The Modern Home Economist - Cooking Lessons: Cheese Souffle and Baked Ham

As a new homemaker many, many years ago, I came to my new home with a hope chest of sorts.  In it were most the items I'd use to set up my first kitchen.  Plates, silverware, glasses, a crock pot ($12 and 3 purchase seals from Premium saltines), a set of pots and pans.  No linens for beds, nor towels for the bathroom closets.  Only items meant to prepare food and serve it.  That's a telling thing, I realize.  I even had a collection of recipes carefully saved from several magazines.

One of the saved recipes was from Seventeen magazine for Cheese Souffle. I'd read an account in a Peg Bracken article in one of the women's magazines of a dinner she had to prepare on the fly.  Her husband had a business meeting with a man whom he'd invited home for dinner.  He called her at noon to give her notice and she went into a dead panic.  Peg Bracken's whole line was that she 'hated housework' which she wrote a book about with tongue in cheek.  Imagine the declared clutz of housework having a dinner guest by the name of James Beard...Well she pulled together a meal at day's end.  On her menu was a baked ham and a Cheese Souffle.

The Modern Home Economist: Budget Home Decor

This week as I've been doing work on my own home, I thought it might be fun to not only show you my photos but share a few from vintage magazines.  Home is the essential ingredient in home economics and making home a cozy, inviting place to be while on a budget takes real skill.  That's why I intend to share so many things that would naturally be included in a home economics course.

This week I'd like to share with you our new porch.

John and I are big fans of having our coffee outdoors on summer mornings, picnics, etc.  Last year we stopped at a restaurant that had a big covered porch and we ate our lunch there.  It sparked a conversation about how much we enjoy eating al fresco, and how much we regretted the small floor space of our front porch.  We decided to think about what we could do to improve and enhance our outdoor spaces.  I started with the purchase of a nice iron table and four chairs from a flea market that went on our front patio.  We put up a big umbrella (Aldi's for $30) and that was a start but as summer came on it was just too sunny even with the umbrella.

The Modern Home Economist: Good Grooming

One of the things you'd often find in old school Home Economics classes were a few books on 'Charm' which mostly translated as good posture and hygiene with an added emphasis on manners, modest dress and make-up.  I still look for these books when I'm out and about in antique shops or flea markets with copious older books.  I guess because I was that girl in high school, not quite popular, not quite fitting in...so I read any number of these books learning how to care for my nails and teeth and hair; how to stand, sit and walk; how to dress appropriately and choose a wardrobe.  Truth told, at 55 I am sure I owe the quality of my skin today to those forays into 'Charm' books when I was 12 (and 13 and 14 and 15 and 16...).

Why would this have been included in Home Ec classes?  Number 1: Good hygiene equals good health.  Number 2: Healthy hair, nails, teeth and skin, plus good posture truly adds immeasurably to overall health and attractiveness.  Number 3:  Home Ec truly taught that good basic self care equaled a good foundation to building excellence in self as well as skills that built home, family, etc.

The Modern Home Economist: Cooking Lessons

It feels like it's been forever since I put up a Modern Home Economist post...and it has!  But I have a wealth of goodies to share with you.  Today's post is related to cookery.  I've found a number of good articles in the vintage magazines that are truly instructional for some basic cooking and thought we'd start out with a few of those.  I hope to soon figure out how to arrange the Home Ec posts into categories but that might be stretching my technical knowledge!  We'll see.  In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these articles.  I want to start with a link to an article about proper oven use.  I found this around Christmastime and found it very helpful.  I had no idea it took 20 minutes to get an oven up to temperature.  For a few dishes this might not matter so much but it's very important when baking to have the oven at the right temperature before the dish goes into the oven.  Hope you find it as helpful as I did. 

The Modern Home Economist: How to Make a Checkerboard Cake

I don't know about you, but I've always loved to see checkerboard cakes rather than the old fashioned and more common marble cake layers.  There was just something special about seeing a cut cake reveal a checkerboard pattern.  

I've seen specialized pans, but I have a kitchen rule: If it serves only ONE purpose, it doesn't belong.  This rule began way back when I had extremely limited storage space.  It teaches you to be frugal in many ways when you've no place to store things.  Even after moving into a home with plenty of storage I've stuck to my old rules.  They made sense...but checkerboard cakes!

The Modern Home Economist: Cooking Lessons: Steak

 This past week after our visit to the meat market I cooked a steak.  Until I met John I'd never heard of the method of pan-frying a steak.  We'd only ever had it broiled or grilled in my childhood and that's what I did after I married as well.  John showed me how to pan fry a steak and I was pleased as could be because I loathe cleaning up the broiler pan.

I bought a Rib Eye as a special treat for us.  We've eaten mostly sirloins over the past year or so.  The Rib Eye was large enough for three servings.  If you're accustomed to purchasing the thin grocery store steaks you might not realize what a good buy a good large steak is.

