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!
2 comments:
i'd use your dishwasher in place of your 2nd drain board
I think that's the best idea, myself. It's odd that the manual doesn't recommend washing the breakfast dishes right after the meal. Lunch and supper dishes are to be washed right away. I guess they figured there were some other things that were more important to get to first.
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