Woman's Dilemma

LIFE magazine teamed up with Bloomingdale's in June 1947 to arrange for a couple of photographs to illustrate a piece called "Woman's Dilemma." I haven't seen the article itself, but it must have had something to do with the question of working inside the home vs. outside. Anyway, the photographs are pretty impressive. Here's the caption:

Housewife Marjorie McWeeney ironing amidst symbolic display of her week's housework at Bloomingdale's store incl. 35 beds to be made, 750 items of glass & china, 400 pieces of silverware to wash, 174 lbs. of food to prepare, some of 250 pieces of laundry on a line, & a ringer washing machine.

Competing Visions

Since I still had a Grapefruit Half left over from yesterday, today's breakfast was more of the same. Once again, I ended up with citrus juice on my tablecloth. I've decided that I'm either going to have to loosen each of the segments at the kitchen countertop before bringing my grapefruit to the table or take the tablecloth off the table when grapefruits or oranges are on the menu! Maybe I'll have pick up some non-vintage table linens for just these kinds of mornings...

I came across an article in a July 1944 issue of The American Home with one woman's routine in keeping house. "I Run My Career Like a Star" was written by Celia Mattox, a mother of three. Here's the bit on her morning schedule:

Whatever day it is, it begins at 6:30. To wash, I slip into a becoming dressing gown - watch the shade, for a strong color gives a pasty look to a face without any make-up. Then I change into my blue denim outfit to prepare breakfast. [She explains earlier that while at home during the day she likes to wear a "becoming cotton blouse" with a blue denim skirt and "gay apron."] That over, the dishes are stacked, the house is aired, and I snatch a few minutes to do my exercises.

There's one woman who opted for a "dressing gown" while she spent some time in the bathroom washing up, but she was fully dressed before hitting the kitchen. I notice that she mentions stacking the dishes (maybe she doesn't wash her breakfast dishes right away either) and airing her house (fresh air is given lots of emphasis in the 1945 housekeeping manual). It sounds like Mrs. Mattox wouldn't have much to argue about with the authors of the manual - at least when it comes to her early morning routine. Heck, maybe she even owned a copy herself!



The Good Housekeeping Housekeeping Book (1947), edited by Helen W. Kendall, also contains a schedule for housework, though it's not quite as detailed as the one in the 1945 manual. Each member of the household is instructed to "hang up night clothes and put away slippers" before finishing up in their bedrooms in the morning. As soon as breakfast is over, "the dishes should be washed and the kitchen straightened up before you go about other household work."

• Remove dishes from the table, scrape, and rinse under the faucet if they need it. Stack them neatly at one side of the sink.
  
• Put away foods that belong in the refrigerator.
  
• Clear away waste food. Get rid of grounds from coffee or tea pot and empty cooking utensils which have been soaking during the meal.
  
• Clean sink so that it will be ready for dishwashing.
  
• Prepare dishwater and wash, dry, and put away dishes.

Kendall suggests that the living room be tidied up just before going to bed at night. "To start each day with the room neat, take a few minutes before going to bed to pick up newspapers and magazines, empty the ash trays, and take glasses into the kitchen." While the 1945 manual advises every member of the family to do their part in straightening up the living room at bedtime, they seem to have built this step into the post-breakfast routine just in case others hadn't done their part after Mother retired for the evening. Those crazy teenagers and their record players! As a one-woman household, I have more control over this situation, so tidying up the living room at bedtime rather than in the morning is certainly an option.

Kendall recommends that pots and pans be soaked during the meal so they're ready for dishwashing as soon as you are. A great concept, but what if your family's interested in a second serving? This would probably work out fine for me unless I had any leftovers that needed to be dispatched with beforehand. The biggest way in which Kendall's routine differs from my 1945 housekeeping manual is dishwashing. She is adamant that the breakfast dishes must be washed before doing anything else. This is not a bad idea, but the fact that I have a dishwasher which only gets filled up a couple times a week makes it kind of a moot point. I might give some thought to getting the pots and pans washed up and put away right after breakfast. If I straightened up the living room at bedtime, that'd free up some time for dishwashing in the a.m.

What do you think? Have you come across any vintage housekeeping schedules that offer advice for these early morning chores?

Week's End

Leftover French Toast reheats surprisingly well. Not in the microwave, of course. I heated up some margarine in a fry pan and was able to get the Toast nice and crispy again. The leftovers are now all eaten up, so I'll be heading back into the Breakfast Test Lab tomorrow morning. For now, though, my dishes are rinsed and stacked inside the dishwasher, I've got two pans soaking in the sink, and I'm sipping a cup of hot coffee while I try and store up the energy I'll need to get out there with the Christmas crowds and do some shopping.

It's been an interesting week. I've had to come up with a solution to my dishwasher dilemma which forces me to think ahead each evening as to whether the dishwasher has room for the next morning's dishes, whether it needs to be run, whether it needs to be emptied of clean dishes... I'm also beginning to really feel the effects of being a night owl. It didn't matter very much when my only objective in the morning was to roll out of bed at the last possible minute and get ready for work. With chores in the bedroom, breakfast to prepare, and chores in the kitchen, I have to get up earlier. Now if I could just convince the night owl side of me to go to bed earlier. The sleep deprivation is really starting to get to me. I've been yawning all week and actually had to take a nap yesterday evening because I couldn't keep my eyes open for another minute. Even now, I'm tired - and I've only been up for an hour. The '40s housewife in there just has to get some beauty sleep!

I've worked my way through about 1/4 of the breakfast menus in the back of my 1945 cookbook, so there are lots of menus still to master. I'm going to take a look at the next few this morning and make sure my grocery list is in order. Time to fly! I'll be back later to post next week's mission.

A Dishwashing Dilemma

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

Scrape dishes with rubber plate scraper or paper towelling.

Rinse dishes with hot water.

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

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

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

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

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

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

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

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

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

Pots and Pans

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

Put cooking utensils to soak

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

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

(c) Use hot soapsuds in greasy utensils

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

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

Grapefruit Juice

Corn-meal Mush, Top Milk

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