Weekends Only!

Here's my new rule: No baking yeast-raised recipes on a weeknight.

What a mess! Even with the things I did along the way to try and clean up the kitchen. By the time I finished, it was late - I was tired - the evening chores hadn't yet been done --- I threw in my towel and hit the sack.

Which is not to say the Yeast Cinnamon Rolls didn't turn out pretty darn good. I wrapped eight of them up in aluminum foil as soon as they were nearly cool and popped them in the freezer. They'll be ready and waiting for me the next time this dish turns up on my menu. The rest are still tender and delicious today! I could have been a bit more liberal though with the cinnamon and sugar. The recipe didn't lay out any exact measurements for those ingredients, so I tend to end up on the safe side when that happens.

I wonder how 1940s housewives fitted something like baking yeast-raised breads into their daily schedules. I mean, I know most housewives weren't baking their own bread any longer, but they still made lots of rolls. Parker House rolls, cloverleaf rolls, sweet rolls, coffee cakes... Maybe once you were an expert at it you just found a way to work each step into the rest of your work about the house. You'd start a "sponge" then go to work tidying up the bedrooms. Knead the dough, set it someplace warm to raise, then head back upstairs and give the bathroom its daily once-over.

These vintage cookbooks can be a bit tricky. They have a lot of general information about certain types of foods towards the beginning of a mini-section of those recipes. The recipe for the Rolls, for instance, was a variation on the Standard Roll Recipe, but you really needed to refer back to the initial section on breadmaking in order to flesh out what looked like a scant set of instructions. That was the case for me too with the Soft Molasses Cookies. I should have read the intro to rolled cookies before even starting the recipe. I guess all of this basic stuff is the kind of thing a 1940s housewife would have learned in a home economics class, the kind of stuff she'd have learned from watching (and helping) her mother cook three meals a day.

Here's something mission-related I learned several days ago. If I'm going to make a trip to the supermarket only once a week, I need to give up fooling myself with a shopping basket. You know, the little plastic one - "I'm just here to pick up a few things!" - that you fit over your arm. It's time to let it go and resign myself to the big ol' shopping cart.

Kitchen Chemistry Redux

I'm baking a batch of Yeast Cinnamon Rolls this evening for tomorrow's breakfast and decided to try the "sponge method" instead of the "straight dough method" I tried last time 'round - unsuccessfully. While I wait to see if the sponge is going to take, I've got lots to post about the weekend...

Friday marked the third week in a row that I've given my kitchen a thorough cleaning. It's hard work - takes me about three hours of good, honest elbow grease - but one thing I've noticed is that I'm finding new hiding places for dirt every week. I guess all those little cracks and niches stand out more now with all that cleanliness around 'em! So the kitchen is getting progressively cleaner every time. The manual recommends that housewives clean one cupboard or several drawers each time they clean the kitchen. By the time they've made their way through each of the kitchen cabinets, it's time to start at the first again. In my own home, the contents of my cupboards have kind of evolved hit or miss since the day I moved in here. I didn't really think through where I ought to store this or that when I started unpacking my belongings and brought home that first bag of groceries. Since I've begun scrubbing out my cupboards, I've collected all my baking ingredients in one place, all my cereals in one place, all my canned vegetables in one place, all my less-used dishes in one place. Things are slowly becoming more efficiently organized.

The thing about the kitchen cleaning that's still a nagging issue for me is that I can't seem to get it all done in one sitting. I can do about 2/3 of it and then I'm just exhausted --- so the rest gets done on Saturday morning or Saturday afternoon. I keep thinking that as I get better at this it'll take less and less time and soon I'll be able to do the whole thing at once, but maybe this is as fast as it's going to get. At any rate, I think I may have to make some adjustments to my routine if the kitchen thing can't be done completely on a weekday evening.

Drat - just checked the sponge. It's not taking. The dough should be all light and bubbly. Okay, I'm going to try that dough saver I used last time. Here's a link to the dough saver recipe:

http://destination1940.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-simple-luxury-it-is-to-make-bed.html

Something else that's vexing me is how much I hate messing up my sparkly clean kitchen by cooking in it afterwards! Just when I've finished cleaning it on Saturdays, I turn around and create a great mess of dishes on Sunday evenings. My countertops are messy, my stovetop spattered, and the sink is full of pots and pans. It doesn't take me all that long to clean it up, but it's never quite as clean as it was 24 hours ago. *sigh* I suppose that's a pain felt by every homemaker since time immemorial. A wonderfully clean kitchen is great to look at, but lasts about as long as the morning dew on a summer's day. A kitchen is one of those spaces, I guess, that just needs to be worked at continually to keep it clean.

Now my dough is finally rising. Thank goodness! I've tried to scrub away all traces of that first batch by running a load of dishes and cleaning the kitchen counters, but my table is still all floury. Can't clean that up yet - I've got more kneading to do.

I was reading an issue of Family Circle during my lunch hour today and found myself snorting out loud at some of their decorating suggestions. I guess they were trying to give some recession-friendly suggestions for perking up the look of your home, but they were the kind of things that make it blatantly clear that modern women's magazines don't have any real interest in improving the efficiency of your home. They don't even recognize that the kitchen is a working environment. To them, the kitchen has become a pretty little backdrop in which you can pour a glass of juice, but had better not even attempt to do any cooking. Oh, maybe you could open one of those tubes of refrigerated cookie dough and slice them neatly out onto a cookie sheet. Heck, you could probably even open up your takeout and divvy it up onto plates. But the kitchens in these magazines are not designed for a woman (or man) preparing three meals a day for a family. Never mind baking a big, messy batch of Cinnamon Rolls!

Tip That Annoys Me #1
"Choose a pretty table lamp for the kitchen counter. It's much more flattering than overhead lighting, and it makes the room more like a living space."

Excuse me - since when was a kitchen supposed to be a living space? It's probably the most intensely busy room in a household where people are actually eating meals they've cooked themselves and dining as a family. There's a photo next to this tip of a tall, stylish table lamp with a tall shade. I'm not sure how on earth you're supposed to get any work done in a room with mood lighting!

Tip That Annoys Me #2 --- here's a non-kitchen tip
"Remove all the pictures hanging above your mantel and lean them against the wall for a more contemporary look. Add a framed sketch or photo to the mix."

Yes, and that is going to make cleaning that room sooooooo much easier. Can you imagine the dust bunnies that'll cling to the bottoms of each of these pictures? And you couldn't possibly have any children or pets in a home like this. How is a person supposed to clean the floors? Artistic? Sure. Functional? Not a smidge. I think these magazines have forgotten that we still have to live in our homes. These tips are for people whose homes are sterile places. I would never had noticed this a few months ago, though.

Update on the Cinnamon Roll Dough: The second rising is done. I'm just waiting for my dishwasher to finish the drying step so I can open it up and get my rolling pin back!

My 1945 dinner menu was surprisingly good last night. Here's the menu:

French Fried Potatoes
Beets
Tossed Greens with Tomato
Chili Dressing
Banana Nut Ice Cream
Soft Molasses Cookies

The French Fried Potatoes came out remarkably good. I couldn't believe it myself! They were cut to the size of what we'd call steak fries today. Parboiled, then fried on the stovetop in a fair bit of canola oil. I was terrified of the hot oil --- especially after my disastrous attempt to fry Corn-meal Mush in January! But I dried out the potatoes as much as possible, held my breath, kept the lid on the pan, and let the oil do its thing. Didn't try to get in there and move the potatoes around with a spatula or anything. And it worked! They were hot and crispy and all soft and potatoe-y on the inside. I'm ridiculously proud of 'em. Canned Beets were much easier to work with than the whole beets, but not nearly as tasty. For the Chili Dressing, I ended up adding a tablespoon of bottled chili sauce to the French Dressing recipe. The balsamic vinegar pretty much neutralized the chili sauce, but there was a bit of a zing there.

