It’s a woman’s life in the Frontier Nursing Service of Kentucky. In 1940 they held a cocktail party ON HORSEBACK. And not only that, but Mrs Edwin Allen Locke jumped her horse over a table after four of said cocktails. Rock and very much Roll.
Category: 1900-1949
Categories
How to Make Tea, 1930
So, is this instruction, from “The Essex Cookery Book”, the definitive way to make tea? With tea leaves, of course, old chap.
It seems so simple and yet, if you’re British, getting it right is so bloody important. Otherwise, you’re in the realms of Arthur Dent’s nightmare:
My washing machine is slightly on the blink at the minute. The drying cycle keeps stopping every 20 minutes so you have to keep pushing the button again. And sometimes I forget that I need to do this so it can take hours to get a load dry. Plus, since having a second child my laundry pile has grown so fast! I’m washing every day and yet there’s still a full basket of towels, babygros and felt-tip covered school shirts pretty much all the time.
“Well, boo bloody hoo!” I can hear a 1930s housewife called Elsie saying to me, quite tetchily.
These were the days when you had to have an entire day a week to get your washing sorted – Tuesday is recommended as you’re clearing up after the weekend on a Monday. Soap flakes, blue to get the whites white, cracked hands and all, this is how to do it 1938-style, from Titbits Book of Wrinkles.
Not that they’re grumbling – this is a positive piece emphasising how things have got so much easier for the housewife these days. I dread to think how much harder it must have been before their “labour-savers” were developed. Although reading the piece I’m not entirely sure what they are – soap? A mangle? I remember my Grandma’s mangle, sat on the end of the worktop in her tiny kitchen in Morecambe. I was fascinated by it, and I wish I had it now. But, oh, my RSI-impaired wrist is aching just at the thought of all this effort…
A letter from the Daily Express, 1940, printed in the digest magazine, PTO.
Not entirely sure what would have changed “if only he’d known” in the situation, really though….
Categories
How to Cook Vegetables, 1930
Some possibly useful information on how to cook vegetables from The Essex Cookery Book, 1930.
I’ve never heard of the dark/light theory of cooking vegetables. Vegetables grown in the dark should be cooked in the dark (i.e. covered with a lid) and vice versa, or so it says.
More carrot destruction here with the timings. Not quite as bad as the advice to cook them for two and a half hours from 1910 (see below) but people apparently really liked carrot mush back then. Also – in what universe does it take 15 minutes to cook spinach? You can see why we got our reputation for soggy veg.
Previous post here on Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book from 1910 – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/the-good-the-bad-and-the-calfs-head/
If you look at practically any general cookbook from Victorian times up to the 1940s, you’re likely to find a section that has now entirely fallen by the wayside in modern books – special recipes for the sickroom, often called “Invalid cookery”.
This is the kind of thing:
(This is where I had embedded a video of the Fry and Laurie period sketch on broth vs soup, and which doesn’t exist anymore, and is also not in any of their sketch books. Which is a shame because it sums up invalid cookery perfectly.)
Incidentally, I seem to remember the recipes for Talbot’s Broth and Henry’s Soup actually did appear on Ceefax as mentioned in the sketch.
Now we have Heinz Tomato Soup, Lucozade, and better medicine, perhaps these gently nourishing recipes aren’t needed so much anymore. But I do like the idea of a special menu if you’re unwell. It marks the occasion, in a way. Recipes included gruel in many forms, blackcurrant tea, barley water, invalid custard, toast water and beef tea.
I’ve also got a number of recipes for the slightly alarming-sounding raw beef tea. I haven’t got a certificate in food hygiene admittedly, but this sounds like rather a potential nightmare. I mean, it’s not quite Talbot’s fried bull penis, but still.
Raw Beef Tea
1/4 lb lean beef
1/4 pint water
Few drops of lemon juice
Remove all fat and cut the beef up finely.
Put into the water with the lemon juice.
Let it stand for 6 or 8 hours, pressing beef with a spoon occasionally.
Strain.
Serve in a covered spoon.
This is only given in cases where it could not be assimilated if cooked.
Here’s some more recipes for the sick. Not sure if I’d fancy tripe as the best of times, to be honest, let alone while under the weather.
From Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book, 1910:
From The Liverpool School of Cookery Book, 1902:
From The Essex Cookery Book, 1930:
If you’re interested in this, I’ve previously posted about gruel and how Horlicks is the modern equivalent here – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/vintage-recipes-gruel/
And I’ve tested out the nursery treat of Blackcurrant tea here – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/vintage-recipes-blackcurrant-tea/
Categories
First Drown your Kitten, 1935
Today – some rather upsetting advice from the 1935 Universal Book of Hobbies and Handicrafts on how to kill unwanted kittens. Your choices are either to drown them in a bucket, or by administering chloroform onto their little kitten faces. Chloroform, you say…….hmmm, perhaps a bit of the old Owbridge’s Lung Tonic might do the trick.
From the matter-of-fact way this is described, it seems to be that as far as they were concerned this was the humane thing to do. One of the cats we had when I was a child was rescued by a family friend who discovered a man with a bag of kittens, preparing to drown them in a river. I bet (hope!) there’s not too much cat-drowning happening now.
“A healthy cat can bring up four kittens, but unless you are deliberately breeding cats, you will only want to keep one or two.”
Of course, if a cat accidentally nearly drowns itself, this is the thing to do. You can swing a cat in here apparently.
Categories
Art Butter, 1940
Owbridge’s Lung Tonic was a cure-all preparation invented in 1874 by Hull pharmacist Walter Owbridge. It was advertised as a cough medicine, a remedy for bronchitis, asthma, consumption (tuberculosis) and all manner of other throat, chest and lung afflictions – “It never fails”, or so it claimed.
It had a secret formula, but an archive analysis shows it to have consisted of chloroform, along with honey and alcohol in the form of ipecacuanha wine. Not recommended for babies under 6 months old, but fine after that, apparently.
(This archive text from 1909 is an interesting read on the subject of this and many other ancient pharmaceuticals – “Secret Remedies – What they cost and what they contain“)
They were also keen users of promotional merchandise. This small booklet, Owbridge’s Table Companion, is from 1939 and is designed to help schoolchildren with facts and figures, while advertising their wares.
The section on measurements of all manner of things interests me the most. All the befuddling names for specific amounts used just for that one item. I wonder if the schoolchildren were actually expected to know and remember all this information?
What a fantastic phrase to describe sea-sickness.
I love boats myself, but I do have a tendency to become indifferent to their fate quite badly. Unfortunately, not having a 1930s pharmacy available to me, I can’t try out their cure: