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.

Let Them Eat Cake!

I've been struggling with the same 2 lbs. for about a month now... Weighed in at 147 - again - this morning. Could this be the dreaded plateau? Or is it just that my body's been through the wringer during the last few days and I'm retaining water? All I know is that I weighed in at 143 before going into surgery on Thursday. (It was a great moment!) I'm slowly but surely taking up my exercises again. The walking feels good, but I'm being extra careful with any of the stretches, etc. that involve my chest or arms. I indulged in a little bit of "comfort eating" on Thursday evening and Friday, so I'm trying to rein that in as well. I'm not beating myself up about it. These 2 lbs. may disappear just as quickly as they reappeared.

Otherwise, I seem to be healing normally. I'm still taking the ibuprofen and using cold compresses to keep the swelling down, but there doesn't seem to be any bruising yet at the site of the incision. And I don't look lopsided either! I was a little worried at the news that this mass was 2 cm. in diameter --- my breasts aren't big enough these days for 2 cm. to go unnoticed.

Hmmm. I wonder if there's a fun way to segue from breast size to oven temperatures...

I've been baking a cake this morning for my father's birthday. My folks arrived in town yesterday afternoon for the winter. I'm not sure they're feeling very festive - it hasn't yet been two weeks since we lost Nana - but I know they're relieved to be here and we'd like to mark the occasion in some way. It's not a fancy cake. I'd love to have had the energy to try some vintage cake and icing recipes. It's just a Betty Crocker mix for a butter pecan cake with some coconut pecan frosting. From a can. Eek! Sacrilege. I am baking it in a chiffon cake pan, though, and that's a very '40s shape.

The thing I wanted to say was that I noticed that the times and temperatures given on the back of the cake mix box are right on the money when it comes to my oven. Now this definitely isn't the case for me when it comes to vintage recipes. My oven always seems to run too hot for recipes from my 1945 cookbook. I invariably have to set the temperature about 25 degrees less than the vintage recipes instruct me to and remove whatever I'm baking from the oven about five minutes ahead of time --- or risk ending up with something burnt and dried out. I used to think it was my oven, but now I'm thinking that the ovens of yesteryear just weren't as well insulated as modern ovens. So they had to bake things at higher temperatures and for longer periods of time. That's my theory, anyway. Have any of you who regularly bake using recipes from this era found this to be the case?

Some of the fine ingredients that go into this sensational Betty Crocker Cake Mix can't be bought in stores. So a woman simply couldn't put them in her own cake! What's more, in her own kitchen, a woman can't duplicate the scientific measuring and blending of ingredients that go into the mix. And, remember, this isn't just a cake mix, it's a Betty Crocker Cake Mix!

Actually, cake mixes aren't entirely un-vintage. General Mills introduced three Betty Crocker cake mixes in 1948: GingerCake, Devil's Food, and PartyCake. The PartyCake mix could be used to bake a white cake, yellow cake, or spice cake - depending on whether you added egg whites, whole eggs, or spices to the mix. Cake mixes cost 35 to 37 cents per box - which translates to just over $3 today. With faith that science and new technologies could solve all problems, the post-war era was prime for the success of such products as cake mixes. What you and I know with hindsight is that no cake mix on the market beats the taste and texture of a cake made from scratch, but 60 years ago there was great hope that the cake mix would someday be perfected and produce a cake even better than that.

Cake mix or no cake mix, I'll be enjoying a very small portion myself!

Streamlining Housework

If you haven't noticed me grumbling about cleaning my kitchen lately, it's because I haven't been. (Grumbling, that is!) When I decided a few weeks ago to split up the big jobs into alternate weeks, it made all the difference in the world. Cleaning the kitchen still means a good solid two hours of work once a week, but the work just seems a lot more manageable than it did before.

And there isn't anything I really enjoy about this particular chore. When the job is done, though, my kitchen looks so nice. I catch myself doing a double take or two just to see how lovely it looks with a shiny sink, clean countertops, and a stovetop that positively gleams! If I can find something interesting on the radio, it always makes the work go faster, and I take a few breaks to drink some water and to put on some hand lotion. The good stuff. If I going to baby my hands at some point during the week, this is definitely the time to do so. Working with all that soap and water can be super drying to the skin.

