The Evening After

Well, I wouldn't call it the social event of the decade, but my parents cleaned their plates - my dad even asked for seconds - and we had some good laughs afterward as I showed them the cookbook I'd used and shared some of the recipes I spared them! Though I'd planned on serving a 1940s Easter menu, I decided at the last minute to serve up a medley of some of the surprisingly wonderful vintage recipes I've discovered in cooking dinner for myself over the past year. I guess you could say it was kind of like my annual report on vintage cookery.

Lima-Bean Casserole
Mashed Potato Balls
Beet Pickle Salad
Popovers
Honey Rice

Mashed Potato Balls are patties formed from cold mashed potatoes and a beaten egg yolk. Brown them in the oven with a dab of margarine on top. I added some seasoned salt to mine to give them a little kick. The Beet Pickle I used for the salad was a canned version purchased at the supermarket. (Aunt Nellie's is the brand. I like to think of her as my dear old Aunt Nellie who pickled the beets straight out of her Victory Garden last summer.) I sliced the beets and served them on a bed of lettuce with a tiny dollop of mayonnaise. Popovers are an old family favorite and the recipe in The American Woman's Home Cook Book (1945) doesn't disappoint. (Note: If you're using a modern popover pan, the batter only makes about six.)

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POPOVERS

1 cup sifted flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon melted shortening

Sift flour and salt together. Beat eggs and add milk, shortening and sifted dry ingredients. Beat until smooth with rotary beater. Fill greased muffin pans 1/2 full and bake in very hot oven (450 degrees F.) 20 minutes. Reduce temperature to moderate (350 degrees F.) and bake 15 minutes longer. Makes 8.

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Whew! It's been a long time since I had such a heavy meal so late in the day. My eating habits have changed so much over the last twelve months that it felt positively strange to wake up still feeling so not-hungry this morning. I guess I've gotten used to waking up with an empty tummy! I felt so full I couldn't face anything more than Toast for breakfast this morning. My sink is full, too. Full of dirty pans that needed a good soaking. My mission tonight is to finish cleaning up after the party.

Lessons learned? 1) I truly would have appreciated one of those vintage ranges with three or four different oven chambers. You can set each chamber at a different temperature, right? None of last night's recipes wanted to play together when it came to temperature. 2) My apartment is way too small to entertain more than one person at a time. And it's awful tough to serve dinner at the kitchen table when you have to ask one of your guest to stand up for a minute while you open the oven to check on your Honey Rice. (I'm thinking Dorothy Dix would not have approved.) Let's face it. Nobody should be seated right in front of the oven! Talk about a hot seat.

Catchup

I can't believe it's been three days since my latest vintage dinner and I haven't posted the results! Yesterday was kind of a tough day. I was running late in the morning and ended up having to dish my oatmeal and pineapple into a mug and eat it when I got to work. (Not the most relaxing breakfast I've ever had!) I'd forgotten about some lunch plans and needed to get my five walks for the week in - so I went to the park after work. Which made me late getting home and feeling very unmotivated to do anything else. Yep, the routine took a hit yesterday, but I was back in the game when my alarm clock went off this morning. With a new resolution: No internet allowed in the a.m. on a weekday. I love getting online to find out what's going on in the world, but it's definitely a liability when it comes to time.

Here's the 1945 dinner menu I whipped up last Sunday evening:

Browned Potatoes

Asparagus Salad

Enriched Bread

Fresh Fruit Cup, Three

The Browned Potatoes are also called American Fried Potatoes in the cookbook. Potatoes parboiled, then cut in slices and fried on the stovetop in a "very little fat." I boiled mine for too long to start, so they were a little softer than I'd have liked - but still good. The Asparagus for the Salad was boiled, then chilled 'til cold. (Canned asparagus was suggested as an alternative.) The recipe instructed me to cut rings from a green pepper, place four stalks of asparagus through each ring, and serve on a bed of lettuce. The basic French Dressing recipe was dressed up this week with a squirt of Catchup, but it didn't make much of a difference in the taste. You know, I think if there's one thing I step away from when it comes to these menus, it'll be the dressing. I cut the recipe in eighths and still end up having to throw much of it away. I may go ahead and buy a bottled viniagrette that I can get some real use from.

Fresh Fruit Cup, Three was a real puzzle... I finally realized that the cookbook contains three recipes for Fresh Fruit Cup. The author must have been calling for the third version this evening. It was a tropical fruit salad - diced orange, diced pineapple, and sliced banana served in layers in a tall glass with coconut. The one step I'd do without next time? Pouring fruit juice over the whole affair before serving. I used orange juice thinking it'd go nicely with the fruit, but it just made the whole thing soggy.

My vintage dinners on Sunday evening have become a lovely kind of ritual. I still make lots of mistakes, but I guess that's the only way you can learn how to cook. The one thing I'm really proud of is that I've been making myself eat at least one serving of leftovers. (Those of you who have been following along know that I have some issues with leftovers!) I've found that if I nudge myself hard - and eat 'em before they're three days old - I can shelve those phobias about food spoilage.

Unlike my housework last night, my vintage beauty missions were not sacrificed to my mood. And the walks might be paying off. I could be imagining things, but I think I actually felt a little spring in my step today. Fancy that! It's as if my muscles are slowly waking up - fiber by fiber - and remembering what they're there for. I had this strange sensation just in walking around the office at work today. This feeling that I could go a little faster and a little farther. It's been just two weeks since I started exercising. That's only ten walks. If it feels like this at two weeks, can you imagine what it'll feel like at four weeks - and eight weeks?

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

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!

Jitterbug's Cooking School of the Web

Have you ever listened to a vintage recording of one of those cooking programs that used to be on the radio? Betty Crocker's Cooking School of the Air and the Pet Milk Program are a couple that come to mind... I want to share the recipe I used for Bran Bread last night, but I'm feeling a bit like Mary Lee Taylor, hostess of the Pet Milk Program, slowly reciting one of her recipes -they were always chock full of evaporated milk, of course! She'd read the recipe one phrase at a time, repeating each phrase twice, and you can just picture frantic housewives at home trying to get it all down on an index card in time. You can hear an episode dating to September 21, 1939 at this link (choose the mp3 for part 5):

http://www.archive.org/details/CompleteBroadcastDay

(By the by, the programs at the link above all date to a single day in 1939 when a radio station in Washington, DC recorded its entire broadcast day for the National Archives. If you want to have an idea of what a typical day of radio fare was like for a '40s housewife, this is an extraordinary record. There are some 18 hours of programs, so you'll have to divvy them up into several batches.)

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DATE BRAN BREAD
2 cups sifted flour
1 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
2 cups bran
2/3 cup sliced dates
1 egg
1 1/2 cups milk
2 tablespoons melted shortening

Sift flour with salt, sugar and baking powder. Stir in bran and dates. Beat egg and add milk and melted shortening. Add dry ingredients and mix only enough to dampen all the flour. Pour into greased molds, cover closely and steam 3 hours. Makes 3 loaves.
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I left out the dates entirely and it didn't seem to cause any problems in terms of consistency. I think the author meant for people to use either small molds or cans, as I used small loaf pans and only ended up with 2 loaves. As you can see, the directions when it comes to steaming are very slim...

This was one of those rare mornings when all the stars were aligned and my 1945 breakfast was absolutely scrumptious:

Grapefruit Half
Poached Free-Range Eggs
Toasted Bran Bread

The Bran Bread made wonderful toast. All buttery and hearty and just large enough to serve the poached eggs on top. And now that I've figured out how to pre-segment my grapefruit halves, I don't have to worry about juice stains on my tablecloth!