Love Story

Remember how I said after making my first 1945 dinner menu how much better the food I prepared for myself tasted? Well, I think I'm gonna have to take that back. Two dinners later, I'm finding myself so tired from the workout in the kitchen that I can hardly taste my meal.

And it is such a workout. Balancing a great pot of potatoes as you carry them over to drain in the sink. Twisting about between the pots on your stovetop so you can lift the lid on one without injuring yourself with steam from another. Just working in all that heat is a challenge. I turned my air conditioning up and pulled my hair back simply to try and feel a little more cool. By the time I sat down to dinner, I was wiped - and almost not even hungry enough to enjoy the meal.

Whipped Potatoes

Buttered Beets

Tossed Greens Salad

Chiffonade Dressing

Chocolate Pudding

I suppose this is the same kind of curve anybody goes through as they're getting in shape. Toning the muscles, learning the moves... I have to remind myself that the most I've done in "making dinner" for years has been: Open box. Heat in oven. This is a whole new world for me, and it's going to take some time. I hope! It really makes me wonder what dinner was like for Mother back in the '40s. Could she really enjoy a meal as much as might her husband and children when she had worked sooooooooo hard to plan it, shop it, and prepare it?

The 1940s seem to have been an era when home-cooked and commercially prepared foods both found a home at the dinner table. I'm trying to keep that tradition myself, including at least one item that's somewhat ready-to-eat. Last week: Canned Green Beans. This week: boxed Chocolate Pudding mix. These items were both readily available to most American households and - for a "bachelor girl" like myself - would have been particularly important. What a blessing they must have seemed to a busy '40s housewife! Even one course - made one or two steps easier --- what a gift. We see prepared foods today with such an overlay of their nutritional dangers. The MSG, the sodium, the preservatives and additives, the trans-saturated fats. It's hard to remember how wonderful they must once have seemed. And in their infancy, prepared foods weren't quite as chock full of the not-so-good stuff as they are today. They were still relatively basic, but what a help to knock even a quarter-hour off the time it took to prepare dinner...

Another miracle - the dishwasher. This was an appliance available only in the '40s to those with some serious cash. As hard as you work towards preparing a meal - and as nice as it would be to relax at the table and enjoy your meal - the dirty pots and pans and cooking utensils can absolutely haunt you! In my case, it was the red water from my pot of beets that had splattered all over my nice, clean stovetop. All I could think about was how nice it had been to see my reflection in my stovetop the day before. Would the beet juice stain? What about the cutting board? Would it be forever pink? There was still some milk left in a saucepan since I'd overestimated how much I needed for the Whipped Potatoes. Would it stick terribly to the pan?

Having worked so hard over this meal, it was great to scrape and rinse and whisk those dishes out of sight. I used to think of my dishwasher as my archnemesis. It didn't seem to clean the dishes very thoroughly. There was always that nasty crumb tray to clean out. And I never understood the whole rinse/don't rinse debate. "Of course you don't rinse," I thought. "What good does it do to have a dishwasher if it's not going to do the job for you?" Well, I'm here to tell you... it's all about the rinse. Since I started rinsing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher (per the manual), I've found that only an occasional dish or utensil has a bit of residue and needs to be soaked and re-washed. The crumb tray? I haven't had to clean it in weeks. 1940s housewives who were lucky enough to own a dishwasher must have cleaned 'em 'til they shone and kissed 'em when no one was looking!

Automagic

Dishwashers designed for the home were still so new during the 1940s that the bloom had not yet worn off the rose. They were mysterious and magical - and probably only found in the nicest postwar homes. Some of these vintage ads make me feel darn ritzy for having one in my kitchen! Images of a woman loading her brand new dishwasher with one hand confidently on her hip, immaculately manicured hands setting the dials, happy mothers sitting with their children reading storybooks while the dishes froth away in the GE Electric... the picture was a rosy one. Sparkling dishes, hours of relaxation - but wait! What are these drips dried onto my glassware? How am I going to fish out those smelly crumbs in that tray way down in there? "Jim, just look at the water bill!"

Introducing the 1945 Thor Automagic Washer. It washes your dishes - and then your clothes! Why have two machines? And maybe scrambled eggs residue will add that extra je ne sais pas to your favorite blouse...



The 1947 models. Which one is on your Christmas list?

Kaiser


Dishamatic


General Electric

A Dishwashing Dilemma

I've come up against a bit of a dishwashing dilemma this week... After leaving the breakfast dishes to soak, the authors of the housekeeping manual instruct me to:

Scrape dishes with rubber plate scraper or paper towelling.

Rinse dishes with hot water.

Stack dishes according to size and shape, on right-hand drainboard.

