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More home ec books...
At lunch, I went back to the home economics textbook section to see what else they had. There was one from the 1940s titled The Girl and Her Home, and one from the 1950s titled Young Living. To be fair, Young Living is a middle-school home ec textbook, or "pre-hi" as they called it.
A very quick skim through other textbooks too shows the influence of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and their efficiency-study colleagues on households during the first half of the century - it moves from an emphasis on home making to home management. One of the books that I left on the shelf is indeed all about household management and is full of helpful advice on how to use one's time cooking and cleaning most efficiently - one tip I remember from it is that one should concentrate on one thing at a time before doing another thing, because it produces less fatigue, and one of the examples was that one should dry one type of dinnerware at a time: all the glasses first, then move to the tableware, etc.
Apparently I've been drying my dishes wrong all these years. Sigh.
But! How about some 1950s cuisine!
From Young Living, which has almost nothing on clothing and a large section on food, the opposite of The Mode in Dress and Home, from 1935, which spent 80% of its pages on clothing and sewing, and mentioned food only in passing:
I sort of like what this recipe is meant to be, if you used good sausage and tomato paste instead of hot dogs and ketchup, and if you didn't COOK IT INTO SUBMISSION
Glamour Dogs or Stuffed Franks
Serves 5
10 frankfurters
1/4 c. water
Stuffing:
2 c. coarsely crumbled crackers
4 strips crisp bacon, crumbled
2 T minced onion
1/3 c. minced green pepper
1/2 t salt
1/8 t pepper
3 T catsup
Preheat oven to 350. To make stuffing: Fry bacon and crumbled crackers. Lightly brown onion and green pepper in 2 T bacon fat. Combine ingredients.
Split franks lengthwise almost through. Fill with stuffing and place in a shallow pan. Pour water in pan around franks and bake, uncovered, for 15 minutes or until piping hot.
It doesn't tell you how to serve it, but two pictures lead me to assume you either need a long baking dish in which to line them up, or you should arrange them in a spoke-like position on a square or round serving tray.
As it is the late 1950s, we're at least getting away from the boil-into-mush method of preparing vegetables, although we're solidly in the age of cottage cheese. (I recommend Susan Lovegren's Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads [Amazon
Powell's] if you want to now more about US eating habit from the 1920s through the 1980s)
Here's the recipe for Quicky Cake. I am so glad they included it, because I never would have known how to bake a really quick cake without it.
1 pkg cake mix.
1 recipe Quicky Fudge icing (the recipe is a basic buttercream)
1 t shortening
Turn oven to correct temperature. Mix cake as directed on the package. Pour into greased and floured cake pans. Bake in oblong pan about 9" x 13" x 2" as directed. Make icing while cake is baking.
After the food section is the personal grooming section, wherein we are informed that some boys think only girls need to use deodorant, but they are mistaken, and that one should shampoo weekly. (I know that it used to be a Thing among the older generation when I was a kid where you went to a beauty parlor once a week to get your shampoo and set, and my grandmother may still actually do that, but I still have trouble wrapping my brain around a once-weekly shampoo. And I don't even wash my hair every day, due to dry hair!)
A very quick skim through other textbooks too shows the influence of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and their efficiency-study colleagues on households during the first half of the century - it moves from an emphasis on home making to home management. One of the books that I left on the shelf is indeed all about household management and is full of helpful advice on how to use one's time cooking and cleaning most efficiently - one tip I remember from it is that one should concentrate on one thing at a time before doing another thing, because it produces less fatigue, and one of the examples was that one should dry one type of dinnerware at a time: all the glasses first, then move to the tableware, etc.
Apparently I've been drying my dishes wrong all these years. Sigh.
But! How about some 1950s cuisine!
From Young Living, which has almost nothing on clothing and a large section on food, the opposite of The Mode in Dress and Home, from 1935, which spent 80% of its pages on clothing and sewing, and mentioned food only in passing:
I sort of like what this recipe is meant to be, if you used good sausage and tomato paste instead of hot dogs and ketchup, and if you didn't COOK IT INTO SUBMISSION
Glamour Dogs or Stuffed Franks
Serves 5
10 frankfurters
1/4 c. water
Stuffing:
2 c. coarsely crumbled crackers
4 strips crisp bacon, crumbled
2 T minced onion
1/3 c. minced green pepper
1/2 t salt
1/8 t pepper
3 T catsup
Preheat oven to 350. To make stuffing: Fry bacon and crumbled crackers. Lightly brown onion and green pepper in 2 T bacon fat. Combine ingredients.
Split franks lengthwise almost through. Fill with stuffing and place in a shallow pan. Pour water in pan around franks and bake, uncovered, for 15 minutes or until piping hot.
It doesn't tell you how to serve it, but two pictures lead me to assume you either need a long baking dish in which to line them up, or you should arrange them in a spoke-like position on a square or round serving tray.
