I saw huge and immediate improvement; “your blood pressure is outstanding!” declared a doctor I was seeing for something else. So I had to stick with it.
For a while, this made me grumpy. It wasn’t just that I had to give up my beloved pretzels. Nor that my cooking suddenly tasted bland — you do get used to less salt, mostly. What annoyed was the fantastic inconvenience of it. I had to cook all my meals, whether I had time or not, without resorting to takeout or popping some frozen dumplings in the microwave.
I began to feel sorry for myself. Which was, of course, ridiculous, so I eventually resorted to gratitude instead.
At the age of 10, my grandmother began cooking for a family of six, plus farmhands, using a stove that had no thermostat and frequently needed to be emptied of ashes, then refilled with filthy chunks of coal. Her vegetables had to be picked before they could be washed and chopped; her chickens came from the henhouse, unplucked; her nuts came from the trees in the yard, in shells that had to be cracked with a hammer.
Until my grandmother was old enough to take over, her mother had done the same thing without even the convenience of commercial shortening or sliced bread. Her mother had embarked on her culinary career without so much as Jell-O or corn flakes, and her mother’s mother had started out without double-acting baking powder or a rotary egg-beater.
All this cooking took a great deal of time. In 1900, about 44 man hours — or rather, lady hours — were needed each week to make the meals for a typical middle-class household and then clean up afterward. I, with my food processor and stand mixer and self-cleaning oven, was doing the same in less than 10 hours around a full-time job and feeling put upon because I was spending roughly half an hour more than the typical American household.
And the food I was preparing was in many ways tastier than what my ancestors could manage. Sure, their home-grown fruits and vegetables were delectable, but each was in season for only a few weeks. For longer winter months, they had only a few hardy items from storage, such as potatoes, apples and squash, plus whatever they’d been able to can or dry the previous summer. Cows dried up, fresh meat gave way to salted and smoked — or to alternative proteins such as beans. Undoubtedly, it all got very monotonous before spring returned.
These are useful things to remember as the United States heads into the biggest cooking day of the year: We have so much to be grateful for even before we’re ready to eat.
This is easy to forget when the turkey hasn’t quite defrosted, and you’re out of brown sugar, and your mother-in-law’s sweet potatoes are supposed to cook at 425 while your mother’s green bean casserole requires a gentler 350. But take a breath, look around at your modern kitchen and think: This is going to be the best, easiest Thanksgiving in history.
You didn’t have to kill and pluck a turkey, hand-grind sausage for stuffing, bank a coal stove, shell peas, chip ice from the ice house to set the gelatin salad or do any other tedious and messy task that went into making a holiday dinner in years gone by. From your great-great-grandmother’s point of view, you live in a fairy story where an army of magical mechanical servants helps prepare the feast.
Your meal is also easier on the wallet. In 1915, Chicago grocers were advertising turkeys as low as 28 cents a pound, or about $8.35 a pound in today’s dollars — compared with the average $1.14 Americans pay today for a frozen bird ($2.05 for a fresh one). This is even more striking as a percentage of wages, which averaged $687 for a man in 1915, or about $20,500 in today’s dollars, and for a much longer workweek. Nor is this just some anomaly about turkeys; in that era, food consumed more than one-third of household budgets, compared with about 13 percent today.
Meanwhile, the easiest Thanksgiving ever is also the best because, well, I’m betting there’s some stuff headed for your table that wouldn’t have been available 25 years ago, much less a century back, whether it’s a kale salad or a new cranberry chutney. In addition to mechanical helpers, the fairies brought exotic delicacies your ancestors couldn’t have dreamed of.
Plus, there’s you and the people you love, which is, after all, the most essential ingredient for the best Thanksgiving ever.
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