My first two sheets of Cinnamon Rolls are now in the oven. It's up to my Kenmore to do the work now.

I didn't think I'd have any luck finding Banana Ice Cream, but there are several varieties for sale - Chunky Monkey, Banana Split Ice Cream, Banana Pudding Ice Cream --- I ended up going with Banana Nut as it seemed more basic than the others. The Soft Molasses Cookies were okay fresh out of the oven, but they're dreadful today. I didn't read all the tips on working with rolled cookie dough until it was too late. Apparently, it's easier to work with dough like that if it's been chilled for 10 minutes or so. Better luck next time!

I'll let you know tomorrow how the Cinnamon Rolls turned out...

Ten Little Leaves and Ten Little Tendrils

I'm going to make this an early post as Earth Hour begins in just two hours and I'm shutting off everything electric here in Casa Jitterbug. I haven't really had a chance to figure out what I'm going to do from 8:30 to 9:30. Shall I just go to bed early? Light some candles and try to do some reading? Sit outdoors on my landing and enjoy seeing the city a little bit darker? Hey, it'd be nice to actually see some stars for once. The city is usually so lit up that the sky is never dark enough at night to stargaze. Maybe tonight will be different.

The stork made a call today - and I'm now the proud mother of two lovely, new houseplants!

I stopped at a nursery this afternoon and spent an hour or so poking around their half-indoor/half-outdoor Houseplants area. They had an incredible selection of potted plants, along with some succulents, and I loved having the chance to match some "faces" to the names of the plants I read about in a vintage magazine article on houseplants. Some of them were familiar, I'd just never heard their names before! Several caught my eye, but I had limited myself to adopting only two and eventually left the nursery with a medium-sized grape ivy and a small "Indian Summer" coleus. The ivy is just big enough that it adds some real oomph to my kitchen. I've popped it in the corner of the room - up on top of the cupboards that line one wall - and laid the longest strand of leaves and tendrils along the top of the cupboards. The coleus has beautiful deep red and geen leaves. A beautiful plant for foliage--- I had a hard time choosing from all the varieties of coleus! This baby found a home just behind my sink.

I've got some studying up to do on caring for my new plants. And they'll definitely need re-potting. It's kind of neat knowing that these were houseplants popular in the kitchens of yesteryear. We usually think that the only way to add vintage flair to our kitchens is with dishes and appliances and curtain fabric, but houseplants are another fun way to do so. Hey, if I'm going to spend this much time cleaning my kitchen, I'd better dress it up a bit!

Week Nineteen: The Mission

It's become a habit during the last couple of years to spend time with my nieces at their home - not mine. Partly because it's so convenient. Their toys are there, their clothing, their special foods, their diapers --- all the gear you need to babysit a two year old and a ten month old. To be perfectly honest, though, part of the reason is that when your home is as chaotic and messy as mine used to be, you stop extending invitations. Because having somebody over means having to clean like a maniac before they arrive.

Last weekend, my sister brought my nieces over on Sunday. They're having some work done at their house and the washing machine and dryer have been disconnected, so she brought some laundry over to my place. It was a wonderful afternoon. Kitten fluttered about, investigating all of Auntie's knick knacks and jumping on the bed, while the baby - I'll call her Poppet - played patiently with a deck of cards. Picking them up, passing them one at a time to whomever was near, messing the pile about. The nicest thing about their visit was just how relaxed and un-tired I felt. I had a few things to do before they arrived to put my living room and bathroom to rights, but the housekeeping routine I've been carving out for myself has made such a difference! I guess I hadn't realized how far I've come until I was suddenly seeing the place through new eyes. My kitchen was clean, the bedroom was clean, my living room was tidy. And all this before I made any special preparations for their arrival...

What a change in just four months. My morning and evening chores have become practically natural. My weekly chores on Mondays through Thursdays still make me groan on occasion, but they don't seem nearly as tough as they used to. And the feeling of going to sleep at night having accomplished all of my missions for the day is so good. Just like a great day at work, where I'm busy, busy, busy - but knowing come 5:00 that so many of my "to dos" are done. My weekly cleaning-of-the-kitchen is far from a habit, but that, too, will come in time... One of my fondest hopes is that my nieces will have lovely memories one day of Auntie's house. That it was a cozy, clean, happy place with good meals and pretty things. It's amazing how children (even when they're one step removed) make your future a fixed target. Suddenly, that future is right in front of you and it's time for me to create that home I want them to enjoy visiting. Even Aunties feather their nests!

While I'm adjusting to the kitchen work and the dinners, it seems kind of convenient that my next mission is not a labor intensive one.

Do the bulk of the weekly food marketing on Saturday afternoons.

As I mentioned some time ago, the manual recommends that the housewife do the bulk of her marketing "on a day when local stores offer special prices. Often Friday and Saturday are bargain days." The authors of The Good Housekeeping Housekeeping Book (1947) also advise their readers to do some marketing twice a week, but suggest that Mondays and Fridays would be the most efficient days to do so. My plan is to do the bulk of my grocery shopping at the supermarket on Saturdays - probably Saturday afternoons - and to supplement it with a quick stop on Wednesday evenings at one of the stores where I buy organic milk, free range eggs, etc. The Wednesday trip alone hasn't added much in the way of efficiency to my household, but I'm hoping that the two in tandem will make a real difference.

Appliance-topia

I've just picked up a new filter for my vacuum cleaner and I'm looking forward to beating back the dust in my bedroom this evening. It's startling to realize how much dust collects in that room over the course of a week. (After all, I hadn't cleaned my bedroom in several months when I added it to my housekeeping routine!) Even in only seven days, this fine accumulation of dust settles on every surface. Including the carpet, I'm sure - though it's not visible. I feel a bit like a soldier patrolling the perimeter of my territory when I'm in there with my dustrag and vacuum cleaner. Once a week, I don my uniform (a flowered apron will do nicely, thank you), arm myself with weapons, and head out into the wilds to keep the enemy at bay...

In other household appliance news, I solved a mystery about my iron that's been nagging at me. Every week, about the time I had only one or two pieces left to iron, it would suddenly start to cool and the water inside would started leaking out. I'd turn the heat down, take the plug out of the electric outlet, plug it back in, try to reheat it - nothing. Tried a new outlet and that seemed to work once in restarting the iron. It's not an old iron. The only thing I could think of was that it might be one of those automatic shut-off irons and I was taking too long to finish the work. So it happened again last night and - just when I started cursing - I poked at this button on the handle which is usually lit up. And it worked! The iron heated right back up... I'm still not sure what happened, but I'm happy I've found a way to coax the iron to get back to work again. I guess I'm a slow ironer!

Have any of you ever come across a recipe for Chili Dressing? My vintage dinner menu for this weekend includes a Chili Dressing for the salad and the cookbook doesn't have a recipe for that particular dressing. They do have a Chili Sauce Mayonnaise dressing and both the Russian and Thousand Island dressing recipes contain chili sauce, but nothing specifically called Chili Dressing. I may substitute one of these other recipes, but I thought I'd see if any of my dear readers have any ideas. Here's the full menu:

French Fried Potatoes
Beets
Tossed Greens with Tomato
Chili Dressing
Banana Ice Cream
Molasses Cookies

This is a Friday night menu, so the non-vegetarian dish I'm omitting is a baked fish. If I can find some Banana Ice Cream at the supermarket, I'll make that my store-bought contribution. If I can't find any, I'll skip the Ice Cream and treat myself to some canned Beets. The whole Beets are so hard to clean up after!

