Three Women, Home Economics, & Being Frugal
The best lessons are passed through generations, an elder teaching a youngster and so on, even if we don't realize it until much later in life.
I began this April newsletter article thinking about home economics classes from the early and middle 1900s. I’ve started (yet another) collection of food-related books. This time, old home ec textbooks from the 1920s and 30s. I am forever fascinated with how those in the know taught young women and homemakers the tricks of the trade, so to speak.
And then I read my mom’s contribution to the April newsletter.
I didn’t take home ec classes in school. Now I understand - with a little more clarity - why I made that choice. I didn’t need the classes. I received that very important education on the home front. I am cognizant of how fortunate I was - so many kids don’t have the opportunity to learn how to cook, let alone how to manage a home, from family.
Let’s be clear… managing a home is a job in and of itself. Historically, that job has fallen to the female - mom, wife - in the household. Thankfully, times have changed enough that the job is frequently shared in a two-adult household. Even though, I’ll take all the tips and tricks I can get and below are some of the best to use in the kitchen!
What are your favorite kitchen tips? Let us know in the comments.
What I did not learn in junior high home economics class…
By the time I was in 7th grade taking my first mandatory home economics class, I had already mastered many household and homemaking skills at the 13-year-old level. Our teacher was a lovely woman, but she did not teach us how to set a table, encouraging us to place the knife on the right of the plate with the sharp side of the blade facing the plate. She did not teach us to eat as many oranges in the wintertime as we could get. She did not teach us how important it was to wash dishes in really hot water.
She did teach us how to iron. Most of my classmates and I had been ironing since we were tall enough to see the top of the ironing board. My job at age 6 was to press Daddy’s cloth handkerchiefs. Even a carpenter couldn’t blow his nose in a wrinkled handkerchief. She did teach us why it was important to get clothes out of the dryer promptly. Who had a clothes dryer in 1968? Our goal was to get them off the clothesline before it started to rain or before they froze in the winter!
She also taught us how to warm empty plates in the oven so the food that was plated and delivered to the table would stay hot. Who had time for that? We did well to keep the flow of overfilled bowls and platters passed the right direction around our table at our family-style meals! If you don’t go one direction, you can have collisions!
Wow! I still grew up to be nearly perfect at all things house and home related. How did that happen? I attribute my skills and talents to three women.
The most important women in my life were amazing. Everything that was necessary and difficult about cooking and homemaking, I learned from my mother. She taught me how to kill a chicken before I started school. Fortunately, never in my life have I had to do that! She taught me how to use a wringer washer, primarily to make me understand how dangerous those contraptions were. She taught me how to harvest garden vegetables, but according to my older brothers I really never had to do that, either. My job was to supervise with a watchful eye while sitting on an inverted bucket at the end of the garden row! Later in my childhood, my tasks did become more important as we spent weeks of long days preparing garden produce for canning.
My Aunt Evelyn, lovingly called Sissy because she was my daddy’s baby sister, taught me the gentler things about homemaking. She loved pretty dishes and acquired a vast collection of Depression Glass. (Yes, I inherited that gene.) She loved flowers and had a neighbor who owned a local flower shop and had a huge rose garden that we could raid. She loved magazines and when we couldn’t afford to buy what we saw in those magazines, we would make it. From her sewing machine came colorful ‘crazy quilts’ and sets of tablecloths with matching fabric napkins. All the work was fun at Sissy’s!
Thank you, Mother and Sissy and thank you, Emily Post. This third woman taught me what I needed to know about table etiquette, entertaining and general good manners. I learned those things from a tattered book written by Emily Post. From the time I found it at a yard sale when I was 16, it was my source for the answers to the questions this middle class rural Midwest girl had. Add a couple early television chefs, a few cooking classes, decorating workshops and lots of experimentation, and I am what I am.
Being Frugal in the Kitchen
From all these lessons combined, the most important lessons I learned were from my aunt and mother about being frugal in the kitchen. Americans waste entirely too much food. In the past couple of years, ‘covid times’ as I call them, we have returned to trying to save money and time, because we have had to.
My aunt could turn a pound of ground beef into 8 big burgers by adding soft breadcrumbs and minced onion and green pepper. If too many teenagers showed up at the last minute for her one BBQ chicken, she stretched her meal by adding hotdogs to the baked beans. If she had only enough lunch meat for a few sandwiches and needed more, she’d make more by thinning out the sandwiches but added a pot of soup that she could make in thirty minutes with canned vegetables and meat stock. In general, starting any dinner with a bowl of soup stretches the whole menu and certainly added bulk to her sandwich-only menu.
A half a package of cookies became a big bowl of banana pudding. If she had pieces of stale angel food cake, she’d make a delicious sauce by thickening simple orange juice to serve over it. In the 1960s, she loved using that popular boxed skillet meal of rice and macaroni. She added the required pound of burger and had a hearty meal for four. If four more people showed up, she’d add more rice right out of the cupboard. I still use one of my aunt’s favorite tricks. When you want a nice green salad and you don’t have enough ingredients, add cooked and cooled macaroni. You almost don’t notice the bits of chewy macaroni mixed in with a little iceberg lettuce and a few chunks of tomatoes. It absorbs the salad dressing and makes the overall result delicious.
My mother was frugal in everything she did. In fact, maybe too frugal when she didn’t have to be! Mother fed a family of five children, so leftovers were unheard of. As adults, my brother and I have often wondered how she made such delicious bread pudding because there was never even a heel of the loaf of bread left! Mother saved her money by being an expert shopper and meal planner. When we were children, she knew what every meal would be. She planned breakfast, lunch and dinner. (Our grade school was just a couple blocks from our house so we were at home for lunch.) If dinner was roast beef, the next day’s lunch might be open faced beef and gravy sandwiches over toast. She made delicious cherry dumplings which were a sauce with little bits of biscuit type dough dropped in to form a sweet dumpling. She stretched a can of sour cherries into a magical dessert that was easily 12 servings. When she fried chicken, somebody ate the heart, gizzard and liver. Somebody else picked the meat off the neck! I will always love chicken livers.
Mother did a fantastic job using fresh garden produce. Stuffed green peppers were stuffed with a little bit of meat and lots of rice. Who knew? Cabbage rolls were made the same way. For both, it was the tomato sauce that made them delicious, and even now I frequently leave out the meat completely. We raised lots of corn, so her shelves were lined with quart jars of corn. A quart of corn stretches vegetable soup and makes it so good. Corn was usually added to her version of ‘goulash’ made with burger, tomatoes, onions, green pepper and macaroni. Fried potatoes stretched a lot of our meals. She made them so often that she kept boiled red potatoes in the refrigerator at all times. They were part of breakfast meals and frequently on the dinner table.
I learned home economics in the right place, at home. I was blessed with my aunt’s house as a second home, so I got twice the education that most youngsters received. My aunt and mother were very different individuals, so the lessons were very different. I grew up to be a cross between two excellent at-home … home economics teachers. I’m so lucky!
~ Debbie