Modern Home Economics: How To Bake A Cake

I've been cooking and baking far longer than the average woman my age...and that's a fact.  Mama began teaching me to cook when I was about 7 or 8 years old.  Just at first, she'd prepare a meal and when I came in from school I was to heat things up so they'd be warm when she came in from work. About a year later she would 'talk' me through basic recipes as she worked nearby.  By age 12, she merely informed me of the menu and I prepared the meal from scratch when I got in from school.  A little later, and I was planning the meals and preparing them, too, as well as doing a bit of the summer preserving, canning and freezing. Mama taught me a lot...but she did not teach me to bake and that skill remained woefully unattended until my marriage when I opened my second favorite cookbook ( Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook ca. 1970) and began to attempt various recipes. 

Ten Things I've Learned Watching "Chopped"

Chopped is a competitive program in which chefs compete against one another.  The goal is to make it through appetizer, main dish and dessert rounds, using special ingredients from a mystery basket and the contents of the very well stocked pantry and fridges in the Chopped kitchens.   The ingredients are sometimes exotic, sometimes just crazy and occasionally common ingredients that aren't typically restaurant quality fare.

As I watched this week I realized I've learned a great deal.  Here are a few of them:

The Modern Home Economist - Cooking Lessons - Stretching a Roast

I've seen this type of thing often in older cookbooks and budget-wise books and so when I stumbled upon it in one of the September issues of my vintage magazines, I thought it worth copying and sharing. It's uncommon to buy as large a roast as they might have done back in the day (4-5 pounds).  In fact, good luck finding one this large unless you're shopping at one of the wholesale clubs or having it specially cut for you.

If you happen to be a small family of say just 2-4 this is still viable with the typical roast we might buy today of about 2 pounds in size.  In fact, John and I used this idea not too long ago.  I'd kept a roast whole, planning it as a 'The family is coming to visit, let's have roast' dinner but no one visited during that time frame.  We were hungry for steak but the budget just plain didn't allow any room for steak.  I used a sirloin roast we'd bought and it worked beautifully for shish kebab, a small roast and two steaks.  So be assured you can use another cut of meat.

The Modern Home Economist - Taking Care of Ourselves: Foot Massage

   

It's been a few years since I wore high heels, but my feet ache all the same some days, especially after a day filled to the brim with housekeeping!  This caught my eye in one of the September issues of Woman's Day (1950 I think).  It was John who convinced me to soak my feet in a warm Epsom salt bath when I had had a particularly long day and my feet hurt terribly.  I couldn't believe how just that small thing made them feel so much better.  

Next time I overdo I'll follow all the steps in the tutorial below. 

Modern Home Economics: Sewing Lesson- How To Set A Sleeve

When I began sewing I thought putting in sleeves was the second hardest thing next to zippers.  Well, if I'd had such an easy tutorial as this I'd have found it a good deal easier, let me tell you!  I thought I'd share this find from a 1950's Woman's Day Magazine.  It was tucked back in the How To section and would certainly be worthwhile if you are removing sleeves and refitting.  There's even a small section on how to add a gusset which would help if you have sleeves that are too tight.

The Modern Home Economist - Sewing Lessons

I didn't mean to take such a long break between posts.  I've been busy, though, not just lax, but genuinely busy.  I really hadn't planned to do a post of blog links for this series but I stumbled upon this blog the other day.  Not only does Deby sew, she has a post related to links on sewing and highlights video tutorials in some of her posts.  I thought it really was a great site to tool around and learn a bit about sewing if you're a novice.  http://so-sew-easy.com/http://so-sew-easy.com/

The Modern Home Economist - Altering Winter Coats

I found this feature in a September 1951 Woman's Day.  The title was "If You Can't Make Your Old Coat Do, Make It Over"...Sound familiar?  Right out of our favorite homily: Make It Do or Do Without.  This feature made it clear that you could indeed make your old coat do very well.  I hope when these images are opened they will be larger than they appear here.   I loved this feature which was labeled "Found Money" and appeared in many years of the Woman's Day magazines.  I've another feature where a man's suit clothes are used to outfit a little boy that I mean to share as well.  And there will be other such features to share with you all as I read through these lovely old magazines with so many helpful articles pertaining to the art of homemaking.

The Modern Home Economist - Sewing In the Home

 

 This afternoon as I thumbed through one of the vintage magazines I came across an article about how to buy a sewing machine.  Seems in 1954 the ZigZag sewing machine was a big deal.  If you're my age and not a collector of vintage sewing machines, then you might not be aware that zigzag seams were such a big deal once upon  a time.  Nowadays you'll find even basic machines have a number of zigzag stitches and slightly better ones might have a variety of fancy stitches.  If you're a dedicated seamstress, you might even have a machine that is computerized and embroiders all by it's lonesome once programmed.

The Modern Home Economist - Every Job Is Important

Two things occurred this past week which piqued my interest: a discussion in a group setting about when we seasoned homemakers learned certain tasks related to home making and a stumble upon of videos from the 1940's and 1950's related to 'charm' and 'homemaking' respectively.  It made me stop and think how basic some of that information is...and how untaught it is these days as well.  Our group discussion related to when we learned basic things like shopping for groceries, planning meals, cooking, doing laundry.  It was surprising the number of us who didn't learn these basic  homemaking skills until we were in our own first homes!  Some of us had the privilege of learning to do one or two tasks but not all and by no means did any of us understand  the full import of the job we'd taken on as a homemaker.