Speaking of cleansers, soap and water aren't the only things at work in my kitchen these days. I use baking soda when cleaning the interior of the refrigerator/freezer and Comet to scour the sink. Cellulose sponges and dishtowels are my tools of choice, with an occasional Brillo Pad on a stubborn drip pan and - once in a great while - a paper towel. It's funny. On the rare occasions that I'd do any kind of cleaning in my kitchen in the past, I would never have set foot in there without a roll of paper towels and a canister of disinfectant wipes. I guess I was just afraid of having to put any kind of elbow grease to work. I thought chemicals could do the work for me. These days, I can go a month before having to change the roll of paper towels in my kitchen. And that's one of the small rolls! Paper towels get used now only for spot cleaning.

As I get accustomed to the mechanics of cleaning the kitchen, I catch myself finding little ways to make the work go faster. Here's my latest discovery: If I remove the drip pans before scrubbing the stovetop down (Is that what those metal trays under the burners are called?), then pop the lid and clean out underneath the stovetop, then wash the drip pans in the sink --- the stovetop and the area underneath it will be practically air-dried by the time I'm ready to reassemble the whole affair. That means my dishtowel will get less wet on that particular job and I can use it longer before having to replace it with another. I love finding little techniques like this to streamline the work!

Sadly, I don't think there's a soul among the women I talk with on a regular basis who could understand my excitement over something like this. Shoes? They could understand. A decorating idea for a dinner party? They'd get it. We just don't talk about housework in this day and age. It's that hidden thing that must be done, but isn't very fashionable to discuss. How are girls supposed to learn how to maintain a home if it's no longer cool even to mention the process? If our mothers hardly have enough time to keep house themselves - never mind teaching their daughters how to do it - and it isn't fashionable to discuss it with your girlfriends, how are we supposed to learn or better our craft? Housework's become the great unmentionable among women, and yet it's getting done is indispensible.

One of the other things that gives this little housekeeper a thrill these days are the ads for Parkay Margarine and Kraft Dinner that have been preserved along with episodes of The Great Gildersleeve from 1941 and 1942. The ads reference a rhythm to housework that must have been completely familiar to listeners of the era... Kraft Dinner - which we now call plain ol' macaroni and cheese - was billed as a fabulous option for dinner on Monday nights. A night when Mother must have been worn to the bone by the wash... As the announcer describes all the perks of using a product like Parkay Margarine, he mentions the baking that would have been done in a Christian household on Saturdays. (The program was aired lived on Sunday evenings):

I wonder how many of you housewives baked a cake or some cookies yesterday for your Sunday dinner today. A lot of you did, I’m sure, because there’s nothing like that real home-baked flavor. Well, here’s a hint for the next time you bake. For luscious, extra flavor in cookies, cakes, and pastries, use delicious Parkay margarine for the shortening...

My own 1945 menu for dinner this evening features a wartime meatless dish:

Peanut Roast
Pennsylvania Cabbage Salad with Sour Cream Dressing

The dessert, Apricot Whip, is made with raw egg whites, so - rather than play around with salmonella - I may substitute a Dried Apricot Cake. Is there any Parkay in the house?

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.

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.

Java Jive

My apron is on, my hair is pinned up, and it’s time to get breakfast started. This morning’s mini-mission? Use my Drip-O-lator for the first time. First, let me warm up the kitchen radio. Here’s my 1944 breakfast menu:

Orange Juice
Scramble Eggs with Cheese
Whole Wheat Toast
Coffee

The only Cheese I’ve got in the house is grated parmesan, so I'll use that. My 1945 cookbook does suggest a few more “adds” for scrambled eggs: onion-juice with parsley, sweet green peppers, or canned pimientos.

