Clearing the Air

I'm used to clearing the dishes off my kitchen table after eating breakfast, but the most I usually do after that is to leave them on the kitchen counter, sometimes popping an especially sticky pot in the sink to soak. That's it. This morning, I followed the new addition to my routine - step by step - and left my kitchen a slightly tidier place than usual. First, here's the menu:

Prune Juice (saved from Friday) with Lemon

Cooked Wheat Cereal

Coffee

If the Juice they're talking about is the water I stewed the prunes in, I did indeed have about 1/3 cup of Prune Juice to drink at breakfast this morning. I put it through a strainer, added a twist of Lemon, and it made a nice glass of juice - though much smaller than I'm used to! It's well known that people used to drink a lot less juice at the breakfast table than they do today. And when you have to either squeeze the oranges yourself or buy canned or bottled juices that are only sold in small quantities, it's easy to see why a small glass of juice was considered an ample serving. My modern tastebuds are used to drinking a large glass of juice at breakfast. This morning was the first time I tried to drink the recommended serving, and I felt so thirsty when it was gone! Should I try and stick to the vintage serving size and drink a glass of ice water if I'm still thirsty? This would certainly make my breakfasts more easy on the waistline...

There were only three kinds of hot cereals at my grocery store: oatmeal, Cream of Wheat, and Malt O Meal. The menu called for Cooked Wheat Cereal, so I read some labels. The Cream of Wheat is wheat farina, and Enriched Farina is suggested for breakfast another day. The Malt O Meal is wheat farina + barley, so this seemed like the closest match. Later on, I discovered on the internet that Malt O Meal was indeed being made in the '40s, but it was intended as competition for Cream of Wheat. It definitely tastes a lot like Cream of Wheat, so I think I'll save the rest for the next time Enriched Farina is on the menu. I'm still not sure what brands of cereal will qualify and, looking ahead, I also see Cooked Whole-wheat Cereal and Cracked-wheat Cereal mentioned in the breakfast menus. I guess I'll have to check out some of the other grocery stores here in town and see if any of them has a better selection of hot cereals.

Adaptation:

The menu also recommends a serving of Toast with Jelly. I passed on this course as the Cereal was super filling.

Open dining room windows top and bottom for free circulation of air... Open kitchen windows top and bottom for free circulation of air, or open kitchen ventilator.

Just as each member of the household was expected to open their bedroom windows before breakfast, the manual recommends opening the dining room and kitchen windows immediately after the meal. We have a very small window of time here in the Southwest where open windows in the morning are really an option, and I'm afraid it's already gone. It went from being too hot even to turn off the air conditioner to being quite chilly in the mornings, so even if I had windows in my kitchen, it'd be too cold most days to open them! (I don't have a dining room, just a dining area on one end of my kitchen.)

The authors of America's Housekeeping Book go on and on about how important cross-ventilation in the home is - especially in the kitchen: "Heat and cooking odors should be drawn out, and fresh outside air brought in." If you don't have windows on opposite walls, do you have a transom above a door that's opposite a window? Do you have a Dutch door opposite a window? If all you've got is a single window, they recommend mounting an electric fan on the wall opposite the window. Or you can install an "electric ventilating fan" above the window.

Worst case scenario (Exhibit A: My Kitchen), you should make use of a "ventilating fan or hood over the range" to "draw off steam and cooking odors." Now that I can do. My range has an Air-O-Hood fan which I'd never even used before testing it out yesterday. And it works! So I turned it on this morning while I was carrying out my new post-breakfast chores. I'm not sure if my complete ignorance about kitchen ventilation is a 21st-century thing or just an apartment dweller thing.

Week Three: The Mission

This week's mission may sound kind of lengthy, but it shouldn't take more than ten minutes a day. Just a general straightening up of the dining area, scraping and rinsing the dishes so they'll be more easily washed later on, and putting away the ingredients used in making breakfast.

Clear away dishes and misplaced articles from dining room, after breakfast.

• Open dining room windows top and bottom for free circulation of air.
• Clear breakfast dishes from table to tray or tea wagon. Pick up and replace small articles belonging in the room.
• Gather up to take out: articles belonging in other rooms, plants or flowers to be tended; place on tray or tea wagon. Collect trash in waste basket.
• Carry out tray or tea wagon.

Rinse and stack dishes, pots and pans in kitchen.

• Open kitchen windows top and bottom for free circulation of air, or open kitchen ventilator.
• Rinse and stack dishes, pots and pans.

Put away food.

• Check and reorganize foods; put away.

Week's End

Now here's a breakfast I've got some experience making! I did pick up some interesting trivia from my cookbook today. Scrambled Eggs were once known as Battered Eggs.

