Image: Home economics class, 1948. Courtesy Museum History and Industry, Seattle, Washington, Seattle Post Intelligencer Archive, No. P125646.Making the most of leftovers was a common topic in ladies' journals and home economics manuals back in the days when women didn't outnumber men in the workplace. I remember "home ec" being offered in high school but didn't give it a second thought. I took typing or computer programming to satisfy my vocational course requirements. Home ec didn't comport with my AP course load or world view.
I was young and biased. I didn't have historic perspective. And it was the 1980s -- too close to the June Cleaveresque stigma attached to advanced, professionalized domesticity for a would-be neurosurgeon. I did not become a neurosurgeon, by the way. I became a cultural historian and historic preservationist with a strong appreciation for old-school values -- like thrift -- combined with environmental values -- like not wasting stuff, including perfectly good buildings and perfectly good food.
The current drawn-out recession has gotten a lot of historians and journalists busy looking at precedents in the Great Depression. Obama's New Deal type stimulus package drew obvious comparisons. The Chicago Sun Times published this great piece on cooking during the Depression last year:
The author, Leah Zeldes, does a good job of comparing the relative economies of home ec then and now, and sketches a brief but compelling picture of how people made do in the 1930s. She also promotes a book on the topic, Dining During the Depression by Karen Thibideau. The full title pretty much says it all, literally: Dining During the Depression: Strong Family Ties, Hard Work and Good Old Fashioned Cooking Sustained People During the 1930s. Updated recipes included.
During the course of my foraging research, I read about how Depression-era cooks supplemented their diet with dandelion greens and similar -- generally prepared with large amounts of bacon fat. Today, dandelion greens and other foragables are being eaten by people who can afford store-bought greens but use foraged plants because of their extremely high nutritional value. But that's another topic (for more on this, I recommend visiting Linna Ferguson's online foraging 101 slideshow:
I came across the book How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher in the bibliographies of many books about foraging and food, including Susan Allport's The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging and Love (Backinprint.com: Lincoln, NE) 2000, 2003. M. F. K. Fisher was a rock-star food writer in the mid-20th century. The book is a contemporary counterpoint to the dreary gourmand-unfriendly realities of the Depression.
Fisher penned How to Cook a Wolf in 1942, amidst wartime shortages in the US. She and her husband had recently returned from studying in Dijon, and her perspective on wartime American home economics reflects her fresh continental experience.
Fisher's wit cuts through the dull "three squares on a budget" mentality prevalent before and after the war. She notes that the ideal three squares create waste (too much food for an average person). She advocates eating small portions of better quality food throughout the day, supplemented with a good wine if you've got it. She lived a long and prolific life dedicated to artful living and died in a house built for her at a California vineyard.
Sigh. More inspiration for today's economizing foodies. No wonder her books are still in print.
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