Saturday in 1961: The Joys of the I Hate to Cook Book

It's been cloudy, windy, uninviting, but at times sunny, today.

Last week I picked the I Hate to Cook Book, published in the US in the early 1960s, out of our pantry bookshelf. It was a present from aunt L. when we lived in Canada, and I already enjoyed it and read it repeatedly then. Satirically written, with easy recipes and a few shockingly ready-made ingredients, it holds up quite well nowadays but also works well as an inverted chronicle of the time it was published — it pricks the bubble of stereotypical mid-20th-century female domesticity.

Heading to the supermarket instead of a street market or a little grocery shop, I picked up two TV dinners as well as ingredients for a 'Cheese and Wine Bake' of cheese and other ingredients on toast, 'Oven Carrots' that are julienned and baked with green onion and butter and seasoning, and an 'Orange and Carrot Salad' of jello with grated carrots.

We postponed the TV dinners to tomorrow, but the cheese and wine bake, and the oven carrots, were well received. We ate them for lunch with Riesling wine and a salad of lettuce, mustardy leaves, violet pansies and other greens that I travelled forward in time for (as surely organic food stores were a rarity or nonentity in 1961).

Mama declined with thanks to eat any of the orange and carrot salad. But a few of us did try it and found it a little underwhelming (it does just taste like jello that happens to have carrot in it for some reason), if anything — not thrillingly terrible.

In terms of hairstyle and clothes, I didn't try exciting experiments in the end. A preparatory attempt at a high ponytail and headband hairstyle, which I performed yesterday evening while uncharacteristically giggling like a schoolgirl instead of an adult woman, ended up looking like a dystopian cross between a punk manqué and a nun who had eccentrically vowed never to pick up a hairbrush again.

In the afternoon I went to the library. Fewer than 15 minutes after I settled in with a book — Aus Menschen werden Leute, aus Mädchen werden Bräute, published by the Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag — the library closed, so I wasn't able to find out much. The book was just detailing the destroyed state of housing and infrastructure in the immediate postwar years. Women were caring for elderly dependents and children while their husbands were kept in prisoner-of-war camps (or dead). In cities, there were especially great challenges: 20% of housing was destroyed, and the gas and water systems often weren't working. The author argues that this role of women wasn't just inspiring woman-power, but also a grim coercion of circumstance.

The descriptions of German cities then, reminded me of western Ukraine nowadays, aside of course from the context that Ukraine isn't a recently fascist state that invaded other countries. Hopefully Ukrainian cities* will be rebuilt sooner; I know that for example the German government has promised to send developmental aid.

*In areas from which the Russian military has withdrawn; of course I remember reading that parts of Luhansk and Donetsk are being actively bombed and repair is temporarily impossible.

Lastly I washed dishes by hand. Aside from that, a little sock-darning, a little embroidery, a load of laundry, and the cooking, and watering my plants, housewifely duties were greatly neglected. Next week I'm hoping to go to a street market again, maybe also the Turkish grocery store, and dive into more Mediterranean recipes from Elizabeth David's cookbook. And maybe I'll dust a few shelves and read Catch-22, The Art of French Cooking, or another book first published in the 60s.