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...

Success With Your House Plants

While I was spending time in bed this week, I came across an article called "Success With Your House Plants" in the November 1945 issue of Better Homes and Gardens. Perfect timing - as it was just a few posts ago I was wondering what kinds of houseplants stylish in the 1940s would do well in my dark kitchen. Here's a list of houseplants from the article that are supposed to do well in little light:

Plants Known for their Flowers

Azalea

Everblooming Begonia

Christmas Cactus

Gloxinia

Impatiens

Oxalis

Shrimp Plant (Beloperone)

Plants Known for their Foliage

Airplane Plant (Chlorophytum)
Artillery Plant (Pilea)

Asparagus Fern

Rex Begonia

Boston Fern (Nephrolepis)

Bowstring Hemp (Sansevieria)

Coleus

English Ivy (Hedera)

Grape Ivy

Nephthytis

Peperomia

Philodendron

Rubber Plant (Ficus)

Any advice from those of you with greener thumbs than mine? Are the authors of this article completely wrong about any of these plants doing well in the dark - and indoors at that? Are some of these plants more likely to attract bugs than others? With sunshine and blue skies, I'm itching to get out to a nursery and pick up something new...