Wednesdays

Wednesday might just be a good mid-week catch-up day after all... My strategy with these weekly chores has been that when social plans fall on an evening I've dedicated to a particular chore, I'd push every chore forward one day and catch up on the weekend. What I'm finding is that Wednesday is a nice opportunity to keep social plans during the early part of the week from disrupting the entire week's schedule. My only weekly chore on Wednesday evenings is "light" marketing - a brief stop on the way home from work at one of the smaller groceries where I buy organic foods - so I certainly have some additional free time later in the evening.

Case in point: this week. Several days ago, I lost my wallet and the Good Samaritan who picked it up decided not to return it or dispose of it, but rather to start using my debit card. (Thanks, creep.) Fortunately, I noticed it was missing very quickly and stopped the bleeding. Well, now I'm a woman without an identity. I've had to replace everything from my bank accounts and driver's license to my insurance cards and library card. I'm far from finished, but that's the reason I've been a bit upside down this week. I've missed breakfast the last two days because I was busy making phone calls. Last night, my sister needed some last-minute help with the babies, so the ironing got left behind. It's been a bit frantic, but it's nice to know that I still have plenty of time to do the ironing tonight and everything will be back on schedule again...

Wednesdays were a hodgepodge kinda day according to America's Housekeeping Book (1945), too. A day for "specific jobs such as silver polishing, shopping, sewing or something to be carried on throughout the day." I guess that's a 1940s update on the traditional saying: "mend on Wednesday."

Have I mentioned how much I enjoy my new centerpiece? Since studying up on vintage table settings for the kitchen, I realized the centerpiece you most frequently see in advertisements and in photos is a bowl of fruit. Practical, colorful, and pretty (as long as your bananas aren't overripe). Since I started making these vintage breakfasts, I've been keeping more fresh fruit about the house than ever before - grapefruit, oranges, lemons, bananas, apples - so I resurrected a small blue footed cake-plate that'd been gathering dust at the back of a cupboard and made it a fruit plate. It's perfect! Just the size for my kitchen table, and it looks a little different every day of the week. Living art.



Another of my breakfast-table discoveries has been if you dress up a bowl of corn-meal mush with a dab of margarine and a pinch or two of brown sugar, it takes like caramel corn. Yum!

What I've also discovered is that my "cooking" habits over the last several years have left me with a serious case of leftover-phobia. I can make something perfectly good to eat, like the shepherd's pie on Sunday evening, and end up with five servings left over. One day later, I'm craving something different for dinner. Okay, everybody needs a change of pace... Two days later, I start making something else and remember the pie when it's too late... Three days later, I'm starting to get icked out at the thought of eating it. It's probably starting to spoil by now, right? Here's some more perfectly good food gone to waste because I've gotten out of the habit of eating leftovers. This is something I have got to correct.

Stood Up

Sixty years ago, women probably spent more time with their ranges than they did with any other appliance in the home. They wrested a meal from these appliances three times a day. Got right down inside the oven in order to scrub it clean and scoured the drip pans 'til they shone. They struggled to master burners and ovens that must have seemed fairweather friends so much of the time. Even women with the most modern of homes would have remembered their mothers and grandmothers gauging the heat of their ovens "by hand." Heating water for laundry on the range. Perhaps even heating a portion of the home itself with the range. We might not err in calling the range a housewife's Gal Friday when it came to keeping house - the one appliance she could not - traditionally - have done without.

This "relationship" was beginning to ebb by World War II as electricity began to power the work of so many other appliances. Toasters and crockpots and electric coffeemakers broke things up, taking on some of the work once done solely by the range and stealing the housewife's affections. The barbeque grill of the '50s took on even more of that work. Then toaster ovens came along. And - in the '80s - the microwave. Our ranges now sit wistfully by while we plug in our steamers and our George Foreman grills, waiting for that one chance they can prove their devotion - alas, only to be asked to heat some frozen French fries! (We're not even sure what to call them these days. Are they ovens? Are they stoves???) They must long for the days when every burner, every chamber was busy three times a day - when they were a vital partner in the housewife's fight to make a home...

While the authors of the manual provide instructions for two different kinds of refrigerators (automatic and ice), they deal with an even wider variety of ranges. Care of the gas range is described first - which leads me to believe it was the type most often found in American homes circa 1945. Next comes the electric range, the kerosene range, and - lastly - wood and coal ranges. My own range is an electric appliance, so here are some instructions I'll need to keep in mind when cleaning my kitchen:

ELECTRIC RANGES

Daily:

Wipe up any spilled food before it dries.

Wipe the surface and drip tray with a damp cloth.

If the oven is used let it cool off and then clean off any spatterings with mild scouring powder and fine steel wool. Charred material can be removed with a brush or spatula.

In some models the oven heating element can be removed while the oven is being cleaned.

Caution:

Never wash enamelled surfaces when they are hot, or the finish may craze and crack.

Occasional:

If food boils over or spills on the top stove unit it can be burned off. If these units are the open type, with exposed coils, turn the heat high until the food is burned off. Let the unit cool, then blow out the charred particles. (The flat tool attachment of your vacuum cleaner makes a quick job of this.) Never brush or poke this type of unit.

Keep the metal ring which surrounds the element clean and shining. A cloth wrung out of soapsuds will usually do the job. Rinse with a cloth wrung out of clear water. If food is stuck or burned on use a little mild scouring powder or fine steel wool to remove it.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

This evening's 1945 dinner menu was fairly regrettable. Though I can't say it wasn't a learning experience.

Pie of Carrots, Potatoes, Peas, Potato Crust
Cucumber, Lettuce Salad
French Dressing
Bread Pudding
Lemon Sauce

The Good
Okay, the pie turned out pretty good. My nod to commercially prepared foods was in the canned peas I used in the pie. It was basically a vegetarian version of a shepherd's pie. Instead of flavoring the white sauce for the filling with Worcestershire sauce, I used an herb seasoning salt - and the pie smelled so good! Tasted yummy, too. You know what's funny about the recipe for the Mashed Potatoes that topped this dish? They're seasoned with salt and white pepper. And I think the only reason it's not black pepper is esthetic. That they wanted the Mashed Potatoes to be as pure in color as possible.

My cookbook contained a recipe for a Cucumber Salad and a Tomato, Lettuce Salad, so I combined the two to make a Cucumber, Lettuce Salad. 1940s tastebuds leaned toward salt, so the sliced cucumber was salted and refrigerated before being served on a bed of iceberg lettuce. I prefer my cucumber straight up, but I think that a preference for that fresh, veggie taste is probably a more modern sensibility. '40s cooks tended to really mix things up when it comes to their produce.

