The History of Cake

Infographic by Foodbeast.

Cleaning Vintage & Antique Pieces

Usually, I post vintage tips here from various old publications; but here are some articles I've written recently about how to best clean vintage and antique items today:

* How to clean antique wooden furniture

* How to clean old glass bottles

(Don't worry, scanning will resume shortly!)

Tips On Baking With Fats, Liquids, and Clabbering Sweet Milk

Some tips on baking from Successful Baking For Flavor & Texture by Martha Lee Anderson, copyright 1937, Church & Dwight Company. I find these tips worthy of transcribing from the image text:

Fats. Solid fats can be used interchangeably. Melted fats or oils should not be used in recipes specifying creaming of the shortening.

Liquid. The use of citrus fruit juices, lemon and orange, is the most recent accompaniment with sweet milk and baking soda for leavening. With the health-giving qualities, this new use for fruit juices in baking is widely accepted.

Sweet milk may be used in place of sour milk if clabbered artificially. To sour or clabber sweet milk quickly, place 1 1/2 tablespoonfuls of lemon juice or 1 1/3 tablespoonfuls of vinegar (white vinegar makes a whiter product) in a standard measuring cup, then fill to the one-cup mark with sweet milk. Mix well. The resulting liquid will contain as much acid as natural sour milk or buttermilk when it is at its best for baking and may be used exactly as natural sour milk or buttermilk in any baking soda recipe.

Gingerbread House Recipe & Pattern

Pages inside the Christmas Cooky Book from Wisconsin Electric Power Company; circa 1960s.

Facts About Disinfecting, Baking Soda & Other Natural Cleansers

While baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) is an excellent and safe household cleaner, there are some things you should know about it -- and other household cleaners.

Baking soda is not officially a disinfectant; it has not been rated as such by the EPA and it is known to generally not be effective against bacteria, including salmonella, E. coli. and staphylococcus. (Neither is vinegar, by the way; though the 5% acetic acid in vinegar does kill some bacteria and viruses, it does not, for example, kill staphylococcus.) However, regular cleaning and good-old-fashioned elbow-grease will address most household cleaning concerns -- including with simple baking soda, vinegar, and basic soap and hot water.

In fact, even when there are flu outbreaks, reasons to fear bacterial infections, persons with weak immune systems in the home, and other reasons to really be concerned, a good scrubbing with simple cleansers and hot water are the place to start. While you do want to remove the dirt and avoid the perfect conditions for bad things to grow in, you don't want to over-strip our world from the good stuff -- the good bacterias which naturally keep the bad bacterias at bay. And even when bad stuff is present, you have to scrub away the dirt to get to the bad stuff itself.

For example, a recent study found that one of the difficulties in disinfecting salmonella was in getting past the biofilms. In the study, rice vinegar just couldn't get past the biofilms (the slimy stuff that forms in wet or humid conditions) to disinfect as well as expected. In other words, scrub that cutting board good and hard using hot soapy water -- and then, if you feel it's warranted, apply the disinfectant. It's similar to how vegetables need to be scrubbed to really remove the pesticides.

You might not want to believe me. But how about believing Professor Peter Collignon?

Collignon is the Director of the Infectious Diseases Unit and Microbiology at the Canberra Hospital, a Professor at the Medical School of the Australian National University, and a member of the World Health Organization's Advisory Group on Integrated Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance (AGISAR). Here's what he has to say on the subject in Clean-freak nation:

"The basic good hygiene your mother and grandmother would teach you, washing your hands thoroughly with warm water and soap, is normally enough," [Collignon] says. "But in high-risk situations, alcohol hand rubs are useful and effective. In the kitchen, too, alcohol cleaners are handy, but that doesn't replace good food-handling practices such as proper preparation, refrigeration, no cross-contamination and thorough cooking. And it certainly doesn't mean that if your hands are clean you can eat what you like without a risk of food poisoning. The best thing for killing bugs in food is heating them."

In another interview, Collignon said:

You've got to clean the surface first and that's usually enough. Then you have to ask yourself whether you need to disinfect at all. For the kitchen sink, for example, you probably don't need anything except cleaning. ...We over-use chemicals. Instead of using one unit, we use 1000 units, and the benefits are marginal. All of us would like to use a magic potion so that we don't have to use the elbow grease. But that's a false premise.

Yes, over-use of chemicals -- including disinfectants -- is part of the antibiotic-resistant superbug problem

If and when you are concerned by flu, virus, bacteria and other such outbreaks (and you can keep up with them at the outbreaks page at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC website), you can then add official disinfectants to your cleaning. Bleach is a good standard; and Seventh Generation makes a line of disinfectant products which uses botanicals to kill over 99.99% of household germs, including Influenza A viruses (such as H1N1, Rhinovirus type 37 aka the Common Cold virus), Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella enterica, Escherichia coli, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

In most cases, scrubbing with baking soda or soap with hot water is enough. If you want to follow that up with some vinegar on cutting boards and counter tops, that's fine; if you have a real reason to worry, follow your scrubbing with a stronger disinfectant. But most of us do not need to do this every time we clean the kitchen or bathroom.