Grapefruit Juice
Scrambled Eggs
Toast
Coffee

I've definitely learned a little something during the second week of The Great Housekeeping Experiment. Looking ahead at some of the breakfast menus in my 1945 cookbook, I can see the same cereals used over and over again in different ways. I should note that the menus I've been using are all "winter" menus. There are alternatives suggested for warm weather, usually involving prepared cereals and fresh fruits. If a '40s housewife wanted to be well-equipped for breakfasts on winter mornings, her shopping would have been fairly simple. She'd keep a stock of cereals on hand (rolled oats, cornmeal, wheat, farina), a prepared cereal or two, dried fruits (apricots, prunes), milk, eggs, bread, canned/bottled juices (apple, grapefruit), and some fresh citrus fruit.

And this may sound strange, but I feel like I'm getting better acquainted with my stovetop. Better able to judge where I should set the burner, that getting the water to boil before adding the cereal is always best, that stewing fruits need lots of water. Each cereal has it's own protocol --- as I learned yesterday with Corn-meal Mush. Speaking of which, I may not have been able to find a recipe on my package of cornmeal, but here's a recipe from the Aunt Jemima website with a whole step I missed!

Corn Meal Mush

1 cup Quaker or Aunt Jemima Enriched White or Yellow Corn Meal
1 cup cold water
3 cups boiling water
1 teaspoon salt

In large saucepan, bring 3 cups water and salt to a boil. In small bowl, mix corn meal with cold water. Gradually stir corn meal mixture into salted boiling water. Cook 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Cover, and continue cooking on low heat 5 minutes for white corn meal or 10 minutes for yellow corn meal, stirring occasionally. Serve hot with milk and sugar. Yield: 6 servings

Dinner and Dancing

Mr. and Mrs. Amberg are having the Millers over for cocktails and dinner, and then they're off for a dance at the country club. Probably more of a fantasy for the average American housewife than a reality. Unless they had hired help, the Ambergs would have had dinner dishes to clean up after and kids to get off to bed. They would only occasionally be able to afford an evening out. I suspect these pictures were actually taken over a series of days than being "a day in the life," otherwise Mrs. Amberg's changed her clothing six times in one day!

Jane Amberg, housewife & mother, prepares for dinner party by carrying roast beef platter to dining table she has carefully set w. colorful place mats, silver candlesticks and silver center piece w. flowers & a bottle of Chianti as her guests finished cocktails in living room.

Hostess housewife Jane Amberg (C) chatting w. her dinner guests Mr. Bert Miller & wife, as her husband Gilbert stands behind her, carving a roast beef to be served at table set w. place mats, candlesticks & a bottle of Chianti, at their home.

Jane Amberg dancing w. husband Gilbert (3L) amidst other couples at their country club formal dance.

Jane Amberg mending a pair of socks as she lounges in bedroom while listening to her favorite jazz records during her "leisure" hours (time w/o kids) at home.

Where is the Love?

I have the day off from work today, but I was so tired out after yesterday's revelry that I lost half off it sleeping 'til 11:00! As I realized what time it was - and how wonderful it felt to be so rested - my instincts were screaming at me just to spend the day puttering about the house, warm and cozy in my pajamas and to skip the early morning chores and breakfast altogether... I fought them back successfully and jumped in the shower, vowing to at least put on some clean clothes and stick to my new routine. Instead of skipping breakfast, I'd skip lunch. Twas a close call!

This morning's menu:

Stewed Prunes (saving the juice for another breakfast)
Corn-meal Mush
Coffee

Isn't it funny how we've almost completely removed the prune from modern cookery? There are all kinds of recipes for desserts and salads involving prunes in vintage cookbooks, but the prune has gotten a completely bad rap today. They've been relegated to a bad joke on the playground. I'm just flipping through the index of my 1945 cookbook, and I see Prune Apricot Upside-down Cake, Prune Blanc Mange, Prune Ice Cream, Prune Pie, Prune Chiffon Pie, Prune Rye Bread, Prune Turnovers, Prune Whip, Spiced Prunes, Stuffed Prunes, Stewed Prunes. What happened... when did Americans decide that prunes were to be shunned from our tables?

We still love plums - why not their wrinkly brothers?



Adaptations:
The menu recommended flavoring the Corn-meal Mush with Bits of Cooked Bacon, and this was a no-go for me as a vegetarian. I served the Stewed Prunes on top of the Mush, so they added some flavoring to the cereal. The menu also included Toasted Buns, but the added carbs didn't seem necessary, so I skipped the course.