As it is the late 1950s, we're at least getting away from the boil-into-mush method of preparing vegetables, although we're solidly in the age of cottage cheese. (I recommend Susan Lovegren's Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads [Amazon
Powell's] if you want to now more about US eating habit from the 1920s through the 1980s)Here's the recipe for Quicky Cake. I am so glad they included it, because I never would have known how to bake a really quick cake without it.
1 pkg cake mix.
1 recipe Quicky Fudge icing (the recipe is a basic buttercream)
1 t shortening
Turn oven to correct temperature. Mix cake as directed on the package. Pour into greased and floured cake pans. Bake in oblong pan about 9" x 13" x 2" as directed. Make icing while cake is baking.
After the food section is the personal grooming section, wherein we are informed that some boys think only girls need to use deodorant, but they are mistaken, and that one should shampoo weekly. (I know that it used to be a Thing among the older generation when I was a kid where you went to a beauty parlor once a week to get your shampoo and set, and my grandmother may still actually do that, but I still have trouble wrapping my brain around a once-weekly shampoo. And I don't even wash my hair every day, due to dry hair!)
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I figure it would almost be obligatory with some of the popular hairstyles for women. Even if most females were expected to stay home and be wives, those puffed up styles would be hell to tease and hairspray daily, which is what you'd have to do.
I read somewhere that if you're really, truly interested to growing your hair to astronomical lengths, you have to shampoo a lot less as well. The detergents in shampoo apparently weaken hair and make it prone to breaking when it hits a certain length. (I also read somewhere that most people's donations to Locks of Love are sold to medical research rather than made into wigs because of said shampoo damage. So take it with a grain or three of salt.)
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When I was in highschool, I used to wash my hair only 2 or 3 times a week, but at the time I had longer hair and a perm. Now I wear my hair short and straight, and on the days I don't wash it, I can feeeeeeeel the oils and stuff on my hair weighing it down, and it starts to look greasy by the end of the day.
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I'm having a little trouble seeing why one would bother stuffing any sort of sausage with bacon and crackers, but I know there's always something weirder or worse. :)
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The Gilbreths wrote a book called Cheaper by the Dozen, about their parents' (who were efficiency experts) attempt to raise eleven children according to time and motion management principles. Amazingly, they were pretty good, if weird, parents, and no one was traumatized.
The book was a favorite of mine as a kid, mostly for its wacky characters and period-piece nature. Warning for strange, outdated racism (as opposed to modern racism) - what I remember offhand was that "Eskimo" meant "gross or sexual," which even then was memorably WTF to me, but I bet there was more that I'm forgetting.
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At least, I remembered the book reading like that - that she stepped into her husband's shoes after his death - although looking at her Wikipedia page, it's obvious she worked alongside her husband, which is even more amazing for the time.
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I can remember shampooing my hair just once a week when I was a kid. I had much longer hair back then, halfway down my back. I think the needed frequency of shampoos is in inverse proportion to the length of the hair, but in direct proportion to the greasiness of the hair. My hair is MUCH drier now and only shoulder length, so I only shampoo twice a week. But of course, it gets somewhat wet every day when I bathe or shower.
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IIRC, the Victorians brushed the hair thoroughly every day with a natural-bristle brush, which would distribute the oils away from the scalp, and remove other debris, which would go a long way towards keeping the hair clean between infrequent washings. Also I suspect they accepted the heavy feeling of oils on the hair a lot more than I do! :D
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A lot of tiny conveniences we take for granted were not yet around: fitted sheets is a painful example. Clothes that don't need ironing to look reasonably smooth (one of the funnier things in Decca Mitford's letters is her passion for drip-dry clothing, when it appears).
I believe maintaining a wash and set meant sleeping in a kerchief or curlers or something, too!
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The Lovegren book is hilarious - I remember one spaghetti recipe where you boiled the spaghetti for an HOUR, then put it in a casserole dish with the sauce makings and baked it for 20 minutes more. And you read it, nodding at the oh-so-outdated and hilariously awful foods and congratulationg yourself on how you'd never eat something like that, and then you turn the page and RIGHT THERE is a recipe that is beloved by your family that holds a special place in your heart and you get slightly offended at its inclusion. XD (Mine and Mom's was chuck roast in foil with a packet of onion soup mix. XD)
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Speaking of horror. That hot-dog recipe...eek. Cooked into submission, indeed! The cake one made me laugh, though. Aha! Using a cake mix! So that's the secret!
Also, the whole one-shampoo-a-week thing frightens me. My grandmother subscribed to it right up until her death, and often bathed only every four or more days. *shudders* I have super-oily hair and skin, so I can't even bear to think what I would look like if I shampooed and bathed that infrequently. It grosses me out even imagining it.
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*shakes head*