortable eating a meal that they regard as the product of too much trouble. When my son was in nursery school, I made the mistake of spending a few hours sewing for him a Halloween astronaut costume of metallic cloth, earning the disgust, suspicion, and hard stares of many a fellow parent who had bought a Batman or Esmeralda costume. When I finally had to begin disclosing to friends and acquaintances just what the long book was about that I had been working on for so many years, I got a lot of those stares. Many times my courage failed me when painful silences followed my confession, "No, not a history of housework, an explanation of it -- a practical book on how you make the bed and make a comfortable home," or "No, nothing about recipes, bouquets, gardening, monogramming, decorating, or crafts. It's about how a home works, not how it looks -- what different fabrics are for, pantry and refrigeration storage, laundering and ironing, tuning the piano, cleaning and dusting, household records, books, laws, germs, allergies, and safety." I managed to persevere partly because not everyone responded with that stare; there was enthusiasm as well. And I was struck that no one responded with bored indifference. The topic was clearly hot -- too hot for some people to handle, heartwarming to others. Born Too Late For me, too, the subject was actually something of a hot potato. I was raised to be a rural wife and mother, but I was born too late to find many openings for farm wives. Until I was thirteen, I lived in the Appalachian southwest corner of Pennsylvania, for most of the time on a working farm where I received an old-fashioned domestic education quite unlike the experience of the average girl in the