Lessons Learned:
1.) The Stewed Prunes turned out deliciously, the Corn-meal Mush not so much. I've never made this before so I was flying blind on this one. The cookbook recommended using the recipe on your package of cornmeal. Mine didn't have a recipe for mush, so I had to rely on the proportions suggested in the cookbook. I boiled the water and stirred in the cornmeal slowly. The cornmeal almost instantly turned to mush, but there were already lumps which I was never able to remove. I thought that it would take 15-20 minutes to be ready for the table, so had to leave it on low heat while I waited for the prunes to be ready.

2.) I found myself wondering today how the stewed fruit in this morning's breakfast and in last Sunday's breakfast would have been served. I've dished them up on top of the cooked cereal each day, but I wonder if it'd be more appropriate to the period if the fruit and cereal were served in separate bowls. My mother, who grew up during the '50s, used to serve stewed prunes occasionally and it seems to me that they were always in a separate dish. The dishwashing hater in me is sounding off all kinds of alarms that I don't need to create any extra, unnecessary dishes to wash, but I suspect that the everyone-in-one-bowl approach is not truly vintage. On the mornings I've made breakfast at home, I've consciously used my grandmother's small cups and saucers to try and find a more '40s feel for my breakfast table. They hold a lot less coffee than do modern coffee mugs.

Busy as a Bee

After lunch, it's time for Mrs. Amberg to give the living room a final touch. She's got guests coming for dinner tonight! Then off to the garage to see about the car - and a trip downtown with the children after picking Peter up from school. I love her spectator pumps and the striped awnings over the windows looking out on the backyard...

Jane Amberg, housewife & mother, standing on ladder to place special china plate as decoration above doorway in living room that she decorated herself, as her son Tony plays on the floor in their rented house.

Jane Amberg conferring w. mechanic at gas station about the car she uses to chauffeur her husband to & from his office & get the children back & forth to school.

Jane Amberg, w. Peter, Tony & Pamela, as they go to drugstore to buy ice cream cones after the boys had haircuts at local barbershop in town.

Jane Amberg rapping admonishingly on window in bkgrd. as she oversees her kids Peter, 7, climbing slide ladder while Tony, 5, blocks the slide & Pamela gets kicked out of tent while playing w. neighbor children in backyard playground.

Thanksgiving Successes

I just finished a scrumptious '40s breakfast (for real, this time!) and am sitting down to enjoy my coffee with the 1941 Thanksgiving episode of the Jell-O Program with Jack Benny. I've got to get back to the kitchen soon and begin work on my contributions to a Thanksgiving potluck - I'm in charge of appetizers this year - but I've still got a few minutes. Here's the menu I chose from my 1945 cookbook:

Grapefruit Juice
Omelet
Toast, Dried Fruit Jam
Coffee

Was ruby red grapefruit juice available at your typical grocery in the 1940s? I know canned grapefruit juice was out there, but I suspect it was made from white grapefruits. I couldn't find any white grapefruit juice at the nearest Trader Joe's last night, but I did pick up some ruby red.

There were lots of recipes for omelets in my cookbook --- and two recipes alone just for the Plain Omelet. One was a Puffy Omelet - egg white beaten separately until stiff and then folded into beaten egg yolks. The other was a French Omelet - eggs beaten only until mixed. I opted for the French Omelet and tried to stick strictly to the directions. And it turned out great! Yummy free-range eggs, salt, pepper, and melted "fat" (margarine for me) - all fried up in a small pan 'til golden and folded in half.

Adaptation:
The only thing strange about this menu was that there weren't any recipes for Dried Fruit Jam inside the cookbook! Did they just presume that anybody using the cookbook would have committed this recipe to memory years ago? I found some recipes online for Dried Apricot Jam, but most of them instruct you to soak the fruit for anywhere from 12 to 48 hours before starting the jam. I didn't even look at the menu until last night - and didn't want to end up with a bowl of undersoaked apricots in the a.m. - so I passed on the Dried Fruit Jam and spread strawberry preserves on my toast instead.

Wife, Mother, Waitress

Prepare and serve breakfast.

There's more than just one chore here and, if I were a '40s housewife, I would most likely have spent most of my time at breakfast serving the meal to my family. Getting up and down from the table to pour another cup of coffee for Jim, plate up a couple more hot griddlecakes for young John, and find the strawberry jam for Patty so she'll eat something. I'm feeling guilty even as I write this - remembering my own mother in the kitchen at breakfast time when we were small. She worked pretty hard to get a warm meal in all of us before we left the house.

As a single woman, I have the luxury of sitting down myself when I've finished making breakfast and eating it. In one sitting!

Did you ever see the movie A Christmas Story (1983)? Ralphie (as the narrator) delivers one of the film's most memorable lines when he describes his mother's useless attempt to sit down and eat her own dinner in the evenings:

"My mother had not had a hot meal for herself in fifteen years."

