Depression Era Frugality

[Rosie]

Rosie~my mom still does the whole 'oil/grease' saving thing to this day. Remnants of her growing up poor. But I will say that it gives the food you cook in it much more flavor. Although I can only stand to eat her fried chicken in it....lol

lol This too was his justification for saving oil. "It gives food flavor" he always said. Also, both my parents always said old oil heated faster and more evenly than new oil. [huh]

 

[Marc Chevalier]

But doesn't old oil go rancid? The fats in oils do break down, don't they?

.

 

[Rosie]

the rubber bands dropped by postie,

I ALWAYS keep the rubber bands dropped by the mail carrier, she drops a bunch of them in my yard everyday and hey, they're free.

 

[Rosie]

But doesn't old oil go rancid? The fats in oils do break down, don't they?

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After cooking, let the oil sit and get cool, the fat and oil seperate. Then, get a used Maxwell House can and voila, oil to last forever and ever. lol You'll save pennies a year.

 

[Marc Chevalier]

Very cool! Thanks ... I'll finally have pennies.

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[Lincsong]

Let's see; washing plastic forks and knives, using the plastic bowls from Cool Whip, aluminium pie plates etc., none of the reusing paper towels. That's a new one.lol

 

[Story]

We could use people like these when the next worldwide catastrophe comes. Unfortunately, they'll probably all be gone by then ...
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Ye jest, and yet what scavenging/salvaging skills would come in useful in a Katrina scenario (when basic services are out for at least three months and the normal commercial supply routes are impassable for at least one month)?

We are truely a wasteful nation, all one has to do is be observant on any given trash day.

Peripheral reading for motivated individuals -

http://clallam.wsu.edu/waterquality/topic6.html

http://www.planetpals.com/booklist.html

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1559500883/002-8367730-1023228?v=glance&n=283155

 

[Story]

More reading for the truely motivated -

http://www.google.com/search?hs=kuK...ut,+make+it+do,+do+without+poster&btnG=Search

 

[Marc Chevalier]

In any society, Depression-era or no, the very poor are the greatest recyclers and the most resourceful inventors. Their "wartime" tends to go on and on.


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[magneto]

...hey, if you haven't had potatoes and/or greens fried in saved bacon grease and duck fat, you haven't *lived*
(All these are courtesy of my ancestors): I wash and reuse tinfoil and plastic things...when I had a fireplace I would make "newspaper logs" out of junk mail...I have about 5,000 small bundles of twine and string...er, that's enough.

 

[Marc Chevalier]

Don't know if it's frugality or what that makes folks keep certain foods for years and years. Or do people just forget that they have the stuff? My own mom kept a can of chocolate-covered ants (yes, ants) for nearly 30 years.

Some visitor to the 1939 New York World's Fair couldn't see fit to part with this:

http://cgi.ebay.com/1939-N-Y-Worlds...92QQihZ014QQcategoryZ4168QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem


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[HistWardrobe]

make do and mend

I'm moderately frugal - I DO wash out and save plastic tubs like from Oxyclean, etc (why BUY Tupperware?) and also rinse out & reuse zip-lock baggies and tinfoil if they didn't have anything gross in or on them, and re-use tea bags if they're the English kind that are good for more than one cuppa. Oh, and I save the free rubber bands from the postman / paperboy. And I cut up favorite old cotton print clothes and use them for quilting, rag rugs and the like. Being in the wardrobe business, empty bread bags are a great way to sort out one's vintage shoe collection == wrap them in archival tissue first so they don't get moisture condensation. And the plastic-lidded cardboard boxes that "Greenies" dog treats come in are great for storing "smalls" like belt buckles. Sigh, all those years of reading Hints from Heloise....

However, when I lived in England, my late mother in law (b. 1920), "land girl" and housewife of the WW2 generation, thought I was a wildly extravagant wastrel who was bound to bankrupt her frugal son. (and this was BEFORE Ebay was invented....).