The Bad
I think I've only eaten Bread Pudding once before and it was very good. A little moist for my taste, but nice, big cubes of bread with cherries and cinnamon. My mom may even have added nuts. My Bread Pudding? Not so delicious. The recipe called for bread crumbs rather than cubed bread, so I ended up with more of a very thick cake batter. The Pudding was flavored with vanilla, nutmeg, and raisins. When I first read through the recipe, it mentioned setting the baking pan in a pan of hot water and baking the whole affair in a moderate oven. Sounds like steaming, right? I jumped at the chance to do some steaming again, but I think the author of the cookbook actually meant that I should bake the Pudding in a steamy oven. In any event, it was far from finished after an hour in the steamer. I popped it in the oven, but I'd honestly forgotten just how moist a Bread Pudding is supposed to be, so it was two hours later before I decided the Pudding was never going to be dry in the center... Blech! It was tough and rubbery on the outside, mushy on the inside, and the raisins and nutmeg - they're an acquired taste. A very vintage taste, I suppose.

The Ugly
My Lemon Sauce was pure, unmitigated disaster. I've never used a double boiler - never even owned a double boiler - but a larger saucepan set on top of a smaller saucepan did a decent job. I should give the recipe the props it deserves. It looked like it might have been a nice sauce. Unfortunately, I started it in my only remaining pot with that old "non-stick" coating. You know... the kind where the black coating eventually flakes off into your food. (All my other pots and pans are stainless steel.) The recipe instructed me to beat the butter into the sauce and - I could kick myself! - but I reached right for the electric beater I'd taken out for the mashed potato topping on my pie and hadn't used. I soooooooooo should've used a whisk. My lovely Lemon Sauce ended up with all these little black specks floating about in it! Completely inedible.

Time to do a little decluttering of the cookware cabinet.

Bins and Boxes

Both my vintage housekeeping manuals are in agreement. Once a week, the housewife should:

Clean, scald and sun vegetable bins, bread and cake boxes.

At first, I thought they were referring to the vegetable crispers in my refrigerator. But they're not. Though vintage refrigerators also contained a bin for vegetables, the authors of America's Housekeeping Book (1945) recommend that the ideal kitchen include ventilated vegetable bins located near the sink. If I had a scanner, I'd scan the illustration for you - but I don't, so I'll try to describe them. Imagine a sink with a double basin. Under the left basin, is a slim door which opens to reveal two metal drawers with mesh sides that slide out on rollers. I wonder what kinds of vegetables would be stored in bins like these... Were these a holdout from the days when iceboxes didn't have storage space for any but the most perishable of vegetables?

I don't have one myself, but I've seen plenty of bread boxes. Usually the type with the rolling or flip-up top. I've taken to freezing the bread I buy so that it won't go stale before I eat more than a few pieces, but I can certainly see how handy a bread box would have been to a livelier household where all meals were made at home. Here are a couple of darling enamel-coated bread boxes:





I don't think I've ever seen a "cake box," though. Plenty of covered cake trays and cake stands. Do you think that's the kind of thing the manuals are referring to or something completely different? Now, I grew up with a mom at home and a cookie jar always stocked with homemade treats, but even I can't fathom having such a supply of cakes that you needed to keep a separate container for 'em on the countertop at all times! Maybe - like the vegetable bins under the sink - these were found primarily in older homes or rural homes where iceboxes or small refrigerators just didn't have the space to store cakes and other baked goods.

I finished cleaning my kitchen today, so it's full steam ahead for another of my 1945 dinner menus tomorrow night. Here's the plan:

Pie with Carrots, Potatoes, Peas, Potato Crust
Cucumber, Lettuce Salad
Bread Pudding
Lemon Sauce

Fine Tuning

Has it been a week already? It seems like just yesterday I was recovering from all those sore kitchen-cleaning muscles, and now I've got sore muscles and pruny fingertips all over again... I had planned on starting a new weekly mission today, but because this kitchen thing is still quite shaky - I'm giving it a second whirl tonight - I think I'll wait on the new mission for another week. The kitchen is about 2/3 of the way done and that's taken me 1 3/4 hours. Last week, the same amount of work took me about 2 hours. So I'm gaining! I've got more work to do, but it's getting late and I still have some evening chores, so I'll finish the kitchen tomorrow morning.

I'm not quite convinced that the refrigerator really needs a thorough cleaning every week, but I'm trying to stay open to the idea and see if it has any surprises for me. It really is useful to take this opportunity once a week to empty the fridge of leftovers that are past their prime, produce that needs to go, and other items that may have expired. This Friday, I wiped down the exterior as well as the interior and was pretty skeeved to find how dirty the side of the fridge had become. It's one of those surfaces I walk by several dozen times a day and had never really noticed how much it needed cleaning! The refrigerator is shining now, along with the range.

Speaking of the range, did you know some of these appliances come with a little metal thingie under the stovetop which can hold it up as you clean underneath? Just like popping up the hood of a car! I had no idea it was there - but it comes in very handy. So did the steel wool I picked up last weekend to clean the drip pans this time. They're not spotless yet, but much shinier than last time 'round.

You know, it occurs to me that housewives who cleaned the outsides of their refrigerators on a weekly basis would probably find it easier not to keep any magnets or other odds and ends stuck all over it. I've always thought refrigerators with a little decor, shall we say, made a kitchen feel more cozy, but it sure takes a heck of a lot of time to remove all that decor in order to clean what's behind it! Let's just say some of that decor didn't make the cut this week.

Adoration

Have I mentioned lately how much I adore ironed - and ironing - sheets?

It's so satisfying to smooth away those wrinkles. To smell the scent of lily of the valley rising from your hot sheets all because you tucked them away in the linen closet last time with a floral sachet. To see a nice, neat stack of sharply creased sheets and pillowcases ready to be put away until the next time you use them on the bed.

DISCLAIMER: I still haven't gotten the trick of ironing fitted sheets. They're still a fairly wrinkly mess by the time I put them away. (My linen closet shrieks when it sees 'em!) Maybe it's time to return to using nothing but flat sheets again. Maybe these new-fangled fitted sheets aren't worth it...

Taking Stock

I’m working away at the week’s ironing this evening - but I’ve got a few moments while my iron heats up from the “Nylon” setting to the “Polyester” setting, so I thought I’d share a few tips from the manual on cleaning refrigerators.

The authors of America’s Housekeeping Book (1945) acknowledged that many American kitchens still contained "ice refrigerators" and wrote up lots of instructions - completely mysterious to me - for removing accumulated "slime" from the drain pipe and refreshening the ice supply with an occasional bath of baking soda. (Boy, am I glad not to have to worry about slime in my kitchen!) Here is some welcome advice on caring for "automatic" refrigerators:

Daily:
Wipe up any spilled food at once.

Wipe top of refrigerator with a cloth wrung out in soap water. Rinse with a cloth wrung out in clear water. Dry.

Remove any fingerprints around the handle of the door with mild soap and water. Rinse and dry as above.

Weekly:
(This cleaning is usually done after defrosting. Unless your refrigerator is equipped with an automatic defrosting device, it should be defrosted whenever the accumulation of frost is ¼-inch thick.)

Empty the pan under the freezing unit, wash in warm suds, rinse thoroughly and dry. Remove freezing trays, empty and wash in hot soapsuds. Rinse with scalding water and dry. Remove racks or shelves and wash in the same way.

Remove racks or shelves and wash them in hot soapsuds. Rinse with scalding water and dry thoroughly.

Wash interior with a cloth wrung out of cool water in which borax or baking soda has been dissolved. (1 tablespoon of borax or soda to 1 pint water.)

Wash exterior with mild soapsuds. Rinse with a cloth wrung out of clean water, dry thoroughly.

Follow the manufacturer's directions for oiling the motor at regular intervals. (With most new models no oiling is necessary.)

