First Day back into the 1930s

Elizabeth is at her look out window and she says that everything looks the same out there.

Inside the house is looking more like the past.

The handles  on the spatula and the egg skillet were different in the 1930s, these would have been Bakelite, a synthetic plastic.  In 1933 polyethylene was accidentally invented and the start of the plastic revolution begun.

I cannot remove everything from our home that was not yet on the market so I put things away and doing my best to simulate the 1930s, mostly concentrating on 1932 at this time because this is where we left off in the last study. It is a good place to transplant ourselves to learn how to live a very simple life.

I encourage all of you to take on a project that you can learn something that you did not know.  Charles and I love doing history studies and this has led us into learning things that we did not know and the benefits has been saving money, and during the 1940s study we lost weight during the rationing.

Once again I want to bring back the book called Clara's Kitchen, Clara Cannucciari. Her grandson Christopher Cannucciari started a youtube channel doing great depression videos and filmed her in the kitchen cooking great depression meals while she was in her early nineties.  

The videos are wonderful and so is her book. Sadly Clara is no longer with us today and thankfully Christopher has left her videos up to enjoy and learn from them. I found Clara the first year that she was doing them and felt like I had lost a family member when she passed away. 

I will link to her videos at the bottom of this post. 

We will be transplanting our horseradish to the large grow tank that we grew swiss chard so that it can have more root space.  I do not want to put it in the ground because I have always heard that it can be quite invasive, especially if the soil is clay. 

To my surprise there are many news articles in the 1930s papers about horseradish and all of the yummy ways of serving horseradish.  Roast beef, fish, veal, ham and oysters are some of the mentioned meats to serve horseradish with.  This has led me to being a bit more attentive to our horseradish plants.

For part of our research we use the old newspapers online, I have a subscription to newspapers and I will be keeping this subscription as long as we continue our history studies.  Our public library has a research room and a microfilm area for the microfilms of the old newspapers.  I used these machines for many years but trying to get on them was getting more difficult and there is a time limit to research.  This is when I decided to subscribe to Newspapers so I could search online at home during covid.  The one thing in the old newspapers that is offensive to me in the historic newspapers is the language used in the past when describing someone of color. I cannot change history but learn from it. 

We reserve our largest bed room (bed Chamber as a term the older adults still used)  in our small house for our guests.  I do use it occasionally for hanging laundry.  It has a half bath so this gives whoever is staying over their own bathroom except to shower which is in the regular bathroom.  I have washstands in the other areas of the house such as the other small guest room or bedroom and even one in the living and dining room we use when company comes. 

There was running water in the cities and towns. Other areas outside of the towns mostly had wells where they hand drew water in the area that we live now.

 Charles and I sleep in the kitchen. Yes, the kitchen. That is in another post on my blog. Since it is just the two of us here, we turned our kitchen and dinning area into a small flat/studio apartment.  We do not have to heat and cool the entire house now that we made this change and it saves us money on our electric.  Charles does not want to move to a bedroom, he said that he has gotten used this and we both like that we are saving money. 

When company comes we just open up.  We use portiers over the doorways (Blankets) to control the temperature and the pets can still walk through to the rooms they want to go in. 

There is more to this story, such as Madge's cats.  

When Charles mother passed away her three cats were without their mommy.  We have kept them as we knew this would be too stressful on them if we rehomed them at their age. Her oldest cat passed away only a few months after her passing.  Our dogs are older dogs and the cats are older and they had never seen a dog, and dogs that had never seen a cat and that did not mix. We had to give up a bedroom for the cats and work things out., so we did.. at this time, we have two cats and two dogs. 

We live in an average home here in the U.S., what you do not see inside our home are many modern items found in homes today such as televisions, gaming consoles, we do not have a dishwasher or microwave and many of the modern small appliances.  We removed those items years ago when we started doing history studies. 

What you do find, is many older items to help us live more like the past.  When living more like the past it does not use as much electricity.  The more we live like the past the more money we save, or another way to look at this is money we do not spend. 

We do have a small electric food processor, they did have some food grinders in the past that were manual.  I have a stick blender for making mayonnaise, they did have manual mayonnaise blenders which do not give the same results and how I know is because I have one of the old ones.  Due to the cost of food, I do not want to waste good oil trying to make it the old way. It is the outcome that we are trying to achieve and making homemade is more like they did in the past. 