A Morning with the Ambergs

A few more pictures of Mrs. Amberg hard at work at home in September 1941. It's interesting that the shoes she's wearing are not the pumps we usually see in vintage ads of women at work; they're just oxfords. And she's wearing cotton socks. So she's dressed for comfort, with her hair tied up in a simple ribbon. Before preparing lunch, she's changed into a striped dress - maybe because Gilbert was coming home. Looks like it's toasted sandwiches and soup on the menu at the Amberg house. Stay tuned tomorrow to see how this 1941 housewife spent the afternoon...


Jane Amberg, housewife & mother, busy straightening up before launching into some heavy cleaning w. dust mop & carpet sweeper in her living room at home.


Jane Amberg scrubbing the bathtub in bathroom at home.


Jane Amberg using pop-up toaster w. slices of bread as she makes sandwiches for her three children at lunchtime in kitchen at home.

Jane Amberg, serving lunch to her husband Gilbert who has come home fr. the office a few minutes away & her ever-present kids at the kitchen table at home.

Mrs. Amberg

Today was kind of a maintenance day. I did my early morning chores in the bedroom and sat down to some microwaved leftover pancakes for breakfast. There are plenty left for breakfast tomorrow morning, so it'll be another day or so before I have any new tales from the kitchen.

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday was that the Griddlecakes recipe calls for "melted shortening." Vegetable oil must have been just coming onto the market in 1945 and not yet widely available. It certainly saves some time - not having to melt a tablespoon of shortening on the stovetop - but maybe vegetable oil's one of the reasons my pancakes weren't very good.

LIFE magazine has just made its photographic archives available online and there's a sweet little series of pictures called "Occupation: Housewife" that were taken in a Kankakee, Illinois home in September 1941. Since I don't have much news to report from the home front today, I'll post a few of these photos and add a few more as soon as I have a chance. Here's a real '40s housewife hard at work... Enjoy!


Housewife & mother, Jane Amberg, 32, posing w. her husband of eleven yrs., Gilbert & their three kids Pamela, 4, Tony, 5, and Peter, 7, in front of large two-storey house they lease.


Jane Amberg, shushing her husband Gilbert, as they sit having quiet 6:30 a.m. breakfast before their three kids wake up, in kitchen at home.

Jane Amberg making one of the four beds she does daily after doing breakfast dishes and getting the kids to school, at home.

Jane Amberg loading the automatic washing machine w. several days dirty clothes in basement at home.

Adventures at the Breakfast Table

So, they weren't the heaviest pancakes I ever ate. But they were darn close!

Day Two of the new addition to my morning routine, and here's the menu I picked out for breakfast this morning:

Apple Juice

Griddlecakes and Corn Sirup

Milk, Coffee

I have to be fair about the Griddlecakes recipe. I didn't follow the directions precisely. Didn't sift the dry ingredients. I used non-fat cooking spray to grease the pan. And I wonder if the 1% milk I used made any difference in the outcome. Would whole milk have made the pancakes any lighter? I definitely made my pancakes bigger than the author of the cookbook apparently made hers! The recipe promises 20 pancakes, I ended up with 12. Needless to say, there are lots of cold, heavy pancakes wrapped up in my fridge waiting for the breakfast table tomorrow morning...

Corn Sirup on my Griddlecakes? This made me super squeamish. Corn syrup rarely sees the light of day in my kitchen, so to set it out on my table felt very odd. I tried to talk myself through it. Most of the "maple" syrup we find in supermarkets is just corn syrup with maple flavoring, right? Just think of it as clear maple syrup. Not so easy! Anyway, the corn syrup sweetened the pancakes a little, but I was definitely missing the maple taste.

So why was this 1945 cookbook suggesting that I use "Corn Sirup" anyway? I thought maple syrup was promoted during the war as a great domestic substitute for sugar. Was it promoted so heavily that they ended up with a maple syrup shortage???

Adaptations

The menu originally included "Slab Bacon." Being a vegetarian, I passed on this course. I didn't make any coffee at home this morning - just enjoyed a cup at my desk once I got to work.

Oatmeal Revelations

There are 41 breakfast menus in the vintage cookbook I leafed through yesterday, so it didn't take me very long to find one that would be compatible with the contents of my cupboards.

Stewed Apricots
Oatmeal
Toast
Milk, Coffee

There are breakfast menus suggested for weekends and breakfast menus suggested for weekdays. I decided to choose one of the weekday menus, hoping they would be easier for somebody just getting started with the whole cooking-a-meal-and-eating-before-noon thing.

