Cooking for boys and girls
Cheryl Unruh
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
WHILE DOING some Christmas shopping in Town Crier Bookstore, I stumbled upon “Betty Crocker’s Cook Book for Boys and Girls.”
This book is a reproduction of the 1957 cookbook that my brother, Leon, and I had when we were growing up.
Now I don’t know if Leon used the cookbook much, but I tried some of the recipes when I was a batter-licking little girl. I made Black Cat Cookies, Good Kid Cookies, and Raggedy Ann Salad.
With illustrations on nearly every page and many color photographs, the cookbook was and is a great way to teach children about food preparation.
It shows how to set a table, explains how to measure flour and vanilla, and defines terms such as mince, dice, and toss.
It was fun to look at the cookbook again, and see how things were back in the ‘50s. Illustrations show girls wearing dresses and aprons while baking. In the book, a boy says that he made a cake for his father and “Dad said it was keen.”
The cookbook is loaded with pictures of faces. Cookies have faces, cupcakes have faces. Raisin eyes and mouths are placed on pears and peaches.
And Betty Crocker even suggests placing a prune in a bowl of Wheaties and using apple bits to create facial features on the prune. Because when you’re a kid, it really is all about playing with your food.
Maybe the book was published before the widespread use of blenders, or perhaps Betty Crocker didn’t want kids using power tools – because when a drink recipe called for crushed ice, the book said to put ice cubes in a plastic bag, wrap the bag in a newspaper and pound it with a rolling pin or a hammer.
Yes, boys and girls of today, that’s the way we used to cook – with a hammer.
My mother worked outside the home, but she taught my brother and me to be self-reliant. Therefore, we were perfectly capable of feeding ourselves when she was gone or busy.
One snack I relied on was ketchup sandwiches. (Take one slice of white bread, pour on ketchup, fold and eat.)
That recipe wasn’t in the cookbook.
Pop Tarts were invented in 1963 during my childhood but were not a regularly available item at our house. We ate cereal for breakfast; Cap’n Crunch was a favorite, and I liked Sugar Smacks and Alpha-Bits. (Spelling for breakfast, a brilliant idea.)
Mom often boiled eggs for us and left them in the refrigerator.
My brother and I took those hard-boiled eggs to new heights. We climbed onto the kitchen chairs and dropped the eggs to the floor where they landed on their paper towel targets. It worked. The shells cracked. I wasn’t fond of actually eating the eggs, but cracking the shells sure was fun.
When we were old enough to be trusted with fire, Leon and I cooked hot dogs before going to school. In order to cook on our gas stove, we’d take a kitchen match, set it ablaze by sticking it into the pilot light, an open flame in the center of the stove top. Then we turned on the gas and lit the burner with the match.
We fried hot dogs in a skillet and even now I prefer my mine with a little crusty blackness on them rather than eating blandly boiled wieners.
In the mid ‘70s, Mom purchased a microwave oven; we may have been the first family on our block to have one. During a junior high slumber party, part of the entertainment was watching frozen burritos go round and round in the new microwave.
Meal preparation has changed quite a bit in the past 50 years.
Nowadays, I doubt that any kid eats prunes on his Wheaties. I can’t imagine that many girls wear dresses while baking cupcakes. And these days, refrigerators dispense crushed ice, thus eliminating the need for hammers in the kitchen.
Hard-boiled eggs, however, still should be dropped from a height of approximately five feet in order to properly crack their shells.
Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.
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