This last Saturday morning was the first time I'd cleaned my refrigerator since the middle of last summer --- and then only because I was expecting houseguests. Though cleaning it every week still sounds a bit excessive to me, it's definitely a little easier when you empty all the food at once as well as the racks and bins. Plus it's a great chance to face your scary leftovers and get rid of any expired foods you might have forgotten about. The fact that the manual suggests that the kitchen be cleaned the day before the housewife does the bulk of her marketing makes good sense, too. She'd be able to check on the freshness of whatever produce she might still have on hand. And if she's running low on something she keeps in the fridge, here's her chance to take stock and add it to the grocery list!

Have any of you ever cleaned with borax? I've never used it before. Is it safe? Is it useful in cleaning other items?

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!

What a Fabulous Surprise!

What a treat to learn this morning that Weenie_Elise had given me the "Your Blog is Fabulous" award! Especially since I've so enjoyed reading her own blog, Ode to Mrs. Beeton: Fun and Frivolity from Housewifery's Greatest Patroness. I'm still new to this whole blogging thing, so I hope I'll follow the rules correctly:

1. You must pass it on to 5 other Fabulous bloggers in a post.
2. You must include the person who gave the award to you and a link back to their blog.
3. You must list 5 of your Fabulous Addictions in the post.
4. You must copy and post these rules in the post.

I have lots of Fabulous Addictions, so these are just a sampling:

1. Playing with my darling nieces. Seeing the light in their eyes and hearing the sound of their laughter... They make me feel like a little girl all over again!

2. Vintage radio programs - from music to drama to classic comedies like Fibber McGee and Molly and The Great Gildersleeve. What a treat to get a glimpse of my grandparents' world through these programs.

3. Playing the piano. I don't own one right now, so I'll take my chances anytime, anywhere. I can storm out all my passions and leave the keyboard relaxed and refreshed.

4. Pad Thai with Vegetables and Tofu. Yum-a-licious!

5. New England. It took moving away to realize that I'm a New Englander down to the marrow of my bones. I miss the woods, I miss the trees, I miss the lakes and rivers and streams, I miss the brick factories with their hundreds upon hundreds of windows, I miss the beach. What I wouldn't give to be able to magically transport my nieces (see Fabulous Addiction #1) back there to live. Oh, I suppose their parents can come along, too. :)

So I'm also allowed to bestow this fabulous suprise on five other people. It's like Christmas in March!

from laura ingalls wilder to cyberbessie... for scouring the Little House books with a historian's eye.

Vintage123... for sharing the quirky, wonderful goodness of vintage ads.

Roxanne at The Haven of Home... for making me look at my pantry with a whole new perspective.

Things Your Grandmother Knew... for reviving the home economics that can add so much to our homes in 2009.

And last, but certainly not least:

Stuff White People Like... for regularly making me laugh 'til I cry.

Dressing with a Twist

While reading up on kitchen cleaning during the last few days, I came across a bit of advice in the manual that I hadn't seen before. The authors of America's Housekeeping Book (1945) recommend that the housewife complete all possible preparations for lunch and dinner before giving the kitchen its daily cleaning. In other words, after giving each of the other rooms its daily tidying - but before cleaning the kitchen - she "put away all cleaning equipment except that needed for kitchen, and carry out any necessary food preparation for lunch or dinner." That way, she has as little to clean up as possible after lunch and dinner. Anything that can be prepared beforehand and tucked away in the oven or refrigerator can be cleaned up after during this mid-morning cleaning. Once the kitchen is tidy, she sets to work on whatever her weekly chore for the day might be - wash, ironing, etc.

That's the plan, anyway. I'm sure much of this work was kind of staggered, especially the laundry - as you needed to get it out on the line as early in the day as possible. And if you were going to be giving the bathroom, for instance, its weekly cleaning on Thursdays, you might skip giving it a daily once-over that particular day since you'd be spending plenty of time in the bathroom later on.

My vintage dinner menu for this evening contains a couple items I can make beforehand and refrigerate. So in the spirit of making those last few minutes before my meal as easy as possible, I'm going to set to work on them this morning. As a dressing for my salad, I've chosen a Chiffonade Dressing - a variation on the basic French Dressing recipe which looks like it might be a good match for my rather plain Tossed Greens Salad. (I haven't yet figured out where this dressing recipe gets its name. Any ideas?) The French Dressing recipe is included in the following post:

http://destination1940.blogspot.com/2009/03/of-cabbages-and-kings.html

Here's the twist for this evening's dinner. I'm going to try and cut this recipe in eighths so I don't end up with too many leftovers:

*****

CHIFFONADE

Add 2 tablespoons each of chopped green pepper, olives, parsley, pimiento and 1 hard-cooked egg, chopped. Add chopped red peppers and cooked beets, if desired.

*****

The other dish I can prepare in advance is the Chocolate Pudding. My cookbook includes recipes for a Steamed Chocolate Pudding and a Molded Chocolate Pudding, but nowhere does it mention a recipe for a plain and simple Chocolate Pudding - as the dessert's described in the menu. Since the menus are supposed to be budget-conscious, I'm going to guess that the author intended for her readers to purchase a boxed chocolate pudding mix. Not the instant kind - I'm not sure they were around in the '40s. The kind which still needs to be cooked then refrigerated.

Too Tired for Titles

My, oh-me, oh-my... What a day! I spent in total about three hours working on my kitchen. Most of it this morning - then I cut out at noon as I had some place to be - then I was back to work this evening to finish the job. Thus far, cleaning the kitchen has easily been the most physically demanding chore. I took a couple breaks to drink some water and, once, to lay down on my bed and close my eyes for a few minutes.

The basic layout of the routine is organized around the three major appliances. First, the refrigerator. Second, the range. Third, the sink. Which makes sense - as you use the sink so much in cleaning things - from the crisper bins and racks in the refrigerator to the drip trays on the range. By the time you're finished cleaning everything else, the sink gets a final scrub and polish and you're finished. I'm actually not quite finished. My garbage can is airing dry outdoors on my landing. I'll bring it in in a few hours and throw a clean bag inside.

What was interesting was how few cleansers I needed in a room that gets as dirty as the kitchen. Per the manual, I used baking soda dissolved in cool water to clean out the inside of the refrigerator. Scouring powder to clean the drip trays. And lots of hot water, scalding water, and soapsuds. The only tools I needed: a sponge, a few clean dish towels (I put these in the wash as they got soiled), and a nylon scrubby thing. Some steel wool would have done a better job on the drip trays, though, so I picked up a box of those at the grocery store for next week. You really can do an amazing job with just a very few simple tools and cleansers. The disinfectant habit is so ingrained in me that it was tough not to use some of the stronger cleansers I had on hand. For a finishing touch, I guess. We've been so bombarded with ads promoting antibacterial cleansers and disinfectant wipes that it's tough to figure out whether these things are truly important in housekeeping or not. The only time the manual recommends using a disinfectant is occasionally in cleaning the garbage can.

Although I didn't even notice when I typed up the list of chores for the kitchen, there are several major items missing! The floor, for one. Which is strange, as the manual mentions floor care for every other room in the house. They do mention in a chapter on "Floors" that the "kitchen floors may need to be damp-mopped every day" and "may require washing once a week or oftener." They just leave this item out of the daily and weekly routine entirely. The authors of the manual never mention cleaning up smaller appliances. And they neglect entirely any care needed to a breakfast nook or dining alcove in the kitchen. These kinds of things are certainly covered in other chapters, it's just odd that they are aren't mentioned specifically in daily or weekly chores for the kitchen. The authors are usually so detailed!

