We moved to Los Angeles (County) in 1953 from California's Central Coast. It was culture shock for me, but when you're as young as I was, these sorts of shocks fade quickly. I remember the big black high-legged '30s stove we had at the old house but not any cooking done on it. That came later, in Los Angeles, on the Wedgewood stove my mother bought -- along with an old and wheezy Frigidaire, and a new Kenmore automatic washing machine. Before that, she'd used a countertop washer. I remember it, but not the clothes washed in it.
What I remember of cooking in the early '50s was a lot of fried food (chicken, steaks), some things done in a pressure cooker (stew and stuff), boiled vegetables, toast, canned food, mac and cheese made with Velveeta, bacon and eggs, etc. It wasn't fancy, but it was filling.
Recently I came across a cookbook I'd forgotten we had: Ida Bailey Allen's Step-by-Step Picture Cookbook, and I thought about how it presented pretty much the standard kitchen fare of the Post-War, suburbanite era, and how that fare differs from what is presented today. I'll use the television cooking shows such as Cook's Country and America's Test Kitchen as examples.
Let's talk about stoves, first.
In the early '50s, we had one of the Southern California standard gas stoves, a Wedgewood. The other and somewhat fancier standard brands were O'Keeffe and Merit and Gaffers and Sattlers. I'm sure there were others, but those were the ones encountered most often. They were white almost always. Later in the '50s, stoves came in colors, turquoise, yellow, pink and such, but in the early '50s no. I never saw a colored stove until I was practically a teenager.
Ours was white and 30" wide, not a common size in those days. Most were 36" or 40" wide, but today 30" stoves are standard and larger sizes are considered luxurious.
Almost all the stoves I remember in the early '50s were gas; I can recall only one electric stove in a neighbor's house, and the reason why electric stoves weren't popular was that gas was much less expensive than electricity in Southern California. I would see almost all electric stoves in Sacramento in the late '50s because electricity was much cheaper than gas thanks to public ownership of the electric utility.
In the 1952 cook book, the stoves seen are all gas, and all similar to the ones I knew as a child, though they appear to be older, pre-War models.
The standard cookware was Revere Ware copper bottom pots and pans and cast iron skillets. In the cook book a lot of glass pots and pans are used, but most people didn't have them. Bakeware was plated steel or aluminum as well as glass.
There are no microwaves or toaster ovens. No convection ovens (actually they did exist but were considered eccentric). There are three types of coffee makers: percolator, vacuum pots and drip pots (not the Italian espresso pots). No Mr. Coffee and its ilk, no specialty coffee makers, no Keurigs. No food processors or individual serving blenders. Electric small appliances included toasters, percolators, and by the mid '50s there were Waring and Oster blenders, Sunbeam (and a few other brand) stand mixers, as well as electric frypans, corn poppers, and deep fryers, but they weren't really common. We did not have a blender or a mixer (a hand-operated egg beater was good enough), and we didn't usually have a working toaster, either. My mother would toast the bread under the broiler.
I remember we bought unsliced bread and had the man slice it for us at the grocery store on this scary machine with dozens of fast moving blades. We also had meat ground before our eyes for hamburgers. The grocery store we shopped at was small, old, had a wooden floor that creaked, a long meat cabinet, very little frozen food, and a limited selection of fresh fruits and vegetables. I don't remember them ever having fresh fish. The most important thing for my mother was Coca-Cola in 6 oz bottles in an aluminum carrier. She loved Coca-Cola as her drink of choice as she didn't drink coffee (couldn't stand the smell, she said), and she didn't drink alcohol.
One of my favorite dishes as a kid was egg noodles with butter and bread crumbs. I've never seen it in a recipe book and it isn't in Ida's Picture Cook Book. Butter. We always used butter, never margarine. When I was out on my own, I bought margarine because it was so much cheaper than butter, but then by the time I got into senior citizen territory, I switched back to butter, no matter the cost -- and sometimes it's ridiculously expensive.
My mother would not use margarine for the reason that when she was first a housewife in the 1930s, margarine was sold in white blocks (looking like lard or Crisco) with a little squeeze tube of orange coloring that you were supposed to mix with the white stuff to make it yellow to resemble butter. It never really looked like butter and it never tasted like it either. So she always used butter even though it cost so much more. I just prefer it these days.
Gelatin salads were a thing during the '50s -- and well before that, too. We never had them at home, but green jello with carrot shreds was standard fare in school lunch trays. It always struck me as odd, to say the least. Ida has numerous recipes for jelled salads and aspics and various other loaf-pan concoctions that you're pretty much never see today. There's a chopped spaghetti loaf-pan recipe that is boggling. I'm sure it was delicious.
My mother did make Jello as a sweet with or without canned fruit cocktail. I liked the red flavor best.
One of Ida's "chef's tips" is to boil your pasta with a spoonful of oil in the water to keep it from sticking together -- something absolutely verboten these days. Her actual recipe for boiling pasta is interesting though and would probably cause an Italian cook's heart attack: for 8oz of pasta, boil four cups of water (with that spoonful of oil and a dash of salt), add pasta, boil for ten to twelve minutes until the water is all absorbed. No draining, no waste of nutrients. Never heard of it done that way. Similar to rice cooking, I guess.
There are quite a few "foreign" recipes, primarily European (French, German, Italian). No Asian or Mexican that I recall -- so this wasn't a cook book for West Coast and Southwest users -- but there are some Armenian recipes. Hmm. Interesting since Armenians were concentrated in California's Central Valley at the time.
There was no effort at all to duplicate high end restaurant fare at home. More likely, any restaurant you would go to -- even the high-end ones -- would try to duplicate or "elevate" home cooking. That would be their selling point.
