Week's End

I got to play with my new popover pan this morning!

Hot Baked Apple

Popovers

The recipe in the cookbook for Hot Baked Apples wasn't very detailed. It tells me to bake the fruit in a moderate oven (350-375 degrees F), but doesn't tell me how long to bake it:

Sour apples cook more quickly than sweet ones, and summer or fall apples take less time to cook than winter apples.

Thank goodness for the internet. Advice like that would've been meaningful for somebody who'd grown up baking apples, but for me --- not so helpful. (Boy, you skip one generation when it comes to passing down traditional knowledge about cookery and the information is practically lost!) Recipes online suggest baking the fruit for 40 to 65 minutes. With a little research, I was able to find out that Braeburn apples - the kind in my fruit bowl - are a winter variety, so I figured one of those would take at least an hour.

I realized the other night that my closet has become a little segregated. The clothes I've hung up in there since I started ironing my clean laundry on Tuesdays are all neatly hanging on one side of the closet. Wrinkle-free, by the way, even after a week in some cases. That still suprises me! I've been so fearful that the wrinkle-free will be contaminated by The Others - all those wrinkled clothes I haven't cleaned since the days when I only ironed things on my way out the door. So they each have their own sides of the closet. And I'm hoping that the wrinkle-free side will just get bigger and bigger until it takes over the whole place someday...

One of the things that's taken me by surprise lately is just how much I like being in my own home. How much more I genuinely enjoy being here when it's not as messy as it used to be. It's certainly not clean by any stretch of the imagination, but the living room and bedroom are tidy. There aren't dirty dishes all over the kitchen counters and stovetop. My clean clothes are all put away, and the dirty laundry is in its place. There's something about a neat(er) home that makes me want to spend some time here. Fancy that! It's no wonder I always felt kinda antsy at home before this. Who can relax in a messy place?

Week's End

The deeper I dig into this way of life, the more often it occurs to me how dangerous it was to be a housewife during the '40s. Between hot oil in the frying pan, a searingly hot iron, and chemicals you have to be super careful using about the house and garden - it was a fearsome job. It still is! Not only can you damage property or waste food if you make a mistake, but you could end up with burnt arms or worse... I think many of us look on homemaking as a very simple, gentle, quiet job, but the housewife is actually working with some very dangerous substances and tools. Even in 2009. I'm a pretty clumsy person and tend to rush into things like new recipes, but clumsiness and haste aren't going to do me any favors on this job.

Since adding Wash Day and Ironing Day to my housekeeping routine, I've been spending a lot more time with my clothes than ever before - and am realizing just how intimately a woman in the 1940s knew her wardrobe. And not just where she bought it and how much she paid for it. My '40s counterpart would've known fabrics inside and out - known what temperature water to wash each fabric in, how exactly it should be dried, whether it should be ironed on the right side or the wrong side. If a garment was made from a blend of fibers, it had another protocol entirely. Add buttons and zippers and decorative trim to the mix, and laundry became an intricate balance of needs. And I'm not even counting the time a woman spent on the articles she made herself! There's a whole different relationship to fabrics that this kind of time and attentiveness brought about - particularly to clothing. You'd be so much more likely to guard against damaging your garments, to work earnestly at removing stains before they set. This is foreign territory for me still.

I find myself truly appreciative these days of the encyclopedia's worth of knowlege a '40s housewife carried about in her head. Rules for everything from which batters needed more stirring than others to which laundry required a cool wash. Everything I'm resorting to the manual to find out. Now, she'd probably been absorbing this stuff since she was a little girl, so it'd have come quite naturally. Maybe I'll start to pick up some of this knowledge, too --- at least some of the more general rules. 'Til then, thank goodness for America's Housekeeping Book!