I gather the milk is meant as a children's beverage with coffee for grown-ups, so I fired up Mr. Coffee and brewed a pot. This step is definitely something I won't be doing at home on weekday mornings. There's plenty of free java at work - and lots more time while I'm sitting at my desk to enjoy it. Unless I start getting up with at least an extra hour to spare, it's hard to imagine being able to really enjoy a pot of coffee at home. Now, for a '40s housewife, having a pot of coffee on hand would make sense. You and Jim would enjoy a cup or two at breakfast, and you could have a second later on that morning. Jim might read the morning paper at the breakfast table and so he'd be there long enough to really enjoy a cup himself. I don't get a paper here at home, so I turned on my 1950 Zenith tabletop radio and listened to NPR while I ate my breakfast - but hadn't planned my time wisely this morning, so had to eat pretty quickly and head out.

Adaptation
The combination of apricots, oatmeal, and toast seemed a little excessive in the carb department, so I skipped the toast. And the meal was more than filling as is. Looking ahead at a few of the menus, I suspect I'm going to have to make more than a few adaptations in the interest of my waistline. Maybe I should have prepared a much smaller serving of apricots and oatmeal - then a single piece of toast would've seemed okay...

Lessons Learned
1.) My 21st-century tastebuds were screaming for me to add something crunchy to the oatmeal. I had a hard time not adding some chopped walnuts, just to make the texture a little more --- I don't know. Modern recipes are usually packed with such a combination of ingredients that stripping them down to something more plain is difficult at first, I guess.

2.) Dried or preserved fruits would have likely been all there was available in the way of fruit during the winter. It's so easy in 2008 just to pick up a few fresh apricots at the supermarket. While I watched the apricots bubbling away on the stovetop this morning, I wished that I could just have added some fresh fruit to my oatmeal. It would have seemed so much healthier - and tastier! The stewed fruits weren't bad, though. They were a little chewy even after 40 minutes on the burner. The insides were still quite sweet and apriocot-y. My cookbook recommended adding sugar "to taste" during the last five minutes of stewing, but I thought the apricots were fine without any added sweetener.

3.) At last! I think I've finally figured out why my mom's oatmeal was always so gummy (sorry, Ma)... I used the real stuff today - no instant oats, no quick-cooking oats - just plain rolled oats. And the recipe on the carton specifically says to bring the water to a boil first before adding the oats and bringing everything down a simmer. I didn't do this the first time. Just threw everything in together and turned the heat up. In only a few minutes, it was bubbling and already looking just as gummy as the oatmeal I hated when I was a kid. I followed the instructions when I made the second batch, and it was an entirely different bowl of oatmeal. Could that really have made such a difference?

Week Two: The Mission

I begin the second week of The Great Housekeeping Experiment tomorrow morning with a new mission in hand. It's only four words long, but they're four words that strike fear into the fiber of my being...

Are you ready?

Prepare and serve breakfast.

I haven't been a "breakfast person" for years. I wish I was. Every diet and health kinda person out there tells us that skipping breakfast is terrible on your waistline and your blood sugar. I wish I could say that the thought of breakfast doesn't make me nauseous, but even when I was forcing myself to eat breakfast the first time I tried this routine, I never got past that feeling. I look forward to a cup of coffee in the morning, but the sight of food makes me queasy. By lunchtime, I'm ravenous. Is it any wonder?

I came across an interesting article in the February 1947 issue of Better Homes and Gardens called "Why Don't You Eat a Good Breakfast?" It's all about getting your family back to the breakfast table. There are all kinds of tips - everything from menu suggestions to setting the table with a "gay cloth, attractive china, a posy in a vase" and to "be attractive yourself." (Since I'm head of a one-person household, this last tip probably won't come in very handy unless I set a mirror up at the breakfast table!) There are also some tips for people with no morning appetite.

Appetite can be largely a matter of habit. If you're used to going without breakfast, you may not feel hungry when you get up, even tho it's 12 to 14 hours since your last meal. The thought of food may induce distaste, even slight nausea... Avoid sweet rolls at breakfast; they tend to dull capricious early-morning appetites. Start your day with fruit... Or you may find helpful the juice of one lemon in a glass of cold or hot water, taken immediately upon arising... If you really want to approach the breakfast table with a gleam in your eye, try setting-up exercises, or a cold shower and rubdown.

Some great suggestions here. Will any of this advice work for me? My breakfast table is covered with a vintage floral cloth in red, white, and blue. I've even found some breakfast menus in my 1945 American Woman's Cook Book (edited by Ruth Berolzheimer and published in Chicago by Consolidated Publishers). Tomato Juice and Waffles with Butterscotch Sauce? Oy. I'm feeling nauseous already.

Week's End

Week One is nearing an end and I've successfully completed my mission every morning to date. I'm not suprised at anything here... These tasks only take a few minutes out of my day. But the experiment will get harder. Every week. I'm going to spend the first few weeks building a morning routine, then begin adding chores to my evenings. I threw in the towel last spring right around the time I got to the heavy duty cleaning, so tough times are in store! In the meantime, I'll savor these sweet, simple tasks for the time being and try to build up the endurance I'll need when the going gets tough.

