Cooking Up Memories

“The Industrial Revolution has turned the home from a productive unit into a consuming maw, and from a nest and refuge to a ‘physical service station,’ a battery of bought conveniences from which individuals recharge themselves with food and sleep.”

--Christina Hardyment

*

Julie Walker collects old cookbooks because they give her a taste of what life was like in the days before microwaves and food processors.

“It’s like reading part of history,” says the 37-year-old Irvine resident. “Nothing is hurried or rushed, whereas today everything is menus-in-a-minute.”

From reading the recipes, Walker has deduced that life in pre-1950s kitchens, while not easy, was less complicated and in many ways more satisfying than today. The recipes, for instance, usually require no more than six ingredients instead of the laundry list of exotic items that cookbooks call for today (ever try to find shiitake mushrooms?).

Back then, baking took time and good-old-fashioned elbow grease. One stirred the ingredients with a spoon instead of hitting the button on a food processor. Fewer fancy utensils were required.

Walker has had to guess her way through many old recipes that don’t follow standard weights and measures; teaspoons and tablespoons were not yet necessities. Many vintage cookbooks don’t list oven temperatures; they simply suggest baking the item in a very hot oven.

Not even Walker is about to give up the conveniences of modern kitchens, with their microwaves, food processors, electric bread makers and other gadgets that have evolved from curiosities to luxuries, and from luxuries to necessities.

*

Yet there’s a nostalgic feeling, shared by her and others who remember kitchens past, that in the rush to mechanization, the kitchen is no longer a center of activity shared by a family, neighbors and hired help but a pit stop of isolated consumption.

Walker’s cookbooks provide a glimpse of how kitchens were once the focus of family and social life. They talk more about entertaining company than modern cookbooks do. They go into detail about how to set a table, “which a lot of people don’t bother with anymore,” Walker says.

In her book “From Mangle to Microwave: The Mechanization of Household Work,” Christina Hardyment says labor-saving devices in the kitchen have had the unintended effect of fostering consumerism over community.

People buy bread, they don’t bake it--unless they have an automatic bread maker. Even then, they no longer need others to pitch in with the kneading, and they’re not as likely to send an extra loaf over to the neighbors.

Visit the kitchen of the 1908 Bennett Ranch House at Heritage Hill in Lake Forest, whose striking features include huge bins that could store up to 100 pounds of flour and sugar. One couldn’t just run to the supermarket for a loaf of bread.

“You made everything,” says Priscilla Hoel, a Heritage Hill docent.

The home’s onetime occupant, Frances Bennett, was known for always having a batch of fresh cookies to share with neighbors. Such simple pleasures, once common, have been lost to busy schedules. Baking bread, butchering meat, brewing beer and other methods of food preparation often involved the help of family members and servants (they were quite common, even in middle-income homes, until World War I, Hardyment says). Not that Hardyment, too, doesn’t see the value of many of today’s modern conveniences:

In her book, she wrote, “Without food processors or convenient little packets from the grocer, even that simplest of puddings, the jelly, meant hard work.

“Improved kitchen plumbing, dishwashers and small kitchen machinery mean that preparing meals can be a swift, undemanding task. In theory at least, the family need no longer be dominated by the old and essential chore of feeding itself.”

Still, when dinner means popping a ready-made meal into the microwave, people miss the smells, tastes and buzz of activity generated in kitchens past.

Mary Colby, an antiques appraiser in San Clemente, has warm memories of her mother’s kitchen. She was born in 1914 and grew up on a dairy farm in Indiana. The kitchen was in a separate room from the house.

“It was a simple kitchen, with cupboards that had holes punched through to circulate air, and an old-fashioned ice box. Ice was brought in every day,” Colby recalls. Her mother, born in the 1880s, cooked on a wood-burning stove.

“I don’t know how she made such beautiful lemon meringue pies,” Colby says.

Her mother used no electrical appliances--just granite ware, measuring cups, a shaker for flour and some hand-operated utensils.

“You should have seen how long it took to make an angel food cake,” says Colby. “We’d beat and beat the egg whites.”

Colby still has a copy of the popular Boston Cooking School Cookbook that her mother, and many other women, used. She appreciates the brevity of the recipes.

The 1930 edition, for instance, describes how to make cottage-fried potatoes: Dice or slice cold boiled potatoes, season with salt and pepper and brown on both sides in a frying pan.

“The recipes were very simple. Now everything requires so many special things you have to have,” Colby says.

*

For many people, cooking today is a solitary activity, but Colby’s mother had plenty of company. Even as a child, Colby would often help out in the kitchen; she still remembers winning a county award for her Parker House rolls. The family also employed a cook.

“Everybody had somebody to cook for them--and we weren’t wealthy,” she says.

With the introduction of the small electric motor in the 1920s, hired cooks were eventually replaced by appliances. Homemakers were eager to acquire machines that, in theory, were designed to make life in the kitchen easier but in practice had mixed results.

The industrial age spawned a huge array of wacky gadgetry. Among the dubious kitchen aids cited by Hardyment: peanut roasters, horseradish scrapers, potato chip cutters, sausage stuffers, raisin seeders and ivory-bladed cucumber slices.

“By the 1930s matters were clearly out of hand, and even the magazines were wearying of trumpeting novelties. . . . Readers were warned not to clutter their kitchens with too many gadgets,” Hardyment writes.

Those gadgets that have proved useful--the toaster, the mixer, the coffee maker, the food processor--set homemakers on the path of conspicuous consumption. To keep them buying, manufacturers made sure that if the appliances didn’t wear out after seven years, they’d ugly out.

Advertisers have convinced consumers that their appliances not only perform, but that they be fashionable. So avocado blenders that still work perfectly end up on the shelves of thrift stores, replaced by more fashionable (for now) white ones.

“The exteriors of machines designed to suit current kitchen fashions are often less durable than the machines themselves: dated colors, broken handles and hinges, chips and cracks in castings, encourage replacement sooner than necessary,” Hardyment writes.

Lillian Kugler, past president of the Tustin Historical Society, grew up in Nebraska during the depression and remembers her family’s simply stocked kitchen.

Her mother cooked on a wood-burning stove that didn’t have a temperature gauge. She didn’t have a refrigerator, only a cellar for keeping food cool. While chefs today often have a library of cookbooks (which are now available on CD-ROM), Kugler’s mother never used one.

“It was always a handful of this or pinch of that,” Kugler says. “I never saw her use a measuring spoon. If the recipe said a spoonful, she’d use a regular spoon. If it called for a cup, she used a teacup. It was just good home cooking.”

Her mother baked a pie every day and made a lot of fried chicken in her cast-iron skillet. Kugler once wrote her mother to ask how she made dill pickles.

“No way could I do it--there were no measurements,” she says.

The family sat down to every meal, and her mother often shared food with the neighbors.

“My mother was always generous about cooking things for people,” she says.

Kugler’s mother died 10 years ago. She never owned a microwave.