The Mighty Potato

I love potatoes.

I have an unnatural obsession with them.

On a personal note, this all started two years ago when I had to write a short play based on a recipe for french fries which became a multi-country/multi-era riff on the history of the potato - The Potato Play: A Brief & Innacurate History - and just about every project I've worked on since has been connected in some way to the potato. In fact, The Potato Play was produced this past September at a potato-themed fundraiser in England (the U.N. named 2008 the Year of the Potato) and I just received an apron with potatoes on it as a thank-you for the rights to the play.

But I digress. I am back with Mabel and am looking at her recipes. She opens her chapter on vegetables with, naturally, the potato.

She writes:

Why is potato so valuable a food?
1. It is easy to cultivate.
2. It can be kept through the winter.
3. It is easy to prepare as a food.
4. Potatoes give us the needed bulk rather than any large amount of nutritive value. Because potatoes lack protein they should be used with meat or fish or eggs in combination with milk and cheese. Potatoes are cheaper when bought by the quantity, and as they keep well, should not be purchased in small amounts unless necessary.

Even in 1917 they were advocating for potato skins!
"...if we peel a potato before boiling it we lose a great deal of this good mineral matter with the peeling."

There are a number of recipes for potatoes along with tips on how to rejuvinate old potatoes. Recipes include:
Baked Potato
Browned Potatoes
Baked Creamed Potatoes (use leftover potatoes!)
Mashed Potatoes
Rivc Potatoes (using a potato-ricer)
Creamed Potatoes with Cheese
Fried Potatoes
Another Creamed Potatoes with Cheese
Potato Pancake

A Note From Mabel

Thanks once again to the power of google, I stumbled upon a blog which had a link to a home-keeping guide from 1917: "The Home and Its Management: A Handbook in Homemaking, With 300 Inexpensive Cooking Receipts" by Mabel Hyde Kittredge. As you might imagine, it is a treasure trove of information, advice and insight into the life of an early 20th century housewife, so I'll provide the link to the full document (with illustrations!) here. But read on for a few gems I've culled:

On hiring staff:

[Having a servant or staff] does not mean that the work connected with homes are tasks for which any woman is too fine and so hires a person to do the work for her. It means (or should mean) that in many homes there are too many things for one woman to do, especially in homes where children are to be cared for.

On the rights of servants:

A servant is less protected by law than any other business woman. Thirty-nine states have laws limiting the working hours of women in factories and stores. In only nineteen are women workers in hotels and restaurants included; in only five are public institution servants protected; and in no State are the servants in our homes protected by law. They are obliged to work as many hours as the head of the house directs, or give up the place.

On how to treat servants:

Do not ask any woman to perform for you any labor that hurts her dignity or any act that each individual should do for herself. Never address a servant with anger or as if she belonged to you. Show all employees the same courtesy you expect from them. Remember that you make them just as angry as they make you; you probably seem unreasonable and at times stupid.

Her chapter on the dining room is filled with etiquette lessons, both for the servants (meal preparation, table setting, cleaning) and household member. She closes her chapter with a quote by Booker T. Washington:

See to it that a certain ceremony, a certain importance, be attached to the partaking of food.

Words for us to all live by!

More on Mabel soon.....

Entertainment on the Lower East Side

The Organ Grinder

Postcards from the Past

I have been fascinated by every image I have seen of the Lower East Side in the early 1900's. But it's strange to think that the photos are, in some cases, less than 100 years old. Perhaps that's why there is something both familiar and intimate about them, as well as foreign and incomprehensible. Here are some postcard images shared with me by a friend's mom.

Enjoy!


Delancey Street (btwn Suffolk & Rivington, 1908

If you look closely at the sign, it reads" Extra News! A Great Bankruptcy (Sale?)" and below "Come In and Convince Yourself!"




Orchard & Hester Streets, 1905.

I really need to print these out and get a magnifying glass. I wonder what the woman in the lower lefthand corner is carrying - a basket full of flowers? Or I suppose it could be live fowl! I also love the little girl playing in the street.


Thanks Jesse & mom!

The Ebay Connection

It really is amazing what you can find on ebay. I was searching for items for potential props and set pieces and for the heck of it did a search for pushcarts and check out what I found. Click on the image and a new, larger image should appear so.



It's a whole article on pushcarts in NYC's Lower East Side. Most intriguingly, only the first three pages of this feature article is shown on the ebay listing and the third page ends with a classification of the pushcart community:

"The Americans sell lunches, the Greeks fruit and ice cream almost exclusively, while the Italians widen the list by adding vegetables. But the Jew-"

And there it ends! Doh!

The Cost of Living

To understand this crisis, it is essential to put the numbers into context.

Scholar Dana Frank notes that the women involved in the riots were not the poorest (though they were surely still below the poverty line and those who were the poorest were certainly affected even more dramatically). Their husbands earned between $10 and $15/wk. A Mrs. Ida Markowitz told a reporter that she supported 5 children on $10/wk. Another woman, Elizabeth Broslin, said that she had only $4 a week on which to feed herself and her four children.

So, at the low end of the scale, a monthly income would be $40 and on the high end, it would be $60.

In cost of living surveys from the early 1900s, it was revealed that immigrant families broke down their income thusly:

30% rent
40% food
30% everything else (clothing, washing, materials, fuel, light, medical services, insurance, recreation)

And of course, this is just one estimate. Others place food costs at 40-60% of monthly income.

It is also important to remember that women shopped for food nearly every day. There was not place to store food aside from perhaps one small shelf -- refrigerators were a newfangled idea and far too expensive to actually own. So not only were these women on very tight budgets but they knew exactly how much each item on their grocery list cost and were acutely aware of any changes in price.

Consider that at one point, people were buying "loose" (or unbottled) milk $0.01 or $0.02 at a time!

Food for War

I found this image courtesy Flickr via the US Library of Congress. According to the author of the post, this is the translation:

Food will win the war - You came here seeking freedom, now you must help to preserve it - Wheat is needed for the allies - waste nothing.

Just a month after the immigrant housewives earned lower prices through riots and boycotts, the U.S. entered WWI, effectively raising prices again and, as this poster shows, making food even more of a commodity.