I should mention - by way of explanation - what I'm doing to keep the rest of the house running while beginning this experiment. My modus operandi is to do everything else just as I'd normally do it. The laundry gets done when I've run out of underwear. The dishwasher gets emptied as I need the clean dishes - one meal at a time. It's complete and utter chaos out there! But my bad habits aren't going to change overnight. One step at a time...

The rooms where we sleep should be kept immaculately clean, sweet and fresh at all times.

Here again, a well-trained family can help with the care. If each one carries soiled clothing to the hamper or clothes-chute, hangs up other clothing... before breakfast, the sum total of saved time really amounts to something for the homemaker or servant.

What kinds of clothing do you suppose a '40s housewife was hanging up before leaving her bedroom in the morning? I guess they must have been the clothes she or her husband took off before going to bed last night. Suit jackets or cardigans, perhaps, the kinds of items that didn't require washing every time they were worn. If she changed into a housedress before fixing breakfast, she might have had a robe to hang up.

Maybe she's had a terrible time choosing an outfit to wear today and half her wardrobe is draped over one chair or another!

I've had a morning like that myself every once in awhile.

Throw Back

Throw back bed covers, including top sheet, on all beds. (This too should be done by the person occupying the room.)

No holds barred, this is my favorite part of the new early morning routine. I uber love getting to "throw back" all those rumply, crumply bed covers and give the sheets an airing... Here's the only problem: what to do with the heap of bed covers? And judging from the list of bedroom linens recommended for the bride by Lily Haxworth Wallace in New American Etiquette (New York: Books, Inc., 1941), it was quite a heap!

For two single beds or twin beds

Six pairs fine percale sheets.

Six pairs percale pillow cases to match.

Six pairs linen sheets (optional).

Six pairs linen pillowcases to match (optional).

Two pair winter blankets.

Two pairs summer blankets.

Two comfortables, wool-filled.

Four bed spreads.

Four mattress protectors.

Two pillows - standard size.

Four night spreads.

I wonder what the difference is between a "bed spread" and a night spread. Any ideas?

Clean, Sweet and Fresh

The rooms where we sleep should be kept immaculately clean, sweet and fresh at all times.

Here again, a well-trained family can help with the care. If each one... puts away personal possessions... the sum total of saved time really amounts to something for the homemaker or servant.

See the problem here is that I do more than sleep in my bedroom. As one of only three rooms in my apartment, it gets a ton of use! If I had a whole house to live in, my possessions might end up a little more evenly spread around. What I've been noticing in the last few days is that when the room is neat to begin with and I put one thing down out of place, it's jarring - keeps on jumping out at me, so to speak. I just have to pick it up and dispose of it and send it along to its proper home.

Even the most immaculate '40s housewife who only slept in her bedroom would have had to do some straightening up in the morning. There would have been books and magazines, ashtrays or pipes, empty water glasses - the kinds of things people typically leave on their nightstands as they turn out the lamp and settle in for a good night's sleep. If a woman had to spend the next couple of hours making breakfast and getting the family off to school and work, she would have appreciated being able to leave her bedroom in decent shape until she could return to it with her full attention...

Now, my 1945 manual instructs me to do that very thing. Each and every morning after cleaning up after breakfast and cleaning the living room, the '40s housekeeper was supposed to give every one of the bedrooms its daily once over. And then on Thursdays - in the late morning or early afternoon - she was scheduled to give the bedrooms a thorough weekly cleaning. That scenario's obviously a fantasy for this working girl, so I'm going to give the bedroom just a thorough weekly cleaning on Thursday evenings. I'll have to be sure that the daily work assigned for bedrooms is being covered on those Thursday evenings, too.

Chutes and Ladders

Monday morning, Tuesday morning... I've continued ticking off the steps of my new routine before I leave the house each morning. Both days put together didn't take me as long as the chores took me on Day One. Though that shouldn't be a surprise. I cleared away quite a bit of clean laundry and odds and ends that didn't belong in my bedroom that first morning. My bedroom's a comfy place for reading, talking on the phone, watching TV, and surfing the net, so it's easy for this room to become cluttered up quickly.

Here again, a well-trained family can help with the care. If each one carries soiled clothing to the hamper or clothes-chute... the sum total of saved time really amounts to something for the homemaker or servant.

