It is January, 1971. It's the first day back at school after the holidays, but there's been a blizzard, and radio station KFAB has pronounced the magic words, beloved by children everywhere, that mean "no school today". I didn't actually hear the words on the radio--Mom came into my bedroom at my usual required wakeup time and told me I could stay in bed. For a natural night person like myself, staying in bed is one of the best parts of a snow day. I respond to this news by blissfully going back to sleep, with visions of a schoolless day, a day all to myself, dancing in my head.
But now it's about 9:30 am or so and I'm ready to get up, or just about. I spend the last few minutes in bed listening to my mom go about her morning routine, a routine I'm normally not privy to because I'm in school. It involves puttering around in the kitchen, listening to the "housewife programs" on radio station KMA, Shenandoah, Iowa. There's Arthur Godfrey, coming in on the network. There's "Swap Shop", a radio swap meet. There's a call-in housewife program presided over by a woman named Billie Burke. But mainly there's "Kitchen Klatter", a program that lasted over 50 years, but could not possibly exist today.
"Kitchen Klatter" was a program for housewives, farm housewives in particular, but there was enough there to interest a suburban housewife like my mom. The "klatter" was the kind of stuff a housewife's best friend might share over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table. Recipes and household hints, of course. But what do housewives mainly talk about when they get together? They talk about their families, of course. And the ladies of "Kitchen Klatter" were all members of a big extended farm family, and they considered their listeners to be honorary members of that family, interested in the latest family news. So the "Kitchen Klatter" program was mainly a radio family newsletter, interspersed at intervals with recipes, household hints, letters from listeners, and pitches for various "Kitchen Klatter" products, including a salad dressing, flavoring extracts, and various laundry products.
All this doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the gestalt that was "Kitchen Klatter". Did I say big, extended family? The "Kitchen Klatter Family" was one huge monster family, with incredibly complex comings and goings, and it was assumed that listeners could identify everybody by name and keep track of it all. It was sort of like "Gasoline Alley" to the max. I never could make sense of it, but my mom seemed to. Of course, my mom had a bunch of rural Iowa cousins to keep track of, so maybe she was used to it. (I would sometimes get those real relatives mixed up with the Kitchen Klatter folks.) And she subscribed to "Kitchen Klatter Magazine", a sort of baseball program for the show, complete with photographs of the major players.
The family stuff didn't really interest me, though, to be honest. What fascinated me were the recipes, done in that unique, measured speech which assumed that the listener was trying frantically to write it all down. They were for things like fancy molded Jell-O salads, casseroles you could take to a potluck, cookies for a fancy tea, and cakes, lots of cakes, made always with Kitchen Klatter Flavorings. I would try to imagine what they must be like to make and what they would taste like. I was fascinated by recipes long before I was allowed to invade the sanctity of my mom's spotless kitchen (me being a far from spotless kid).
And then there were the mail-in offers for a wide array of household gadgets described in glowing terms by the Kitchen Klatter ladies ("I have to tell all of you that this is the best ice-cream scoop I have ever used. I just don't know how I ever got along without it."). All for a few coins and a couple of boxtops from Kitchen Klatter Bleach or Kitchen Klatter Blue Drops, or the inner foil seal from a bottle of Kitchen Klatter Burnt Sugar Flavoring. I love gadgets and I love to get stuff in the mail, so I never understood why my mom didn't send for all of them.
All this "Kitchen Klatter" would mingle with the real kitchen klatter of my mom cleaning up the breakfast dishes, and then maybe cooking something, if she had a holiday to prepare for or a potluck to go to. My mom, like most moms of her time, loved convenience foods, so I wax nostalgic for things like instant mashed potatoes and tuna casserole the way folks of an earlier generation waxed nostalgic for homemade goodies. Maybe, if I was lucky, she would make a cake, from a mix of course, mixing the batter on her big, white ceramic Hamilton Beach electric mixer). Maybe she would consult her big, orange-covered Betty Crocker Cookbook (which I have inherited). Or maybe she would look through her magnetic photo albums full of recipes cut from Women's Day or Family Circle magazines, or from the backs of boxes, bottles, cans, or jars.
Or maybe she would leave her clean kitchen intact, and turn on "As the World Turns" and do the ironing.
Anyway, the point of all this is that all of this comes rushing back to me whenever I find in a junk store one of those little recipe booklets put out by food manufacturers or manufacturers of kitchen appliances. I love those booklets, especially if they are from the 1930s to the 1960s, feature garishly-colored food illustrations, and have a "modern" Kitchen of Tomorrow mindset. So this blog's main feature is a romp through my collection of recipe booklets, though I also hope to touch upon some of my other food-related obsessions.
It's obvious this 20s housewife is proud of her rolls.
These 30s housewives are so cute. I would love to have kitchen curtains made with fabric in this pattern.
This 20s housewife gets her serenity from Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, the sponsor of this booklet.
It takes a lot of Snowdrift shortening to make Depression-era food taste better.
OK, Mommy, I give up! Please don't lock me into your new General Electric refrigerator!
This has to be my all-time favorite recipe booklet housewife. She's pretty, in a girl-next-door kind of way, and she stands beaming with pride, holding the cake she just made with her big ceramic Hamilton Beach electric mixer, just like the one my mom used to have. What more could you want out of life?
This one gets the Sexiest Housewife Award for her low-cut peasant blouse and come-hither look.
Calm down, Grandma! It's just a mixer! Note: The housewife in this one is smartly at home attending to important cooking duties, after punishing her teenaged daughter for staying out after curfew by assigning her to take Grandma shopping. (Sorry about the tape on this one, but that was the original condition of the booklet, and it was too daunting to try to correct in Photoshop.)
Yes, folks, this is what happens to you if you eat too many waffles: the Heartbreak of Wafflization.