The Drip-O-lator (patented in 1921 with revisions in 1930) looks like it works very much like your typical drip coffee maker today, except that the water reservoir is fitted on top instead of behind the coffee pot. The biggest difference is that you have to heat up your water separately. The 1940s housewife probably used a tea kettle. I don’t have one, so I’m just going to run some water through my Mr. Coffee - without the grounds (sounds pretty silly, doesn’t it!).

Deep inside the aluminum fixture is a small well for the coffee grounds. My friend tells me that they didn’t use any coffee filters in the Drip-O-lator, but suggested I use a small filter in there if I didn’t want to end up with any stray grounds in my cup. A perforated metal cap with a tall rod for a handle fits down in there on top of the well. You fill the top of the fixture with hot water and it drips down through the well and into the coffee pot. My water’s heated, but I’m not sure how long I can expect the coffee in the Drip-O-lator to stay warm, so I’m going to start my Scramble Eggs with Cheese first…

The water has been added. It looks like it’s going to take some time for 5 cups’ worth to work its way through the well and down into the coffeepot. While we're waiting, here are a few early ‘40s pictures of the Drip-O-lator in action:

Okay, breakfast is ready, but the coffee’s not. The Drip-O-lator works nowhere near as quickly as my Mr. Coffee. Will the coffee be richer? I’m going to go ahead and eat. Coffee later…

It looks like coffee. It’s not as hot as the coffee I’d pour from my modern coffee maker. (And they didn’t have any microwaves for a quick re-heat!) I gather percolators cooled down real quickly, too. Tastes about the same as the coffee made in the modern coffee maker. It may be tinge richer. Can't quite put my finger on the difference. There must have been housewives trying to keep the coffee warm by putting the pot on a burner, because there's a warning stamped inside the pot. The pot will explode if you heat it on a burner or over an open flame.

I love coffee, I love tea.

I love the java jive and it loves me.

Coffee and tea and the java and me.

A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup!

I Came, I Saw, I Broiled

I haven't felt so intimidated in a long time as I did when I turned the page of my cookbook and found this menu looking back at me:

Broiled Grapefruit
Omelet
Graham Biscuit (I substituted the last of my Baking Powder Biscuits.)

Broiled Grapefruit? I've never broiled anything - and wasn't even sure where the broiler was! The word is right there on the controls for my oven. I can set it to "Bake" or "Broil," and just above the 500-degree mark on the temperature control is the word "Broil." But using it? Feels a bit like not stopping for gas when the gauge hits "E." And I wasn't sure whether it was located underneath the oven chamber - you know that drawer where some people store their pots and pans - or whether the broiler was actually the heating element inside my oven at the top of the chamber. Would there be flames spitting out somewhere? Did I need special cookware?

Oddly enough, there wasn't even a recipe for Broiled Grapefruit inside the cookbook which recommended it in the first place. So I had to look about online to see if anybody out there was broiling citrus fruit. Sure enough, I found people chatting about it on a few cookery sites. I also found a tip about broilers that steered me in the right direction. If you have a gas stove, the broiler is usually underneath the oven chamber. If you have an electric stove (like mine), the broiler is usually inside the chamber.

Because the homegrown grapefruits I received the other day had so much pith, I decided to pick up a grapefruit at the store. Setting aside half for tomorrow, I loosened each of the sections, then sprinkled brown sugar and cinnamon on top with a dab of margarine. I set the oven rack in the topmost position and checked to be sure the grapefruit would still be about four inches below the broiling unit. Then tentatively started "preheating" the broiler by turning the oven up to 400 degrees - then to 450 -- then 500. The Omelet was finished by this point, so it was do or die. With an imaginary dash of salt over my shoulder and a note to self that I'd enjoyed my brief life even if it was about to come to a flaming end, I turned both knobs to "Broil." A few minutes later, the element at the top of my oven was red hot, so I slid the pan in underneath and counted the minutes. Just three.