I'm so tired I can't even think in a straight line, so I'll leave you with my 1945 dinner menu for tomorrow evening and call it a night:

Whipped Potatoes
Buttered Beets
Tossed Greens Salad
Chocolate Pudding

Week Seventeen: The Mission

Today, the bedroom. Tomorrow, the world!

Or at least the kitchen.

Just typing up this week's mission makes me cringe. For a 1940s housewife, the kitchen was a room that had to be cleaned several times a day. Every time a meal was finished, there were dishes that needed to be scraped, rinsed, washed, and dried (or stacked for washing later). There were foods that needed to be put away, refuse for the garbage can. Once a day - preferably about mid-morning, just after giving each of the other rooms in the house their daily once-over - the authors of America's Housekeeping Book (1945) recommended that the housewife give the kitchen its daily cleaning and wash the breakfast dishes. Once a week, ideally "the day before you do the bulk of your weekly food marketing," the kitchen should get its weekly cleaning.

For any of you who've just started reading my blog, I have a full-time job outside the home, so I don't have the time to give every room of my apartment more than a little daily maintenance. Instead, I'm trying to blend most of the daily chores for each room with the weekly chores - so each room gets some intensive attention once a week. That's my plan for the kitchen, too. Obviously, it still needs to get cleaned up after meals, but there are plenty of other tasks I can reserve for the weekly cleaning.

Saturday is the day I plan on doing the bulk of my weekly food marketing, so I'm going to dedicate Friday evenings to the kitchen. (If I do happen to have some social plans on a Friday night, I'll move that cleaning forward to Saturday morning. Everything's pushed forward one day this week as I had plans last night.) The romance! I feel a bit like a wife scheduling dates with a husband she hasn't felt very romantic with lately. My kitchen is now my Friday night date --- and deservedly so. I've paid it very little attention over the years. The only time it really gets cleaned up is if I'm expecting guests or Bob, the apartment maintenance guy.

So here it is. My mission for Week Seventeen. It's a doozy - and I'm properly terrified.

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

2. Rinse and stack dishes, pots and pans.

3. Check and reorganize foods; put away all foods except those belonging in refrigerator. Remove all foods from refrigerator. Wash interior of refrigerator. Return food to refrigerator.

4. Collect all refuse and put in garbage can.

5. Wipe off top of refrigerator.

6. Wash dishes. Dry and put away, if not room to rinse with hot water and leave to dry.

7. Wipe off surface of range. Clean spilled food from drip pan or oven. Clean range thoroughly.

8. Clean, scald and sun vegetable bins, bread and cake boxes.

9. Clean out and wash 1 cupboard or several drawers in rotation weekly.

10. Dust radiator or register.

11. Dust lighting fixtures. Dust window shades or Venetian blinds. Wash wall behind sink, stove and work surfaces, if washable. Wash work surfaces. Wash exterior of cabinet work and shelving to remove fingermarks.

12. Take out garbage. Clean garbage container thoroughly. Put clean lining in garbage can.

13. Clean metal fixtures, soap dish, sink strainer, dish drainer, and sink. Wash, rinse and scald dishcloth or mop or send to laundry; hang outdoors if possible.

14. Collect soiled towels; wash. Hang fresh towels.

Turning a Bedroom into a Guest Room

This week is all about plugging along… After two weeks of illness, I’ve got to push and prod myself every step of the way to get these chores done. That said, I’m starting to feel a bit of the ol’ rhythm when it comes to my morning and evening routines. My ironing got done yesterday - all except for a blouse I forgot about that had been drying in the bathroom - and I did a little marketing this evening. My aunt is in town for a conference, and my sister and I will be making dinner for her tomorrow night. At my sister’s house, thank goodness! I may have made some progress in housekeeping since November, but my home is still far from ready to do any entertaining. At any rate, that means I’ll need to push my weekly bedroom cleaning forward to Friday evening and my new mission to Saturday morning.

It’s been a while now since I cleaned my bedroom, and I’m actually looking forward to putting it back to rights. Since I don’t have all that much in the way of news this evening, I thought I’d share this wonderful description of how the ideal guest room should be furnished from Lily Haxworth Wallace’s New American Etiquette (1941). I think we all deserve to feel as good as we’d try to make a guest feel in our homes. How do your bedrooms measure up to the ideal guest room?

Bedrooms should be liberally equipped with lights. The central bulb should operate from a switch that can easily be reached on entering the room. There should be a bed light, two, if the room has twin beds. A lamp should be above the sofa or chaise longue for reading. The bed and sofa lights should operate on individual switches.

The room should have shutters and shades so that every bit of the early morning sun can be kept out of the room if one likes to sleep late in complete darkness.

The bed or beds should be comfortable and should be well equipped with sheets, blankets (plenty of them), and a quilt. There should be two pillows, one hard and the other soft. There should be a bed light over each bed to satisfy those who like to read themselves to sleep.

Any bells for calling servants should be placed so that they can be sounded without getting out of bed.

There should always be a bedside table on top of which there should be an accurate alarm clock. The table should also hold a small tray with a glass and spoon, a thermos bottle of cold water, and a hot-water bottle or electric pad. A flashlight or candle should be beside the bed for service in the event of a breakdown in the house lighting supply.

The closet should not be the storage space for miscellaneous articles. It should have sufficient shelves and hangers for all the clothes it will hold. There should be hat stands for the women and trouser hangers for the men. Shoe trees should be amply supplied. If riding is a practice, there should be a bootjack.

There should be at least one lounging chair in the room and a sofa with comfortable cushions. They should be so placed that the light from the window is right for reading. A lamp should be near by for night reading.

A dressing table should be so placed that it receives satisfactory light from the window during the day and should have lights properly arranged for use after dark.

In the days of midsummer an electric fan is a welcome addition to the equipment of a hot room.

Mirrors should be in as many places as possible. There should be at least one of full length and the others should be placed so that they are at the proper height and receive good light.

A writing desk should be equipped with note paper, envelopes, ink, pens, pencils, stamps, blotters, and a calendar. Beside it there should be a waste basket.

Battle Royal

It was a Battle Royal this morning when my alarm went off at 4:30 and I opened one eye to hear the sounds of rain outside. The laundromat has rarely seemed so far away. I leapt from the bed to shut off the alarm - re-setting it in desperation to 6:00. "To heck with the wash!" I thought to myself. "I'm sure there's something I can wear..." But some inner housekeeper kept debating the issue and wouldn't let me go back to sleep. I shrugged off the covers at 4:35, cursing under my breath, and got myself out of bed to get the laundry downstairs. Whew! A mighty close call.

Rainy Mondays must have made many a '40s housewife heave a mighty sigh. Did they give up and do the laundry the following day - hoping for sun? Did the power of the routine hold 'em to it as they scurried to find a way to hang all their wet laundry indoors?

Well, the laundry got done on this rainy morning in 2009 and I treated myself to a little something "new" for breakfast. Prepared Cereal was on the menu this morning, and Grape-Nuts fit the bill nicely. Grape-Nuts and Grape-Nuts Flakes have been around since long before the 1940s. (A fresh, local pink grapefruit made the perfect fruit course.)

I've been looking about for a whole wheat cereal from the '40s that I might be able to serve hot. Something that might be period appropriate when Cooked Whole-wheat Cereal pops up on the breakfast menu. Grape-Nuts is whole-wheat - well, at least partially. It's part barley, too. And I vaguely remember that they used to advertise a Grape Nuts Hot recipe on the back of the box. Do any of you remember the directions?

