Remembering Kitchen Relationships
In 1984 Ethel Day in Carleton Place, ON. described to the Ottawa Citizen that she still had a 100-year-old meat grinder. Passed down through three generations, the Universal cast meat grinder was used by her grandmother to grind meat, her mother ground peanuts and finally Day herself ground breadcrumbs and anything else laying around.
The Journal of American Appliances declared in 1882:
‘Year by year domestic inventions of every kind are increasing; and no matter whether we desire to clean knives, or make stockings, peel potatoes, black shoes, make butter, wash clothes, stitch dresses, shell peas, or even bake our bread, all we have to do now is turn a handle.’
How times have changed–now all we have to do is “plug it in”. But, what other appliance has stood the test of time like these meat grinders? They don’t make anything like this anymore. When was the last time you bought a small kitchen appliance and expected it to last for a century?
My Grandmother had a meat grinder attached to her back kitchen counter, and I never remember it being put away. I wondered how she cleaned it and if she had an attached hose to the sink, or something to hose it down. God knows the bacteria that was in that thing, and every church or Legion sandwich filling was made in that old grinder. It’s a wonder the town of Cowansville, Quebec didn’t come down with a town-wide salmonella poisoning incident.
She would take what I call her ‘mystery meats’ and make these wonderful sandwich concoctions that I just loved. Church tea? No problem Mary Louise Deller Knight made her famous salmon and chicken sandwiches. Going on a bike ride to Selby Lake? No problem, Grammy would make me a sandwich out of something, and hence, her mystery meats became gourmet sandwiches to me.
In those days Grammy would cook the most wonderful meals– baked beans, brown bread, and lots of roasts and stews. Not to mention delicious cakes, pies and cookies of all kinds. Food just seemed to taste better for some reason when they were cooked on the wood stove. Muffy, their cat, would always be asleep on top of the woodbox, except when I came in and she would hightail it under the stove.
Grammy always had a little clothesline in the corner of the kitchen behind the stove for drying the dish towels washed in MIR soap. It intrigues me that a woman could spend her whole life cooking for generations with few appliances. It’s metaphoric, I suppose. It is amazing what those ladies could create using the most elementary equipment.
I hated MIR dishwashing soap. It wasn’t because it was a bad soap; it probably was very good at what it was advertised for. What I could not stand was sitting at my Grandmother’s tiny kitchen table eating lunch or dinner and staring at the Yellow bottle. ( it came in a few colours) While I ate it stood as a lone sentinel on the side of the sink caked in dry soap. My Grandmother always had the dishes done and the stove stoked, but she never seemed to clean off that bottle– and that bottle looked like a wax candle after a week. As I am writing this I wish I was back in that small South Street kitchen to see these things again: The Jello molds that made her famous jellied salads, the bread box and tin pantry containers full of gosh knows what and her recipe box.
But, the memory that stands forever is the sweat pouring from her brow as she used her hand crank egg beater. I still own a very old egg beater but I don’t own an electric beater anymore – it died. Today, after 4 weeks I got the Tik Tok advertised semi-automatic beater delivered to my mailbox. This mixer has gone viral and it is the hottest thing online. It works with your right hand pressing down on it and to be honest I probably could have gotten my old egg beater out and it would have done the same thing. Bought on Amazon for a mere ten bucks it’s a hand-push mixer designed according to the mechanical principle of the spring and does not require batteries or electricity. There was a lot of laughter and chatter on my Facebook post telling me to post a video which I did. I was egg-cited and I began with a simple egg quiche mix and this week I will try it with cake batter. Did I worry it was going to fly up in my face? I would be lying if I said I wasn’t.
But no egg-cuse and one must get down with one’s bad self, and if this new hand mixer does not work that’s fine. After all, you don’t put all your eggs in one basket or bowl as in this matter. If the going gets rough with this new mixer I will just do as Michael Jackson says:
and…….
“Just Beat it!”
See you next week!!
lindaseccaspina 