Why an Amish Kitchen Never Smells — The 15-Cent Bowl That Sits by the Door

Why an Amish Kitchen Never Smells — The 15-Cent Bowl That Sits by the Door For about fifteen cents a bowl, changed every two or three days, my Amish kitchen smells like nothing at all — and in forty-one years of frying fish every Friday I have never once bought a can of air freshener. If you have been trying to get rid of cooking smells or make your kitchen smell good naturally, here is the whole of it. My name is Mammi Sarah. I have kept a farmhouse kitchen in Lancaster County for forty-one years, and my mother kept the same white bowl on the shelf by the door before me, and her mother before that. Your kitchen still smells like Tuesday's supper because a smell is not air, it is stuff — tiny bits of grease that rise up and settle onto your curtains and cupboards. A candle does not remove one particle of it. It rents you a mask that needs refilling forever, while the companies that sell sprays and plug-ins take in billions covering smells that fifteen cents would have removed. I will show you what sits in that bowl, why it lives by the door and not by the stove, what it costs, and the honest truth most people are never told: clean has no smell at all. I will not pretend it does what it cannot. A bowl of vinegar is a fine housekeeper but a poor undertaker — it cannot bury a potato gone soft in the bin or a sour drain, and for the first half hour a fresh bowl smells faintly of pickles. That much I owe you straight. Tell me in the comments which smell is the stubborn one in your kitchen — the fish, the bacon grease, the cabbage, or a drain that sulks no matter what you do. I read every one. 🔔 Subscribe for more of the old ways — next time, why Amish women never buy air freshener at all, and the little pot that simmers on my stove using three things sitting in your pantry right now. You would never guess the third one.