Beacons of a Sensible Diet circa 1915

To keep you warm and give you energy for work, eat energy or fuel foods, potatoes, bread, cereals, corn bread, syrup, and other sugars.

 

To keep your muscles and organs in repair eat a limited and fixed amount of repair foods, meat, eggs, cheese, nuts, flesh foods, peas, beans and lentils.

 

Do not increase the repair foods with increase in work or exposure to cold; increase the fuel foods for further energy.

 

Eat fruit every day. Canned fruits are good. Cooked fruit is often better than fresh fruit.

 

Eat green vegetables whenever you can get them. Thoroughly wash all raw foods.

 

Have plenty of bulky vegetables of low food value, like carrots, parsnips, spinach, turnip, squash and cabbage to stimulate the bowels and give flavor to the diet and prevent over-nourishment.

 

Eat slowly and taste your food well, and it will slide down at the proper time.

 

Do not let any one bring a grouch or a cross feeling to the dinner table; it will upset all the food values.

 

~A Second Course in Homemaking, 1915

 

 

 

October 31, 2011 | | Tags: | Comments Closed

First Aid in the Home circa 1920’s

PLEASE, PLEASE! These are 1920’s tips only meant as interesting reading so please use common sense and current guidelines for first aid.

Cuts: First cleanse with clean boiled water. Then apply iodine or mercurochrome. If cut is deep, apply tight bandage to stop loss of blood, and call the doctor. If iodine is used, do not bandage,or skin will blister.

Burns: Apply sterile solution of cooking soda or boric acid.

Nosebleed: Press root of nose, or under the lip just below and on each side of nostrils. Plug nostril with cotton. Keep quiet. Hold bead high and apply ice locally.

Swallowing Objects: If there is difficulty in breathing,hold child with head down and slap forcibly between shoulder blades. If this fails, gag child by pressing baseof tongue. Do not give laxatives or emetics.

Foreign Bodies in the Eye: Wash out the eye with 2% solution boric acid, or remove foreign body with corner of clean handkerchief. Do not rub. If particle is stubborn,send for a competent eye doctor.

Poisons: Send for physician. When poison is not an acid or strong caustic, induce vomiting with mustard and warm water or by pressing down the base of the tongue. Neutralize poison as soon as possible.

~ A Mother’s Manual 1929

October 24, 2011 | | Tags: , | Comments Closed

Embroidery Stitches

A lady richly  clad  as she, Beautiful exceedingly.
— Coleridge.

 

Did you say you wanted some trimming? Why, of course you do. If you can get lace narrow-enough, overhand it on to the neck and sleeves, and featherstitch a line around the neck, sleeves, and bottom hem to cover the hemming stitches. This would be very nice done in some color,— pink or blue.

Hand embroidery, however, would make pretty trimming, and I am very sure you could mark out the design on the dress, with a lead-pencil, just as I have planned for you to copy from the picture.

Draw first the little five-leaf forget-me-not in the center of the front, then the stem at each side, ending near the top of the shoulder, and add the other flowers  and the leaves.    You might practice this by drawing several times on your paper pattern, so you will be sure it is right, and then if your goods is thin enough, you can lay it over the drawing on the paper (before sewing the garment up), and trace right through.

FRENCH   WORK
Take a needleful of white embroidery cotton, and fill in the petals of the center flower by taking four or five long stitches from the center to the outer edge, then start back at the middle of the flower and take short stitches directly across the others,—the padding stitches,—setting your needle in on the right side line of the petal and bringing it out on the left side line, putting the point of the needle each time exactly on the pattern.

STEM   OR   OUTLINE   STITCH
For the stem stitch, hold the goods firmly between thumb and fingers of your left hand, start from the end of the stem where it would be broken from the plant, and holding this end toward you, take first a couple of short stitches one on top the other (so you will not need a knot), then a stitch twice as long, made by setting the needle in—away from you—and bringing the point out (toward you) close to the previous stitch. The needle must go in and come out every time on the stem line, with the thread left lying on the right side of the marking, and the needle-point on the left side of the line. A little practice will enable you to get a smooth, rope-like stem.
The leaves can be done like the petals, only as they are long and slender, they require but two or three long stitches first for the padding.
Perhaps you might like to scallop the edge of the neck and sleeves instead of trimming the other ways suggested, and if so simply indicate with a pencil mark the neck opening, but do not cut out -until after the embroidery is all done.

October 18, 2011 | | Comments Closed

Nuts in the Household

And no I don’t mean people.

In the housekeeping days of our grandmothers, the idea of nuts as one of human
nature’s daily foods would have been received with alarm , but we are no longer cautioned to eat nuts with salt and discretion , a little of the former but a great deal of the latter “for the stomach’s sake.”

