"Come out of the Kitchen!"
September 19, 2011

"Come out of the Kitchen!" (1915-1916)
by Alice Duer Miller
Giving this one "ever so many" stars!
Available here.
I was mostly browsing around in PG and Manybooks this weekend, and I found a delightful little trifle by Alice Duer Miller, called "Come out of the Kitchen!" (1915-1916). Per Wikipedia, this was her first real success as a novelist. I believe this was serialized originally in "Harper's Bazaar". The story was also made into a successful play, an equally successful silent film, and eventually, was very loosely adapted into the 1948 film Spring in Park Lane. This edition is extra fun, because the illustrations are stills from the stage play.

Burton Crane is a young man from the North, who wishes to rent a large house in the South for 6 weeks during the Hunt season. Crane is young, good-looking, rich, and unencumbered by living parents. He's kind of matched up with Cora Falkener, a very nice, very capable, but not very exciting young lady of his class. Since his parents had the good grace to provide him with loads of money (dear old Dad) and a good deal of humor and common sense (Mother) before conveniently popping off the mortal coil, he would be able to pretty much do as he pleased...so the author has provided us with a lawyer, Tucker, who considers himself Crane's personal watchdog, and Mrs. Falkener--potential mother-in-law and formidable grande dame.

All very straightforward, and Burton Crane rents a large, pleasant, genteel-but-dilapidated house through a real estate man, stipulating that it must come with household staff, as his valet is recovering from typhoid and he is currently servantless. The staff provided are ostensibly on loan from another local family who are currently out of the country, but the butler, cook, maid, and bootboy provided are all suspiciously young, (and for the South) white, and genteel. The maid and cook, it is observed, have manicured hands!

To the reader, it is almost immediately evident that these four are the children of the the absent homeowners, posing as servants for reasons of their own. No such thoughts occur to the Northerners, though. The lawyer and Mrs. Falkener do instantly percieve the cook to be a threat when it comes to young Crane., and devote themselves to seeing the girl tossed out on her ear. Or, in the case of the lawyer, possibly poached by himself--since the cook in question is superb at her craft. But that very fact makes her kind of hard to get rid of--as does Burton's unwillingness to be dictated to in the matter. Because the lawyer and Mrs. Falkener were right--Crane wastes no time falling in love with her.

But before long, Crane sees rivals everywhere--Tucker is starting to fall for her, and he even sneaks back home from a luncheon to spend time with her, and spies her dancing with the butler! Never having been jealous before, he thinks everything over, and he decides he could fire her--but he won't. He convinces himself that he's entirely unaffected by the the whole thing and he'll just ignore her completely from now on and everything is fine.

And he promply goes into the house and asks Cora Falkener to be his wife. Have I mentioned that I really like Cora? She seems to be an intelligent, competent, interesting young woman, and she handles her difficult mother rather well. And I'm glad the author doesn't deal with the other woman dilemma by making her an impossible witch. But there are only two other ways of handling this kind of thing, and it's a comedy, so she's spared the "highly convenient death" outcome. Therefore, it turns out she's mad for--and engaged to--a young poet her mother despises.

When they both figure out that they almost married each other, based on the fact that each thought the other one was in love, they go from vaguely disappointed to relieved to laughing over it in about five minutes, because they are so deliciously sensible. Far from being upset with Cora over her secret engagement, Crane's relief leads him to A) offer her fiance (who is a statistician as well as a poet) a job, and B) break the news of the engagement to Cora's mother.

Chaos reigns briefly as the household tries to get the packing dealt with�in the absence of the housemaid, who was previously sacked for insolence. But Cora doesn't mind her mother's mood, as she's just relieved that the news is out, and Cora herself didn't have to deliver it. She tells Crane to let the poet know details of the job offer and where to reach her, and the two women make a rapid exit from the scene.

As soon as they are gone, though, Crane feels like he's had it with the whole mess and tells Lawyer Tucker (who is saddled with the awful and unlikely first name of Solon, which makes me feel sorry for him despite not liking him much) that he wants to pack it in and go home himself.

But what of the delectable and charming cook, you ask? Here's how the author put it: "The time had come, then, when Jane-Ellen was to be friendless and out of a job; the third act was here." And yeah...since this is a romantic comedy, we can assume it's not gonna play out that way.

After more servant-related hijinks that results in the butler getting canned (so far they've booted the boot boy, the maid, the boot boy back at his job but disguised as an old man, and the butler--if you're keeping score.), Crane finds that he has two unplanned dinner guests: the poet, who he needs to talk to about Cora and the job offer, and This means he must, despite his intention of ignoring her, go down and talk to the cook.

As soon as he sees her, he realizes he still feels very jealous and in love, so he gets all huffy with Jane-Ellen and orders her about. She, in turn, gets all huffy because her he's being bossy, and because he fired both her brothers--and he immediately lightens up because the butler isn't a rival after all--just a brother! So he completely reverses his attitude, speaks nicely to her, asks her politely to change from dinner for two to dinner for four--and to please serve it, since she's the only help he has left. And she agrees, since he was sweet and polite about it. So he goes off to speak to Cora's poet, feeling very much better about the Jane-Ellen situation.

Enter Solon Tucker--who spills it about Crane wanting to leave, drools all over the cook, and is on the brink of either trying to hire her or marry her when she manages to ring the dinner gong, bringing Crane running with fire in his eye. And that's no sooner happened than Crane finds out the real estate guy is the same local fellow who was macking on his girl a few days before.

Knowing all this and having to sit down to dinner with them throws Burton Crane a bit, and he tries to enlist the poet to keep the conversation going so he, Burton, doesn't "knock their two heads together". As soon as Jane-Ellen walks in with the vittles, though, the conversation swings over to her beauty, which kind of screws things up, and pretty soon everybody is just being smart-assy to each other all over the place, except for Reed the real estate guy, who realizes that the upshot of all that's going on is that Crane and Jane-Ellen will the only two people in the house over night, and is scandalized by it.

It pretty much degenerates into a free-for-all, until Jane-Ellen cuts herself opening a bottle of champagne, and they all calm down in order to deal with it. After she shoos them all away, Crane takes Reed the real estate guy into the office and soon gets the truth out of him, as this is a very sensible story and people do not keep unnecessary secrets for very long.

At this point Reed, still concerned about the honor of Miss Claudia Revelly (Jane-Ellen's true identity) but knowing she won't listen to him if he tries to take her off the premises, departs in search of her brothers, the erstwhile butler and boot boy, to rescue her.

Meanwhile, Tucker hits the road after some final dickishness aimed at Crane and Claudia, Crane with only Cora's poet on his hands. So he promptly blows the guy off to head down to the kitchen and talk beautiful, sideways piffle at Claudia before doing the whole "Oh, my dear love!" cried Crane and took her into his arms. bit.

And it turns out they were well-chaperoned anyways, since she had promptly smuggled each of her siblings back into the house and up to the garret after they were fired.

I like this book a lot, if you hadn't figured that out already. Despite the silliness of the situation, everyone is of such splendidly normal intelligence, and people react sensibly to the situations they end up in. Plus, the humor is clever and wry, the characters are likable, and the whole thing plays out with a tidy logic. Head and shoulders above most of the stuff you get in a romance from this time period.