I think of the movie "Mildred Pierce" and how successful her restaurant was doing home-style cooking for fancy and ordinary people going out to dinner in Southern California both pre- and post-War. That was an ideal.
One of the places I liked going out to eat at as a child was Clifton's Cafeteria. This was a Southern California institution, and to me, it was like food-heaven. So much variety, all good. All "home-cooking".
Another place I liked going to was El Encanto (I've written about it before) up in the San Gabriel foothills above Azusa. It was not really "home cooking" as it was a well-known road house featuring steaks, and yet what was served was not that different than what you would get at home on a celebratory evening -- steak nicely broiled, baked potato, vegetable (I remember green beans a lot) tossed green salad, shrimp cocktail, roll and butter, dessert (spumoni, often, but pie or cake too).
Nothing fancy. There were fancy restaurants, of course, in Los Angeles (Chasen's and whatnot) yet even their famous dishes were not that exotic. Not difficult or finicky. The food wasn't necessarily fancy at a fancy restaurant in those days, it's was the atmosphere and service you were paying for.
That all seems to be turned upside down these days.
Sometimes I'm astonished at what's being presented on the TV cooking shows, especially Test Kitchen and Cook's Country, as it appears that "standard cooking" has devolved into crazy and decadent specialty cooking in which recipes can take literally days to complete, require endless expensive, hard-to-get ingredients and equipment, and the completed product (thinking baguettes here) can usually be picked up at your local market for a dollar or so.
Just so you can say, "I made this!" Why?
One consistent thing about Ida's recipes and how-to pictures is that they are almost all stress-free, easy to follow and do, they don't take forever, many are very quick using canned or boxed foods combined in clever and easy-to-do ways, and generally speaking don't require exotic ingredients that you have to hunt all over town (or now the internet) to find.
The one ingredient you won't see used today is monosodium glutamate. It was used pretty often back then, and I remember it used in my mother's cooking.
Ida doesn't have any pressure cooker recipes, but I have another '50s cookbook for that. She also doesn't have much in the way of blender recipes, but -- no surprise -- I have an Oster blender cookbook (and blender, too!) from the '50s for that!
She uses food mills (Moulis), choppers and grinders rather than blenders or food processors (which were not available for home use at the time.) Choppers and grinders were available attachments for Sunbeam mixers, but mostly they were hand cranked counter or table-top attachments. (I gave away a complete late '30s Sunbeam mixer outfit when we moved -- all attachments and the jadeite mixing bowls along with the mixer) but we still have a hand-cranked grinder/chopper. We have and use an ancient CuisineArt food processor, too. And several Oster blenders with different blade configurations. They can make some things simpler, but the truth is, they aren't used that often.
There was no Saran Wrap cling film at the time Ida did her picture book. Cellophane was used. There were storage bags and rolls of cellophane wrap; it didn't cling, but could do a fair job of protecting food in the refrigerator or freezer. Various paper wrappings were also available. There was aluminum foil, but tin foil was more common in the early '50s. Aluminum foil was considered a luxury until mid-late '50s when tin foil essentially disappeared.
I think there are plenty of Ida's recipes that I would never try to make or eat. But one of the good things about her 1952 cookbook and others of the era is how down to earth and achievable most of those recipes are, and how creative she and others are with easily obtainable canned and frozen foods. There's no shame in using and cooking with what you can get, in other words. It wasn't that long after wartime rationing had ended after all.
These days, the cooking shows tend to require a major campaign just to acquire the specialty and often very expensive ingredients that you're probably only going to use once and may have to discard a good portion of. And then spend hours or even days in preparation for a dish or product like bread you might serve once and never again. That's why I call it decadent. When it's all for show, not really for eating, and it costs a fortune and takes forever... the point is exactly what?
I started this consideration with a bit about gas ranges of Southern California suburbia in the early '50s. The survivors are treasured these days. To find one and have it restored can be quite a quest -- and can be very expensive. But some of these ranges are still in really good condition and can be picked up for a few hundred dollars. If we ever get around to a major renovation of our kitchen, I'd like it to be '50s style, with one of those Wedgewood or other gas stoves from the era.
The gas ranges that are heavily marketed these days (Wolf, Fisher and Paykel, Le Cornue, etc.) are almost impossibly deluxe and expensive -- I've seen some Le Cornue models well over $100,000. I remember a neighbor woman in the 1990s who bought a restaurant range for home use. It cost about $1000, but she found out she had to have a larger gas line put in to handle the higher BTUs it put out and she had to protect her walls and floor from the extra heat, and she had to put in a more powerful range-hood, and when she'd done all that the cost was up around $3000, which she considered outrageous, but she was happy with the result, she loved the stove, and she cooked constantly. When people can afford to install a $50-100,000 range, though, I kind of doubt they ever cook themselves. They hire someone or they go out to eat.
The stove is there for show and nothing more. I'm pretty sure of that.
I remember one of the presenters on a cooking show saying: "Of course no one has a salamander at home." And I thought, "Well, that's silly. Of course you don't have restaurant equipment at home -- why would you? But guess what? If you have a toaster oven -- which many people do -- you have the home equivalent of a salamander. It doesn't get quite as hot, but if you set it on broil, it does essentially the same thing."
Oh.
A '50s style kitchen would be authentic to our house because what's now the kitchen was an open porch until it was enclosed and made into the kitchen and laundry room in the 1950s during one of this place's periodic remodelings. It needs renovation because of various things that weren't done well back in the day.
Trendy-modern and super-expensive just doesn't fit with this place. So maybe the '50s ideal is the way to go. Just have to remember what it is!
I'll try to get into some of Ida's actual recipes in another post.
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