The book suggests that the housewife leave the dishes while she tidies the living room then sets about giving each of the rooms their daily cleaning. The kitchen comes last, and only then will she wash the breakfast dishes. That'd be well and good if I didn't have to work outside the home. Luckily, my dishwasher should be able to take some of the labor off my hands, but here's the dilemma: should I leave my scraped and rinsed dishes stacked up in the sink and pile them in the dishwasher only when the sink gets too full to add any more, or should I treat the dishwasher like it's my drainboard and stack the dishes in there each morning once they're scraped and rinsed?

My modus operandi while doing The Great Housekeeping Experiment has been to do all my other housework just as I've always done it - hit or miss - a little here, a little there. I've been known to use my dishwasher as a cupboard, just taking the clean dishes out when I needed to use them again. (I know, it's been complete chaos here in the Jitterbug household!) That doesn't often leave my dishwasher free and ready for more dirty dishes. On the other hand, my sink can only hold so many dirty breakfast dishes. So I've hit a wall here. The Experiment is going to impact my evenings now as well as my mornings. I guess it had to happen sooner or later. I'm going to have to start making sure the dishwasher is ready for more dirty dishes before I go to bed at night.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

I don't own any rubber plate scrapers, but I do have a couple of rubber spatulas that do the job. They aren't quite the same tool. The scraper was shaped a little more like the spatula you might use today to lift your cookies off a cookie sheet. It was a sturdy piece of rubber affixed with metal to a wooden handle. At one point, they were also available in molded rubber. Our modern synthetic rubber - and now silicone - spatulas are much more flexible. We can use them to clean out bowls and the insides of jars, while plate scrapers were designed for flat surfaces.

Paper towelling was sold in much smaller rolls than we buy today! I guess you'd have used it as sparingly as possible.

Two drainboards are better than one, so that soiled dishes may be stacked at the worker's right and the dish drainer at her left.

A steel sink with a drainboard on both sides was the latest and greatest in 1940s kitchen design. My sink hasn't a drainboard on either side, so that's why I think it'll be helpful to think of my dishwasher as a substitute. Where better to let the rinsed dishes dry while they await washing? The kitchen in my parents' house hasn't been renovated since the '50s and its still got two drainboards, both of them tilted ever so slightly toward the sink. Alas, my little unit here in Apartment Land wasn't built until the '80s - when people thought we would never again need to wash another dish in the sink. Drainboards weren't even a consideration. Well, that's okay. I'm sure there were many housewives back in the day who had to make do without all the drainboards or counter space they might have liked in their kitchens. Women working in older kitchens with cast iron sinks would have had to rig up drainboards that were quite literally boards.

Whoops, gotta run... I've got a dishwasher that needs emptying!

Pots and Pans

You wouldn't think washing dishes required much in the way of elaboration, but the authors of America's Housekeeping Book dedicated a chapter to that very topic. Electric dishwashers were now available to homeowners, and the chapter includes step-by-step instructions on washing by hand and using a dishwasher. One of my new post-breakfast chores this week is to "[r]inse and stack dishes, pots and pans." The manual recommends taking care of pots and pans before tending to anything else, so here are some tips on caring for any pots and pans used in preparing breakfast.

Put cooking utensils to soak

(a) Use cold water in utensils that have held milk, egg or cheese mixtures, or dough

(b) Use hot water in utensils that have held syrup, frosting mixtures, candy, etc.

(c) Use hot soapsuds in greasy utensils

Here's where the 1940s housewife and I have to part ways as I am not going to be able to return to the kitchen later in the morning - at least on weekdays - to wash the breakfast dishes. If they're going to soak, they'll have to soak until I get home from work at the end of the day, and eventually they'll be washed by hand or tucked away in the dishwasher for a sudsy finale. Pots and pans were expressly off limits when it came to the vintage dishwasher. Which is perfectly sensible. Without being soaked first, they only come clean about 50% of the time even in a modern dishwasher!

The only pot or pan I had to soak after breakfast this morning was used to make a bowl of Corn-meal Mush. Here's the menu:

Grapefruit Juice

Corn-meal Mush, Top Milk

So would Top Milk have been as heavy as cream or a little less weighty - like half 'n' half? I wasn't sure, so I picked up some organic half 'n' half at the grocery store and ate it with my Corn-meal Mush. It wasn't very tasty. I think I'd rather have had the Mush without anything on top. I'd like to say that I'll just save the half 'n' half for my coffee from now on, but I can see from the next page of menus in my cookbook that I'm fated to try it again one of these mornings. In any event, it was good to get back to the basics after my tangle with Butterscotch Sauce. I'm super pleased that my Mush came out almost lump-free this morning! I tried mixing the cornmeal in a part of the water (it makes a kind of paste) then adding the paste to the boiling water in the pot - and it turned out just about right. I think the recipe doesn't call for enough water, though.