‘Whether the rise of vegetarianism or scientific dietary knowledge is accountable for the
general popularity of nuts in cookery, nut culture as a food product as well as a staple
industry, and nuts in the household, are now factors in modern commercial and home life….

… “He who plants a tree plants hope,” and in regard to pecan-culture, one who knows
says: “The industry is comparatively new, particularly as a commercial enterprise, but
is spreading rapidly. When intelligently handled the indus try is one of the most remunerative agricultural resources, is safe and sure, and an orchard when once well started will continue to return annually its cost, for no one knows how long-probably for two hundred years. Besides, the pecan is a choice nut, valuable for food , is a standard luxury, and no one can doubt the pleasure the young, or old, children have in gathering the ripe nuts in November, when the weather in the South is simply delightful.


Peanuts in their growth are the antithesis to pecans, walnuts, butternuts, chestnuts,
hickorynuts, etc., for they mature under ground. They’re often called the groundnut
or earth-nut.

Nut Recipes

Nut Pastry

Many lovers of pastry have to forego its delights on account of the dyspepsia that
lurks in its wake; others taboo pastry on vegetarian principles. Experiment has shown that excellent pastry for all kinds of pies, tarts and turn-overs, can be made with ground
nuts for shortening instead of lard or other fat. English walnuts, pecans and hickorynuts
give the best results, and they should be mashed in a mortar and then put through a
sieve. Allow one cupful of nuts to one pint of flour, half a teaspoonful of salt, and enough
cold water to moisten for rolling; proceed as with ordinary pie crust.

Puree of Chestnuts

Place fifty chestnuts in a saucepan with a quart of milk , stew until they a re reduced to
a pulp. Drain and press the nuts through a colander. Stir into the pulp two tablespoonfuls of butter, season with salt and pepper. Reheat the milk in which the nuts were cooked, add to it the pulp, one pint of cream and one scant tablespoonful of com starch, dissolved in cold milk; as soon as it comes to a boil remove from the fire. Serve with toasted crackers.

~The Ladies World, 1915

October 10, 2011 | | Tags: , , | Comments Closed

Planning the Menu -The Sunshine Book

A balanced menu plan from the Sunshine Book circa 1920′s

There are two things to be kept in mind in planning the menu.  One, the right grouping of foods, the other, the saving of time.

Every meal should be balanced and should contain a muscle-making food, one or two energy foods, a sweet, a fat or reserve force food, a mineral food, a liquid, some bulky foods, and a protective or vitamine food.

Muscle Makers: Milk, eggs, cheese, nuts, fish, meat, and dried legumes, and all foods largely made up of them. For example, the Cream of Pea Soup, English Monkey, and Baked Beans Mexican Style, given in this book.

Energy Foods: All grain cereals, macaroni, bread,potatoes, all unsweetened Sunshine Biscuits, etc.

Quick Energy Foods: Cakes, desserts, pastry, candies, syrups, all Sunshine Sugar Wafers and Sandwich biscuits like Sunshine Hydrox Advocate Creams, etc.

Fats: All fried foods, fat ham, bacon, cream, salad oils and dressings, and puddings and desserts containing considerable fat.

Bulky and Mineral Foods: All green and bulky vegetables, whole grain cereals, bran, fresh and dried fruits, etc.

Vitamine Foods: Milk, butter, eggs, whole grains, leafy vegetables tomatoes, Citrus fruits.

Dissolvents: All liquids.

To balance a meal choose one muscle-maker, from one to three energy foods (planning the portions accordingly), one or two fats, a quick-energy food (as sugar in coffee, a dessert, marmalade, etc.), at least one bulky food, a vitamine food, and a dissolvent, as water.

But remember to select each meal according to this plan. Then watch the family health increase and the bills decrease. For when the family is rightly nourished the members eat less-it is an unvarying law.

As to the saving of time, try to plan meals that need one kind of cookery-as everything prepared in the oven-or steamed. Select the right ready-to-eat foods to help out your cooking-the correct Sunshine Cookies for dessert-the right cracker for the sandwich, or the soup accompaniment.
Remember that unsweetened Sunshine Biscuits make an excellent base for appetizers, much easier than frying bread-that they are ready for use instead of toast–that they, in short, can take away-at little expense many of your baking hours. Introduce them as true foods-remembering that each one it’s own place. It will not be necessary to explain that you ore serving Sunshine Biscuits for their food value or to save time. Everyone will be delighted with the change and you will be praised for your good taste.

~The Sunshine Book  circa 1920’s

October 3, 2011 | | Tags: , , | Comments Closed