We cannot live in the past, but we can resemble them. This is what I believe because it seems to make more sense.
This past week I have been tinkering around through things trying to make this study stick. I am taking my time sorting out the items that were not in the 1930s and thinking about the things that might be actually better for us today. Such as my stick blender, this is what I use to make mayonnaise. I have one of the old crank ones but the mayonnaise is always thin and I am guessing that homemade mayonnaise was probably more like a salad dressing consistency. I feel that we (the "we" is all of us, Charles and I and those of you doing the study) need to go slow and methodical, and hope that after this study that we find ourselves in a much calmer, practical, sensible home and that our budget is to where we can manage the ups and downs that comes with this life going forward.
For those of you just reading along, I hope that these posts will give life a different perspective and help in some way for that is what I want from my blog.
These are our railroad plates. They are small dinner plates and were actually used in the dinning cars of trains. I haven't been dressing this table lately with a tablecloth because I have been working on my tablecloths from stains to mending and I have some that need to be cut more to size.
We plan to stay put in the merged 1930s and 1940s era resembling more like our Grandparents and parents lived. My mother lived through these times and It feels homey and the right place to resemble.
I have been experimenting with a few recipes. This day I made oatmeal raisin cookies.
I did not use any kind of mixer, and just used my wooden spoon to mix the butter, sugar, egg and vanilla, then added the sifted flour, baking soda, and cinnamon and mixed that and then added the oats and raisins. I had to rest a few times but that's okay because it was much more quiet doing it this way and more like they would have done this in the 1930. I do have the hand crank beater, some call it the egg beater but for stiff batter that would be difficult with cookie dough.
The cookies
We have decided that Macaroni and cheese will be one of our go to sides because macaroni and cheese was extremely popular in the 1930s.
I followed the macaroni trail back in the newspapers and in 1912 the newspaper was explaining that macaroni originated in Italy. It was describing what it was and how to rinse it and all about cooking macaroni.
The article explained how it was very good mixed with butter, cream or cheese. The one thing that I do not understand about that article is they called the macaroni "sticks" and mentioned breaking them apart. Only a few years later there was an advertisement from Kraft with canned Macaroni and cheese. So before the 1920s the shape changed.
I can only imagine the taste of the pasta in Italy during these early years with all of the shapes of pasta.
During the casserole time of my earlier years, and still today people baked the macaroni and it was crispy on top. I like it plain, and I make a white sauce and add the cheese and then the cooked and drained macaroni. For the small amount that we make we boil one cup of macaroni in a pot of water, while that is boiling we make the sauce. It is 1 tablespoon of butter, 1 tablespoon of flour, melt and stir, add 1 cup of milk, stir, add 4 ounces of grated cheese. We use a mix of white and cheddar cheese, stir into a creamy sauce. Sometimes add a bit more milk if too thick. then add the drained pasta to the sauce and incorporate the two. I think I already may have told this but here it is again.
This evening I mixed our leftovers from the past few days and made this above. I had saved some chicken broth from chicken I had made and I added the bits of chicken, a bit of pork from a meal, carrots, zucchini, onions, garlic, and macaroni and cheese. The cheese sauce melted away into the broth.
This would be something done in the 1930s and 1940s for sure.
We took our kitchen lavabo and put it on a post in the upper part of the garden to wash our hands. It is nice to have these two water sources to wash our hands out in the garden to get the dirt out from under out nails.
We push up on the spout underneath and the water comes out. I fill it when needed when I am watering the plants. This lavabo is something commonly seen in remote rural areas in Ukraine where they do not have running water. I purchased ours on ebay from a seller in New York.
The vegetables are starting to grow rapidly now. Still just blooms, no veggies and we need the bees to come to our garden. This is very concerning that they are not here but this has happened before and they come when we most need them. Right now, most of the blooms are male blooms so it is not quite time anyway.
The walking onions are doing well.
My absolutely favorite place to stop is the merged lavender and onions.
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The feelers are now latching on from the cucumbers as well as the beans on to the cattle panels so we can grow vertically.
In the 1930s the gardens would have looked much different than this but we need to grow food in our shady back yard at this time and containers are what we have right now. We plan on making ground raised beds in the areas that the pots seem to do well, letting us know that they are getting what they need as far a sunshine.
Our first Zinnia bloom for the year and I hope many to come.
As I said above, I am going slow and still going through clothing. I have pulled aside what I will wear this year. I have been cleaning out closets and drawers so this is what takes so long. I am doing all of this here at the start of the study because if we are doing it together then it will take all of us time.
Charles has been cleaning his small workshop, we also have to stop to garden and cut the grass and take care of the pets. There still is laundry and cooking and dishes, which of course is handwashing and hanging out the laundry outside or inside due to weather.
I am studying the old recipes, budgets, and menus, while taking serious the time that we are actually living here in 2025. I and making sure of what our real time pantry needs but to resemble the 1930s. I am concentrating on making sure to keep our food staples topped off the best we can afford. More basic food means less ingredients, this helps to afford more real food.
Dried fruit, is as important today as it was in the past to use in cooking. This might not be something you normally use but necessary if there are less supplies in the stores. Flour, sugar, dried fruit, powdered and canned milk, yeast, baking powder, soda and salt can make a lot of different types of food.
Our diets have changed through the years and many people try to eat healthy. Now here we are facing possibly something similar to the 1930s. We absolutely hope this does not happen but learning the old ways is not such a bad idea.
But then there is fat. The kind we need to make baked goods and the baked goods is what helps to get through tough times.
Shortening was used during the 1930s for baking and frying. Charles and I have been talking about this lately, we stopped using shortening a long time ago and switched to olive oil and butter. Today, both of these are very expensive.
We are now taking another look at shortening and we did not know that crisco had reformulated their shortening to meet the FDA's requirements of zero trans fat in 2007. So now due to costs and the seriousness of todays world, for our budget we need this in our pantry as did my grandparents and my parents and in my early adult lifetime.
We do not need to be naïve about what is going on today.
We are all at different financial levels but can come to a similar situation of what we can or cannot purchase from an unexpected supply or money shortage.
In the 1930s people of all levels of wealth felt the sting of the great depression but of course those of great wealth. One day they had money and then it all went away. The banks closed they could not get their money out, people did not see this coming so they were not prepared. But, some were prepared because they were already poor and they knew how to get by on what little they had. The higher you are the further you fall.
Then in the second world war when people had been just getting back on their feet from the great depression there was rationing of food and goods. It did not matter if they had money to buy what they wanted, they were not allowed to buy it because the country needed the food to go to the soldiers fighting and the rubber in the tires for the military vehicles. It was rationed, simple as that and people had to make do with what they had. Everyone was asked to grow a garden to help feed their family. Nobody could buy as they pleased, even shoes were rationed. Food staples, canned goods, sugar, coffee were rationed.
We do not know what can happen, our weather for instance is so destructive now. Tornadoes, fires, floods, unusual hail storms, earthquakes are like an epidemic now and these cause shortages too because it ruins crops and destroys homes and businesses.
What I intend to do is to take care of our home, which will take care of us. If you take care of your home it will take care of you, and if they take care of their home it will take care of them, then we will be okay. (In the perfect world)
I would love to hear from you up in the forum on this blog to see what you have been doing since the last post.
Have you been making changes or learning new things since the new 1930s study started?
Have you learned from others in the forum?
If you are not signed up in the forum you can still read the comments. The sign up is to just keep spams out of the forum.
Grandma Donna