Easy & Inexpensive Snack Sandwiches

These recipes are from The Way To His Heart “A Cookbook with a Personality”, copyright 1941, Priscilla Wayne Sprague, published by Western Grocer Company (makers of Jack Sprat Foods). Details on the cookbook and its history is here.

Vintage Cleaning With Baking Soda Tips

In Successful Baking For Flavor & Texture by Martha Lee Anderson (copyright 1937, Church & Dwight Company), there are many tips for using baking soda for household cleaning. Polishing, cleaning, and sweetening (odor removal), are among the uses. This list of tips is probably no real surprise, as Church & Dwight are makers of baking sodas like Arm & Hammer.

Raisin Rock Cookies

A recipe from Successful Baking For Flavor & Texture by Martha Lee Anderson, copyright 1937, Church & Dwight Company (makers of Arm & Hammer and Cow Brand baking sodas).

Pretty Stenciled Pie Crusts

From the September 1978 issue of Decorating & Craft Ideas Magazine, which has the stencil patterns, pie crust recipes, as well as recipes for fruit pies and vegetable and beef pies, and how-to information. Confident cooks can just be inspired to paint their own pies with with egg yolk and food coloring.

How To Remove Stains From Marble (And Info On Soft & Hard Soaps)

Tips from Godey’s Lady’s Book, January 1855:

Method 1 – Mix equal quantities of fresh spirit of vitriol and lemon-juice in a bottle; shake well; wet the spots, and in a few minutes rub with a soft rag until they disappear. Another mode is to sponge the spots with a weak solution of muriatic acid or aquafortis.

Method 2 – If the marble be stained with oils, mix soft soap, fuller’s earth, and hot water into a paste; cover the spots with the paste, and let it dry on. The next day scour it off with soft or yellow soap.

Method 3 – Boil half, a pound of soft soap in a quart of water, very slowly, until the water is reduced to a pint. Apply this in the same manner as the preceding.

You'll see that I added some links to help you; but here are a few other notes.

Regarding "soft soap," as it was in the 1800s: Soft soap is traditionally discussed as that made simply by omitting the salt from your soap recipe process, keeping the soap in a jelly-like state. Soap with salt creates the "hard soap" most of us are familiar with. However, many soap makers will also tell you that the firmness of a soap will also depend upon the type of grease or fat used to make it. Hard soaps come from "hard fats." Hard fats are those which melt at a higher temperature: beef, goat, sheep and lamb. "Soft fats", those which melt at lower temperatures, such as chicken or pork, will soften your soap -- even if only used in combination with other, harder, fats. "Yellow soap" is a hard soap made from tallow (fat from cattle and sheep) and resin (salts).

Why two kinds of soap? Different uses -- which are largely based on thrift. Since you can control (and so spare) the amount of soft soap taken from the barrel or jar stored in, soft soap is ideal for spot cleaning like stain removal. Soft soaps were also often used for washing dishes and floors because you could rather easily guesstimate the amount of soap needed and only put that much in the bucket -- and, because soft soaps dissolve easier than hard soaps, you don't wait long for the soap to be ready to use. Hard or bar soaps are best used for bathing, where the hard soap takes longer to break down and so lasts through however long it is put to use in the bath or shower. Hard soaps were also used for laundry for similar reasons; one bar to last for a longer amount of time, still leaving you with soap when the chore is finished.

There's no reason why you couldn't try soap jelly or other thrifty soap tips. However, if you want a more historically authentic experience, check out Grandpappy's Homemade Soap Recipes. Also, if you've been thinking of using your leftover bacon grease to make soap, you might want to read this first.

Simple Table Setting Ideas

These photos were found in an article entitled Sit Down to Handmade Table Settings inside the October 1980 issue of Decorating & Craft Ideas magazine. Since the holidays are nearly upon us, and entertaining is ever-certain at holiday times, I thought these were pretty nifty.

The first idea is to use a large pottery bowl as an ice bucket. On large tables, you can have several of these with individual bottles for guests. (Also a great game day idea!)

The second idea is to use wooden chopping blocks or bread boards as placemats.This would be ingenious any time of the year -- especially when reheating leftovers in the microwave. I remember my grandma using wooden boards to carry casseroles and hotdishes out to the table; using individual ones for carrying and serving food on plates from the microwave is the same idea. And wooden boards are not only very stable to carry, they are easy to clean, economical to reuse, and most often considered the healthier choice. (Wood cutting boards are also easier on your knives.)