Commercially Prepared Foods

So here's the plan for the week ahead... I've made it through the last two - going on three - days with all my chores intact. If I can get through the next three to four days and am able to keep up with everything I was doing before I got sick, I'm going to go ahead and add a new mission to my routine at the end of the week. I've just got to talk myself through each day and focus very hard on what needs to be done each morning or evening and what I need in order to get started the following day. This evening? I've got laundry to sort in preparation for tomorrow's wash and, of course, my usual evening chores.

As I was writing about dinner last night, I started thinking about the balance between prepared foods and whole foods which made up a 1940s pantry. No mistake, commercially prepared foods were out there and becoming cheaper all the time. And I don't want to make my meal preparations take any longer than necessary if I'm making things from scratch that no busy housewife would have been making herself by the '40s. The only trick is deciding which items were commonly being purchased instead of prepared at home. Here are some of the foods I'm still puzzling over:

Juice
Orange juice still seems to have been served fresh squeezed, while grapefruit, apple, prune, tomato and other juices were usually purchased canned or bottled. Orange juice is the only time juice appears on my 1945 menus as "Chilled," so it's as if they're prompting readers to squeeze this one first thing in the morning and chill it in the refrigerator until breakfast time.

Bread
Sandwich bread was certainly available from grocers, though there was probably still a smaller group of housewives who still baked their own bread. Quick breads were still made at home. Rolls? Probably made at home unless you lived in the city where there were lots of bakeries. People living in small towns and rural areas certainly made their own rolls. Middle to upper class folks in larger towns? I'm not so sure.

Salad Dressings
Hmmm... I have never seen any ads for prepared salad dressings in the '40s, but I suspect there were a very few dressings out there - probably not available though in your typical suburban or small town grocery. In one of the new supermarkets in the city? Perhaps. Maybe even by mail order. Here's the puzzler: check out this photo from the early '40s. That totally looks like a bottle of prepared salad dressing!



Preserves and Pickles
Another fine line here. I've seen lots of ads for grape jelly, orange marmalade, and grapelade. Some of the basic items, like strawberry jam and apple jelly, were probably starting to become available. Anything fancier? I'd guess you either bought it from a speciality supplier or made it yourself. Canning and making preserves and pickles was still a popular activity anywhere people had enough land for gardens.

Cookies
Totally available, but I'd venture to say that most families ate homemade cookies.

Crackers
No longer made at home.

Cakes
I can remember from reading a "biography" of Betty Crocker that cake mixes took a while to catch on. It wasn't considered very feminine to use a shortcut like this one if you were going to go to the trouble to make a cake. I'd venture to say that almost every housewife made her cakes from scratch.

Soup
Canned soups seem to have been considered pretty gourmet during the '40s, especially tomato and cream of mushroom. I'm guessing that working class families and rural families might have stuck to homemade soups, but it wouldn't be long before they could afford or had access to canned soups as well.

What do you think? Can you think of any other food items where commercially prepared substitutes were becoming available, but may or may not yet have become "acceptable" in middle class households? There are probably a zillion things that haven't even occurred to me!

Potatoes, Parsley, and Pears

What a night!

Potatoes Persillade (started out as Parsley Buttered Potatoes)

Canned Green Beans

Pear and Grape Salad

Corn-meal Muffins

Dinner made it to the table only about five minutes late this evening, but only because I realized after the last time that I grossly underestimate the time it takes to prep and cook things. I tried to wash things up as I went along - which works out great until the last ten minutes or so - and even had a chance to set the table this time. When I sat down earlier this afternoon to plan my preparations, I felt a bit like a military tactician plotting out the action minute-by-minute.

D-60: Wash and peel potatoes.

D-50: Start heating pot of potatoes in cold water.

D-25: Prepare corn-meal muffin batter.

D-20: Muffins in oven.

D-15: Begin preparing salad.

D-10: Start heating green beans.

D-5: Add potatoes to saucepan with melted margarine. Roll to coat with lemon juice and parsley.

Surprisingly enough, I pulled it off, and it all came together at just about the right time. Things still get pretty hairy right there at the end, though. I guess someday I'll be a wise, old housewife and a home-cooked dinner will be a piece of cake!

The Parsley Buttered Potatoes should be made with smallish potatoes. Well, small enough potatoes so that you can boil them in 40 minutes without having to cut them in pieces. The whole potatoes are easier to roll about in a saucepan to coat with garnishes. There was actually a non-budget conscious version of this recipe inside my cookbook called Potatoes Persillade. The only difference: fresh lemon juice. I happened to have a lemon in the house, so added a twist or two.

How can you go wrong with Canned Green Beans? I don't have a Corn Sticks pan, so I decided to make half a batch of Corn-meal Muffins instead. I tried to avert Next Day "Too Dry to Eat" Syndrome by freezing the leftovers right away, but check out these tips I found in a November 1945 issue of Better Homes and Gardens for just that problem. (I guess it's always been an issue for housewives!)

Second-Day Treats

Corn bread leftovers make elegant stuffing seasoned with celery and onion... Or take your choice of sage or thyme.

To serve leftover corn sticks, slice sticks in half, toast under the broiler.

Split corn bread squares, cut diagonally to make triangles, toast, and use under creamed foods.

I've saved the best for last: Pear and Grape Salad. My mouth dropped when I read the recipe for this dish the other night and I've been trying to imagine how I'd pull it off ever since:

*****

PEAR-GRAPE SALAD

Frost the curved surface of one-half pear with cream cheese, stud with one-half grapes and garnish with chicory and watercress, or other attractive greens.

*****

"How on earth would cream cheese stick to a pear?" I wondered. Well, it stuck. And the pear didn't have to be frosted all that prettily as the grape halves cover the surface anyway. I chose red seedless grapes and an Anjou pear. Couldn't find any chicory or watercress at the supermarket, so opted for a spring mix of baby greens and herbs instead. This made an absolutely darling salad! It looked like a giant raspberry resting on a bed of greens. And it was very easy to make - especially once I figured out that my melon baller came in handy for cleaning the core out of the pear. If I were to make this again, I'd definitely choose an overripe pear, so it's easy to cut through when you're trying to eat it, and 1/4 of a pear is actually enough for each person. If you were serving this to a family, you could lay the pear halves on a plate at the center of the table, then cut each one in half again before serving it to each person.

The taste was interesting. Sweet, creamy, and bitter --- but it dressed up the table so nicely. So decorative for a weekday family dinner! It made me think how the daily dinner truly was the '40s housewife's final "presentation" for the day. Her husband and children were gathered around the table for the first time since breakfast. This was her chance to show the family all the good she'd been able to do that day. An opportunity to show off her freshly laundered and ironed linens, her sparkling dishes, and food prepared even when the pantry contents were slim and she'd met shortages at the grocery. To share pickles, preserves, and canned goods prepared last summer.

Salad Architecture

When I turned to my American Woman's Cook Book (1945) for a recipe for the Pear and Grape Salad found on my dinner menu for Saturday evening, I was kind of excited to realize that it wasn't a molded gelatin salad (more about that in another post). Well, I kept leafing through the Salads section and laughed out loud at some of the recipes. The food prepared for other courses may sometimes have been kind of bland, but the salads - the salads are completely different!