We have an old radio, a computer for my blog, a washer, dryer and small fridge, hot water tank.  We will not remove these items, but sometimes we do not use them during a study.  We turned off our hot water for a year during one study. 

This morning I was listening to the radio and the program was about chocolate.   :)

We used a real 1920s icebox for one of our studies however, we could not buy block ice for the icebox.  We had to buy bags of ice and that did not work as well as block ice.  We tried making block ice but everything we did cost money so we stopped using the icebox and went back to a very small fridge.  Again, same purpose and outcome, we need to keep the food cold. Today we do not have train deliveries of block ice and ice deliveries to homes as they did in the past.  I am writing about this so that you know it would be difficult to find block ice unless you live in some large city that has an ice plant. 

Our grocery stores look different today than the stores in the past.  However, food was much the same with the exception of the "many" processed food items.  They did have some processed food such as corn flakes for breakfast.  They had canned food in tins.  

My old catalog's show that they had more items than I ever thought they would have, such as this catalog in 1916.  There are many pages filled with dried fruits and staples and the amount of canned goods is incredible. 

So now we are going back into our study of the 1930s.  What Charles and I, and hopefully some of you, are slowing things down because there is too much turmoil in our life right now with this real time we live.  We all need a better perspective and what better than to learn how the people made it through the great depression years.

We study and learn not about all the horrible things that happened but the good things that happened.  

I will be doing some sewing, and our meals will be changing to help with the increased prices of food.  I will be taking better care of our home so things do not weather too much because it is very expensive to repair.  So time to touch up on things around the home. 

The little things that we do each day that matters.  Mending a rug, patching something that has torn instead of replacing.  We need to save the money that we have now.  This is the time to start doing these things.  

When we turn on the oven, think of what else we can bake for the next day or two or three so we do not waste that electricity or gas fuel.   

This study can be started at any time, it does not matter when you read this.  We are learning how to live a more simple life, each of us on our own.  We can talk about it in the forum or you can just read along in the forum and there will be plenty of wonderful ideas hearing from others of what they are doing or learning.  Thank you all that come through in the forum with your wonderful postings.  We have gotten many good ideas from each other.  

I am starting this and at the same time putting it in your own hands to choose to do none, some or part of the study.  I cannot come into your home and set you like the 1930s.  This is not about what we look like, it is how we do things and how we would make changes in desperate times.  How will we get through this, what do I need to do and start doing to learn, in the process you will start saving.  Think about when you turn that light on or that appliance, how much will this cost me, the kilowatts that we use is what show up on our electric bill and we are fully responsible for that as well as water, and as well as our grocery bill. 

This is not just a me thing, I feel that this is a needed thing to do today and a great place to focus so we can take our place in being the ones that are digging in and taking care of ourselves. If you lost a button on a clothing item, time to get the needle and thread and sew on a new button.

To get ready for my starting the study today on Thursday, May 1, I washed all of my laundry this week and got the laundry situation in order. Now that everything is clean I want to choose my wardrobe and have that ready next week.  

I will choose two day dresses two skirts, three tops, two pants. One garden pants, I must have pants here due to mosquitoes.  Two aprons, a pair of garden shoes, a house shoe, and two pair when leaving the house shoes.  Two summer sleep wear and my robe.  I have my garden sun hat, my baking bonnet, and another summer hat.  This will help an enormous amount with the washing to thin out the wardrobe, wear them more than two times.  This list is most likely more than many people had during the great depression because of the shoes.  

For those that have not watched Clara before I hope you enjoy her videos, her grandson made these for several years and they have been such a gift to us.  She tells stories of living through the great depression while sharing how to cook the many meals they made during the depression.

For those that have watched them, I will happily be watching them again for my study time I have allowed myself during the study.  I have an hour each day to spend on my computer to catch up and research and then back to the old way I go.  I have to use my computer also for this blog. 

The link below to Clara's great depression videos. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXpouL9Q1iY

I hope to see you in the forum to let us know what you are doing to make changes and save money or tell your memories of the past. 

Grandma Donna