The grapefruit was still in one piece when I pulled it out. The topping had melted right into the fruit. Most of it, anyway. The rest was a sticky, burnt mess in the pan (which should have been lined with aluminum foil). After letting it cool for several minutes, I tried a piece. It was okay. Nothing to write home about. The cinnamon really overpowers the taste of the grapefruit. I guess that'd be alright if you didn't like grapefruit, but I do. And I prefer it fresh and chilled. I can see how Broiled Grapefruit might have been considered a fancier way of serving citrus for breakfast during the '40s. If you had houseguests or were planning a holiday breakfast, it'd really dress up the table. If I try it again tomorrow morning I'll use a little less cinnamon - and a lot more aluminum foil.

Can't believe I lived to tell about it... I'm feeling all kinds of bravado this afternoon over conquering my fears!

Bran Bread Reflections

My 1945 breakfast menu for tomorrow includes Toasted Bran Bread, so I was poking around today looking for recipes - figuring it would be just a quick bread. Well, there is a recipe in my cookbook for Date Bran Bread, but it calls for the bread to be steamed for three hours! I have never steamed anything before, but I'm giving this a try. My largest pot isn't big enough for more than one of the small loaf pans, and I don't have any used coffee cans or other metal cans hanging about, so, after doing some research online, I bought one of those aluminum foil roasters, placed water in the bottom with some stones to raise the loaf pans above the water. Covered the filled loaf pans tightly with foil and slid the whole affair inside a 350-degree oven. I have no idea if this is going to work.

This is another of those instances where the author of the cookbook seems to take for granted that her readers have some basic skills most of us no longer learn from our mothers and grandmothers. Steaming bread. Making jam from dried fruit.

It will be six weeks tomorrow since I set forth on The Great Housekeeping Experiment. Six very interesting weeks. I realized the other day that I have a much healthier-looking, better stocked fridge than I've had in years. There are grapefruits and oranges inside, together with some dried apricots and prunes in sealed containers. A couple varieties of juice - and milk and eggs that are still fresh! (That used to be a rarity.) My cupboards are better stocked than they've been in a long time: Shredded Wheat, Malt-O-Meal, rolled oats, cornmeal, Wheatena, flour, wheat bran... These were the building blocks of a '40s wintertime breakfast. If a housewife kept these items on hand, she'd be able to put a variety of breakfasts on the table.

And speaking of breakfast - these vintage menus are just as carb-heavy as I anticipated, but it's easy to adapt them to be a little friendlier to the waistline. What I've been finding - much to my surprise - is that I've come to feel a real sense of pride in making a pot of non-gummy oatmeal, lump-free cornmeal mush, and farina with just the right amount of water. I've also been getting to know my stovetop better. Just where the heat needs to be set to get the water to boil quickly, how far to lower it to keep a good simmer going. It's funny to feel so accomplished when it comes to things most of my friends wouldn't get very excited about.

Good news! I just checked my oven and the batter I left inside those loaf pans actually appears to be turning into bread!!! I'd say they're just about done. Maybe five more minutes.

Something else I've learned in the last six weeks: when I pick up the things in my bedroom and living room everyday, the job is fairly easy each time. The same goes when it comes to the breakfast dishes. Tidy begets tidy, so when my bedroom is picked up, I don't want to set something down where it doesn't belong. It's kind of nice to keep these rooms picked up by putting things back where they belong in the first place. My living room also seems a whole lot more spacious, and, boy, is it nice to come home to a dark apartment and not have to worry about stumbling over something as I'm looking for the light switch.

I've also discovered that my sleeping habits stink. In the American Home article I mentioned several days ago, the author writes that she wakes every day at 6:30 - no matter what the day of the week. This has got to be a whole lot easier on the body than my own habit of burning the midnight oil and sleeping in as late as possible, getting up at a different time nearly every day. I've got a long road to go, so this will be something I'll try and fold into my routine over time.

As I finish writing this, I'm enjoying a slice of my own Bran Bread, fresh from the oven. I can't believe I pulled this off! It's nice and moist, too. I ended up baking it for about 1 1/2 hours at 350 degrees F. I'm definitely freezing one of these loaves so I don't have to go through this again for quite some time...