Oh, if only I had a clothes-chute - and a servant at the other end of it! Wouldn't it be marvelous just to slide those dirty clothes right out of view and not even see them again until they were folded up all neatly in a fresh, clean stack... I don't even own a hamper, just two plastic laundry baskets. I keep them stacked up at the back of my closet and store my dirty clothes there until my next trip to the laundry room. Unless I'm being a clothes hog, they do a pretty good job of containing a week's worth of laundry. It'd be nice to own a hamper again and keep the dirty clothes a little more out of sight. From time to time, I've seen a hamper in vintage advertisements. They generally seem smaller than the new ones out there on the market today.

A clothes-chute reminds me of all the other "chutes" into and out of the early 20th-century home. The coal man shoveled coal right into your cellar through a chute. The milk man left his daily delivery in the milk chute built near the back door... Isn't it fitting that the same homes featured a chute leading straight from bathroom to laundry room? The people of that era really had a thing for the idea that you should be able to slide all life's necessities from one location to the next. Like the home was a miniature factory and its chutes, the assembly line.

Here's a description of the kind of clothes-chute you would probably have found in a '40s home:

"In many residences a clothes-chute is provided, which runs from some place in the second story, from the bathroom when practicable, to the laundry. The chute is merely a vertical shaft or well about 16 inches by 2 feet inside, lined with matching ceiling and provided with doors in each story." Frank Eugene Kidder and Thomas Kidder, Building Construction and Superintendence (W. T. Comstock, 1915)

Open Windows

Day One - or should I say Morning One - was a great success! I'm not crowing too loudly as I know that these early morning tasks are just the tip of the iceberg. These are the kinds of chores that the authors of my manual expected from every occupant of the 1945 household. Even the youngest school-aged child would probably have been raised to take care of these duties before sitting down at the breakfast table.

Open windows in bedrooms, top and bottom, on arising, for free circulation of air (except in completely air-conditioned houses). (This should be done by the person occupying the room.)

The weather here is finally cool enough that I can open my bedroom window and let the fresh air indoors. What a blessing after a summer of air-conditioned stuffiness! Even women living in a northern climate have to give up opening bedroom windows during the winter, though, so we all have to endure stuffy air at one end of the year or another...

The authors of America's Housekeeping Book make it clear from Chapter I, "When You Hunt a Home," how important fresh air was to the modern housewife. "Cross-ventilation in every room" was the very first item on the checklist designed for the woman inspecting a home for sale. Women were encouraged to budget time every day in order that their children get "exercise and fresh air." Most women by far still dried their laundry on clothes lines, and they were encouraged to air all their bedding outdoors once a week.

I find it interesting that the manual referenced air-conditioned homes. I've always thought that air conditioning was only found during the '40s in hotels, restaurants, or other public facilities. Digging a little deeper into the manual, I find that the term "air conditioning" was being used to refer not just to cooling, but to systems that circulated, purified, and humidified (or dehumidified) air. In other words, somebody who lived in a "completely air-conditioned house" in 1945 would never have had the luxury of a freshly-aired bedroom!

Week One: The Mission

Has anyone ever asked you what possession you'd most like to have if you were stranded on a desert island?

Well, I'm taking two housekeeping manuals along on this journey, but one of them by far is my favorite: America's Housekeeping Book, compiled by the New York Herald Tribune Home Institute and published in New York by Charles Scribner's Sons. The first edition dates to 1941, but the copy I have is a reprint from 1945. As far as I can tell, they hadn't revised the book in any way. My copy must have been owned by young woman taking a home economics class. Her name, "Ann Dooley," is inscribed inside the flyleaf along with a syllabus in pencil. She also included notes for her report on "Laundering and Ironing" and some prep towards an exam!

The weekly housekeeping routine laid out by the authors is super detailed, with step-by-step instructions on even the most mundane chores. Here is the first bit of advice they offer for every morning of the week:

The rooms where we sleep should be kept immaculately clean, sweet and fresh at all times.

Here again, a well-trained family can help with the care. If each one carries soiled clothing to the hamper or clothes-chute, hangs up other clothing, puts away personal possessions, turns back the bedding and opens the windows before breakfast, the sum total of saved time really amounts to something for the homemaker or servant.

The authors elaborate a few pages later:

Open windows in bedrooms, top and bottom, on arising, for free circulation of air (except in completely air-conditioned houses). (This should be done by the person occupying the room.)

Throw back bed covers, including top sheet, on all beds. (This too should be done by the person occupying the room.)

So, there it is... my mission for Week One.

