...at least one young cook... called a home economist at the local utility company and complained that her grocer was unable to supply her with potato jackets!
(From the recipe for "Baked Potatoes".)
"Newlywed Cooking" used to be a standard joke genre. I never have heard why the sweet bride hadn't learned these things before she left home, esp. as cooking required many hands before chopping machines. But what really puzzles me about this quote is - why was the home economist employed by the utility company?
The extension services still do useful New Deal things, e.g. check whether your pressure-cooker is likely to blow up, and I could see a home economist being employed there, possibly covering a toxics hotline as well. Were public utilities conflated with extension services? Did the newfangled electric utilities hire home economists to provide user support for baffling new appliances? might say; or Mechanization Takes Control.
ISBN: 0-672-51831-7
So wrote clew in Cookery. | TrackBackIs this quote from one of the early (maybe even the first) edition? I really want a copy of the very first edition of the Joy of Cooking. I have a geeky fascination with old cookbooks: they offer such tantalizing hints into the domestic/social history of the times.
The copyrights listed for the copy I have run from 1931 through 1975.
My grandmother once went to a home economist's class on how to use the newfangled fitted bottom sheets, and I think that was post-WWII.
Beeton's Household Management went through Distributed Proofreading a while ago, but may still be being postprocessed; it was set with a wild miscellany of fonts and indentations and subheadings, very troubling to turn into plain text. It has, of course, an equal miscellany of practical and social and culinary advice - how many servants of what kinds and at what pay you should have, at any of a range of incomes, and who goes in and out when at formal dinners, etc.