It's as if 1940s housewives reserved all their creative cookery for this single dish... They put such imagination and artistry into their salads. What we've known - at least while I was growing up in the '70s and '80s - as the typical dinner salad (iceberg lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, celery, and radishes) had not yet been standardized. The road was still wide open and women came up with some incredibly creative - and sometimes bizarre - combinations for the salad bowl. Fruit was still considered just as suitable for salads as were vegetables. Sometimes a cold cooked vegetable was added, sometimes the salad was molded with gelatin. Salads were often served on a bed of greens or sometimes in a tomato with the insides scooped out (or some other kind of edible "cup"). They were also served on plates instead of bowls.

Salads were always assembled with an eye towards geometry. The esthetic we embrace when it comes to salads today is kind of raggedy and rustic. Sixty years ago, it was all about architecture. The Washington Salad recipe in my cookbook takes this quite literally, instructing the reader to fashion a little log cabin out of "cheese straws" and fill it with a mixture of celery, artichoke hearts, cherries, and grapefruit pulp - topped it with mayonnaise. Tasty? I have no idea, but you gotta give the author points for creativity.

The only rule of thumb seems to be that a salad be served cold - usually with a hearty scoop of mayonnaise! They didn't seem particularly interested, though, in adding croutons, nuts, or cheese - the fatty goodies we like to add - to their salads.

My impression is that this changed over the course of the '40s. The imaginative salads were starting to give way in the later part of the decade to your typical dinner salad. By the '50s, fruit was usually relegated to the dessert course and prepared salad dressings were taking the place of mayonnaise. I think we're coming full circle, though. Our early 21st-century salads are becoming more creative again.



Why do you suppose salads became less imaginative in postwar America?

Back to the Bargaining Table

Jitterbug is getting her groove back, but it's taking some time. Maybe it wouldn't be so hard if I hadn't been hit with a one-two punch. If I had gotten sick without having been so overtired from taking care of my niece. Well, life deals you a few knocks once in awhile, and I'm sure I can put this behind me. What can I say? My bad habits when it comes to housekeeping took years and years to put on - and it's only been a few months since I started trying to turn it around.

Even as we speak, I'm bargaining with myself: "I can blog for five minutes, but I have to straighten up my living room afterward." "I can check out all my favorite blogs after that, but I have to clean up the pots soaking in my sink." A messy frump of a devil lounges about on one shoulder while a serene, aproned housewife stands on my other shoulder waving her finger at me. (Of course it doesn't help that this has been a great week for reality TV... Between the shocking finale of The Bachelor and wild card week on American Idol, I've been very - um - busy.)

On the upside, my morning routine is back in place and I actually enjoyed my breakfast today for the first time in a couple weeks. I've been vetching about it, but I'm getting that evening routine done most of the time now, too. I did my wash on Monday and some marketing this evening, but that's it for weekly chores. All in all, I'm doing much better than I was this time last week. And I've got a 1945 dinner on Saturday night to begin getting ready for. Here's the menu:

Parsley Buttered Potatoes
Canned Green Beans
Pear and Grape Salad
Corn Sticks

I love how fancy they make Canned Green Beans sound by capping it all like that... And how 'bout the Pear and Grape Salad? After the Celery Cabbage incident, I think I'll do some investigating before making a grocery list!

"Of cabbages--and kings--"

The time has come," the Walrus said,

"To talk of many things:

Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--

Of cabbages--and kings--"

Lewis Carroll, 1872

The Saturday before last, I made the first of my 1945 dinner menus. The ordeal took me two hours of what felt like non-stop work, but I'm sure it'll take a little less time and energy both as I get more comfortable in the kitchen. The only thing I'm really disappointed about is that I completely lost my appetite the next day because I was sick and the leftovers went uneaten:

Steamed Rice
Buttered Carrots
Celery Cabbage Salad
Steamed Molasses Pudding

Mistake No. 1: My cookbook didn't have a recipe for Celery Cabbage Salad, so - envisioning a blend of chopped celery and cabbage with some sort of dressing - I picked up a bag of celery hearts and a bag of pre-shredded cabbage (they didn't have any head cabbage at the store I was shopping at that evening). As the big day drew near, I decided to try looking about online for a recipe for Celery Cabbage Salad and (wouldn't you know it!) I found a page right away on a website called Retro Food:

http://retro-food.com/2007/03/16/celery-cabbage-salad/

The hostess over at Retro Food imagined the same dish I did when she came across references to Celery Cabbage Salad. What we both didn't know was that there's actually a type of cabbage called celery cabbage, also called Napa cabbage or Chinese cabbage. She was able to find a recipe for a salad using this type of cabbage in Meta Given's Modern Family Cook Book, first published in 1942. It turns out to be just a dish of "wheel-like slices" of the cabbage drizzled with French Dressing (like our modern day Italian dressing) or Thousand Island Dressing.

Well, I was able to use the celery up in other ways, but still had a bag of cabbage to contend with. I decided to compromise by serving up a dish of shredded cabbage with a homemade French Dressing on top. It was good. Zesty! I've never made dressing from scratch before. Happily, this is something you can make a few hours in advance then refrigerate and shake up just before serving. Here's the recipe. Be careful: it makes lots of dressing. I cut this one in eighths.

*****

FRENCH DRESSING

1 clove garlic (optional)

1 cup vinegar

2 teaspoons dry mustard

1 tablespoon sugar

1 tablespoon salt

1 teaspoon paprika

1/2 teaspoon pepper

2 cups salad oil

If using garlic, soak it in vinegar 1/2 hour before making the dressing. Mix dry ingredients together and place in a covered jar or bottle. Remove garlic from vinegar and add vinegar to dry ingredients. Pour on the oil slowly. Place in refrigerator until ready for use. Just before serving, shake vigorously for 2 minutes. Makes 3 cups dressing.

*****

The Buttered Carrots and Steamed Rice turned out really nicely. I tried to give this meal a little punch of health by making it brown basmati rice instead of white. Still, it was the first time I've ever made any rice that wasn't instant. The real thing takes a long time to be ready for the table! I've heard people rave about basmati rice and it's well deserved. It smells like buttered popcorn while you're cooking it - and tasted all buttery, too.

Mistake No. 2: I used way too big a mold for the Steamed Molasses Pudding. This was another instance where the cookbook which includes this dish on the menu doesn't actually have a recipe for it inside! (I can't figure that out.) I found lots of recipes online and chose one which was a favorite of somebody's granddad. The Pudding was good, but definitely not sweet. I bet this one was a wartime recipe. It called for a dark molasses and very little sugar. I think I'll try it next time with lighter molasses and additional sugar - oh, yes, and a smaller mold, too!

http://www.familycookbookproject.com/view_recipesite.asp?rid=557542&uid=6300&sid=14446

Whew! What a meal... I'm super glad that I was only cooking for an audience of one this time 'round. Especially when it wasn't ready for 30 minutes after the time I'd been planning it for. I tried to clean things up as I went along so that the kitchen wouldn't be a complete disaster by the time I served dinner. That's one of the downsides of not having a dining room. You can't leave the mess behind while you enjoy dinner in a calm, clean space.

Something I truly didn't expect was that I actually wanted to say grace. There was something unquanitifiably different about eating food that I'd worked so hard to buy and to prepare. I really wanted to take a minute and thank God for this meal. I usually feel like that if I'm eating with family, if it's the holidays - but on a regular, everyday, run-of-the-mill Saturday? Somethin' new. It was like I had a different relationship with this meal. It was harder fought, harder earned than something I'd taken out of plastic wrap and heated in the oven. All that said, though, I do recall waking up the next morning and groaning at the thought of having to cook breakfast. It's hard for me to imagine making homecooked meals for a family three times a day, seven days a week...