The Great Housekeeping Experiment

This blog had its beginnings in 2006 in another discussion forum. After moving into a new apartment in a new city, I started something I called "The Great Housekeeping Experiment" - an attempt to keep house according to the routine written up in a 1947 housekeeping manual. After three days, I threw in the vintage towel. It was an exhausting workload that women could only have done after spending years apprenticed in their mothers' homes. Have you ever seen the scene in Woman of the Year (1942) where accomplished careerwoman Tess Harding (Katherine Hepburn) tries - disastrously - to make breakfast for her husband? That was me after just three days. Here are a few excerpts:

For starters, the housekeeping schedule doesn't tell us when the housekeeper could shower (or bathe) and dress herself. That was the very first issue staring me in the face when I got up this morning. Did the 1940s housewife head down to the kitchen fully washed and dressed and ready to be seen by the world, or was she garbed in a robe with her hair still in curlers? If we were to judge by advertisements from the era, I'd say they were fully dressed at the breakfast table. In real life, was that really the case?

I can definitely see what a treat a favorite soap opera or two would have been to a 1940s housekeeper. It's easy to imagine a woman working extra hard to get a task done in time to sit down to listen to her favorite soap - maybe with a fresh pot of coffee or a friend. Wondering how a cliffhanger would be resolved could keep the mind occupied while doing monotonous work.

Housekeeping in shoes bites!!! Whether you're in a housedress or street clothes, there's no getting around the fact that 1940s housekeepers most assuredly wore shoes around the house. It's all I can do to keep from kicking them off and going barefoot or wearing slippers. And they aren't even heels --- as we see in ads. Just flats. In those days of door-to-door salesmen and neighbors that popped by unannounced, a woman had to be ready to greet the public at any moment. Oy.

After chalking "The Great Housekeeping Experiment" up to failure, I felt inspired again last spring and started looking around for a housekeeping manual designed for women with a war job, perhaps - a routine that might be useful for a woman like myself in 2008 who works outside the home 40 hours per week. I didn't have any luck, but I did find another manual published in 1945 and decided to pick and choose between the two routines to try and put something together that worked for me. I also decided to start slow. Pick up one new step every week and try to build something lasting. Habits that would at last bring some blessed order to my household. Would it be possible to get to a place where I actually enjoyed housework? Where cooking and cleaning were not the torture they've always been?

I read the chapter in my housekeeping manual on laundry and the instructions were soooooo detailed. There were different procedures for every possible kind of cloth --- and we have so many more kinds of manmade cloth today! I usually just cram my whites/lights in one load and my darks in the other load. I'd try sorting mine by type to see how long it would take me to save up a load, but I'd run out of clothes first! My laundry experience today is much quicker and easier than it was in yesteryear, but I doubt my clothes last as long (or smell as fresh coming out of a hot dryer as they would on the line).

I was worried at first that my clothes would be wrinkled again by the time I wore them --- I've always ironed my clothes just before putting them on and leaving the house! --- but wrinkles haven't been a problem with most pieces.

I don't own anywhere near the amount of tools the 1945 housekeeper would have had to make the job a little easier. No dust mop, no upholstery brushes, no special brush thingies for cleaning blinds (Where is that Fuller Brush Man when you need him?). My equipment was much less specialized. Though the special tools would have been nice, it must have been quite a chore just to find space for all that additional cleaning equipment, especially in cramped post-war housing.

Thank goodness for fitted bed sheets!!!!! They didn't have 'em yet when this housekeeping manual was written in 1945. Just for experiment's sake, I decided to follow the manual's step-by-step instructions for making a bed. They only had flat sheets to work with, so the bottom sheet had to be fitted to the bed with hospital ("mitered") corners on all four corners. It'd be a lot of work to keep those corners in place every day!

The experiment failed this time, too, though I managed to keep it up and running - a piece at a time - for almost three months. I had a midsummer houseguest and the break in my routine just threw everything out of place...

So I'm starting from scratch. Due in part to a little inspiration from Marzipan, who's conducting her own experiment at "My Decade Year." (Thank you!)

http://mydecadeyear.blogspot.com/

There are a couple things that keep nudging me in this direction. As a historian, I'm always thinking about the present in relation to the past. I'm interested in every era, but I think 1930s and '40s America have a lot to offer us here in 2008 - in a country facing recession (and quite possibly depression) and in a country at war. I wouldn't go back for anything other than a visit, mind you! There's plenty about the past that's ugly and repressive, but I do think it has a lot to offer us.

The only thing that really makes this possible for me, I think, is that I don't have a husband or children with lives and needs of their own to work around. As a single woman, I have the luxury of doing whatever I like with my lifestyle. And though you'd think from my vetching that I had a 30-room house to keep up with, it's actually only an apartment! I would love to have been born with the genetic make-up to love housekeeping, but it's always been a drag for me - and unfortunately that means I'm constantly losing things (in my own house) and I probably spend way more than I need to on food every week. The chaos at home breeds chaos everywhere else, and it's exhausting.

So I'm headed back... Destination 1940. I'm armed only with two housekeeping manuals, a stack of vintage magazines, and a fabulous pop-up toaster (thanks, Sara). Wish me luck!