I filched the picture above from Shorpy. Anyone who's interested in photos from times gone by should bookmark and spend plenty of time paging through the site's collection of photos from many sources, including his own family. Consider joining and contributing your own pictures of the past. (Note on Shorpy: Shorpy is the name of the site, from the nickname of a boy coal miner from Alabama who is pictured in the right-hand column of the site. The blogger is "Dave".)
At any event, the picture looks like it was taken in a tenement kitchen in New York, c.1910, where Mrs Hyde Kittredge's lessons in tenement housekeeping were held and from which the lessons in "Housekeeping Notes" have been derived.
The coal range on the left looks properly blacked, and no doubt all the dampers and draughts and checks have been adjusted properly. The girl is getting hot water from the kettle kept constantly on the stove. On the right are the covered laundry tubs. There will be lessons about doing the wash in your tenement anon.
The table is covered with newspaper, and we will find Mrs. Hyde Kittredge recommending newspaper for all kinds of uses in the tenement kitchen, from wiping off the stove, to covering the kitchen table when recipes are being prepared, to polishing glassware. Did average tenement households have that much newspaper around?
Staples are kept in glass jars on the shelves above the table. This is one of Mrs. Hyde Kittredge's recommendations. The jars are vermin and dust proof, both inherent problems of tenement living. The girl on the right is getting down the powdered sugar. The girl on the left is getting down the jar of corn starch. Next to the corn starch is a jar of beans. Next to that, a jar of brown sugar. The next jar appears to be unlabeled, but I'm sure the contents are known to the students. Next to that jar is one of oatmeal. That takes forty minutes to cook on your nicely blacked range in a double boiler. The next jar is coffee, but I can't make out the label on the next jar. (Note: I downloaded a fullsize .tif version of the picture from the Library of Congress -- where this collection is housed -- and by zooming in, many of the details of the scene are quite clear.) The jar next to that one has corn meal in it, powdered sugar next to that. Not sure what's in the next jar, but the cans and boxes on the shelf include pure white pepper, White Rose Gelatine, baking powder (can't quite make out the brand, possibly "Star"), and big cans of Breakfast Cocoa.
On the shelf above there appears to be a bottle of cooking wine (!), a can of olive oil, a jar of matches, a can of tomatoes, various cooking pots and casseroles, and a tin box that may have been for crackers.
There's what looks like a portable stove-top oven on the shelf above the range. If the tenement had a gas hotplate, the presence of the portable oven might make more sense, but maybe the students were to be trained on its use, on the assumption that their own tenement homes may have or need one.
Various sized iron pots are hung from a nail beside the stove, and there appear to be either menus or task-assignments tacked to the wall next to the stove. There's a newspaper in a cloth bag hung on the door on the left. There's an aluminum pot hung below the shelf over the table. I'm sure it's a prized possession. It looks like it has never been used. There are various granite ware and chipped enamel pots, including a coffee pot, hung from the shelf along with a number of utensils.
The door on the right has illustrated instructions for housekeeping duties tacked to it. Some of it that I can make out include making a bed, taking care of a sick person, and staining and finishing furniture.
The girls are very neatly dressed and coiffed, though some of their shoes appear worn. They are wearing matching gingham aprons, but the aprons are not tied, so maybe they aren't real students, and they aren't actually making anything. Hm. Could it be a staged photo?
The teacher is surprisingly young, maybe only in her teens, and is very neatly turned out.
This is the setting in which our next lesson, "Washing the Kitchen Table", is offered.
OK. On the door on the right, there's a whole sheaf of what could be typed instructions for this and that housekeeping operation hanging from a pair of hooks. I bet kitchen table cleaning is among them.
You need a pan of hot water, two towels, a scrub brush (probably not the one you use on the floor, but that's not clear), Sapolio and/or Dutch Cleanser (what, no Bon Ami?) and your newspaper now burning in the stove -- we'll assume. The process is not as bad as I thought it would be, and if the student always covers the table with newspaper before she attempts a task, the table should be fairly clean when she starts. Except for the coal dust, of course, which is going to be everywhere.
Whew!
Then you rest? By no means. Your cereal has been merrily bubbling away in the double boiler on the stove for the last forty minutes.
Think all you have to do is wring out the towels in the sink? No. Think again.
You have a "towel pan?" Didn't know that, did you? And then you need another pan to rinse them in, and by now you really need a much bigger kettle for hot water. Remember, there is no piped hot water in the building. Every drop you use has to be heated on the stove.
You hang your towels up on the rack. Which is where? You'll note the tenement kitchen in the picture is very small, and there doesn't appear to be a towel rack in view. Maybe it's behind the photographer. Maybe you could throw them over the back of a chair next to the stove. And where's that wash boiler?
And you've only just begun.
Mrs. Hyde Kittredge takes pains to urge that these lessons be given in a spirit of constant interest and even fun. Hard to imagine. Especially when this is the easy part...
More to come.
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