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As it seems to be going in our neck of the woods, IT WON’T QUIT RAINING/SNOWING/SLEETING/BEING CRAPPY…
So today I’m taking a short break from the house project and modern sustainability to share a cool look at how our great-grandparents really used to do it. Facebook friends will remember a few weeks back how my awesome husband decided to dig out my the second edition Better Homes and Gardens cookbook that belonged to my great-grandma (aka “Great” as our family always called her).
Interesting take on the homemaker as a “home-business woman”.
Ever since Mark finished listening to the audiobook of In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, his drive to get us eating all REAL food has skyrocketed, and who ate more real food than our great-grandparents?
At first, Mark was looking for a good waffle recipe (he chose the Devil’s Food Waffles below, which were a delicious sugar-bomb), but I decided to dig through the whole cookbook to see what treasures were inside. I was not disappointed! As BHG states on their page about the history of their cookbook, each edition is like “surveying the history of America at the table from 1930 to the present.”
The recipes are great, but the bigger finds are the written recipes from Great herself! This is my gorgeous great-grandma:
She would have been 35 years old at the printing of this particular cookbook. My grandma would have been about 7.
She tucked in handwritten recipes that she gathered from magazines, books, and friends.
She also had numerous cutouts and saved pages from newspapers and magazines.
Came for the point-free ketchup recipe…
…stayed for the questionable comic on the back.
I guess she didn’t need that coupon…
I’m hoping the saved this for the chart about laundry and not the ad for using Tums to relieve “Sunday Stomach” caused by too much week-end smoking.
Again…hoping for laundry.
It was so neat to be able to take the time to “travel through time” and see the kitchen through Great’s eyes. I was only 3 years old when she passed away, so I never got to develop a connection to her in the way my older cousins and our parents got to. Sifting through her handwritten notes and clippings is the closest I’ve gotten to her since listening to her story recordings (like our own little family version of StoryCorps!). As we journey through our homesteading process, I hope that I can be as smart, tough, resourceful, kind, and loving as I always heard she was. I’d like to think she’d be proud!
What a wonderful treasure you have! I love the newspaper ads and articles she saved. How wonderful to have these things.