Moving to England in the early 80s was less like moving to a foreign country than it was like moving back to the 1950s. Bottled milk and doorstep delivery! Non-homogenized milk where you could use the "top of the milk" as a lighter alternative to cream. A whole bunch of people who thought that (1) central heating was a luxury and for sissies (2) fire places with wood or coal-burning fires for atmosphere were wasteful ("why dont you install a nice 2 bar electric fire, dearie?") (Answer: I am American. My fireplace in this neat Victorian house is for CHARM and ATMOSPHERE. When I want to keep warm, I turn on the central heating!!!)

My late mother in law seldom used paper towels (and dried them out and re-used them when she could), used rags to clean her countertops instead of sponges from the store and initiated me in the mysteries of boiling linen tea towels on the stove top.

She was a big saver of cooking grease - bacon, beef, etc etc. Yuk, rancid grease - a bit ingredient in victory garden era British cooking.

She used to DARN her nylons, creating little flesh colored wart-like lumps where the incipient runs had been. And she was a great turner of collars and cuffs, something I've never quite seen the sense of. My idea of frugal is that if a shirt gets too worn to wear for "best" it becomes your knock-around shirt, until demoted to painting the house shirt...

She had enough rags saved up to provide for about six households forever. Occasionally she'd part with a few for the rag and bone man.

Caledonia - when I lived in south London (Lambeth North / Walcot Square) as late as the mid 1990s we still had a rag and bone man who drove a horse-drawn cart and called out for "any old iron?". He was ancient then and he's probably now gone to rags and bones himself. Last relic of a vanished era?

 

[The Reno Kid]

When I was growing up, there was always a coffee can (MJB) on the back of the stove filled with bacon grease. I didn't realize until I was in my teens that you could fry food in anything else (except for deep-frying). Whenever we had bacon for breakfast, the grease would go into the can while it was still liquid. If you wanted to fry some potatoes or something, you just scooped some grease out of the can and plopped it in the skillet. It was yummy!

Also, we always had a large vegetable garden. At the end of the summer, my mother would spend about a week canning beans, corn, etc. She also made most of our pickles, relish, and stuff like that. We stored it all in a root cellar with a bin full of potatoes. It usually lasted through the whole winter.

My grandmother always had a rag bag and when it had enough rags in it, she would tear them into strips and braid them into rugs. You have to pay top dollar for those today and the quality isn't even close. She also had a jar that she filled with rose petals. The first time I saw it, I thought she was keeping a jar full of dirt on her dresser. But she explained that she used it to make sachets that she kept with all her clothes. The smell was heavenly. I had always wondered why my grandmother always smelled so good because I knew she didn't wear perfume.

There's more, but space (and time) is limited.

 

[Raegan]

My grandma saves bacon drippings to use in cooking and when I remind her of how unhealthy it is for them to be eating all that food fried in grease my grandpa always has to tell me about how when he was a kid, his lunch was a lard and black pepper sandwich. That just seems nasty to me. I can't even imagine how gross it would feel to have that lard coating the roof of your mouth. Yuck. But I guess it was what the times called for. There was also a patient at a nursing home that I worked at that still eats mustard sandwiches, because that's what she ate growing up.

 

[Rosie]

My grandma saves bacon drippings to use in cooking and when I remind her of how unhealthy it is for them to be eating all that food fried in grease my grandpa always has to tell me about how when he was a kid, his lunch was a lard and black pepper sandwich. That just seems nasty to me. I can't even imagine how gross it would feel to have that lard coating the roof of your mouth. Yuck. But I guess it was what the times called for. There was also a patient at a nursing home that I worked at that still eats mustard sandwiches, because that's what she ate growing up.

Let's not even talk food! The things my dad said he ate when he was a kid . Scrapple http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple

Pig ears, pig's feet, cow tongue, chitterlings or as my dad called them chitlins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitterlings
chicken gizzards, chicken feet and mountain oysters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_oysters
That's the only meat his family could afford.

Poor daddy. But, he always said whenever I would utter ewww or gross, "Cornygal, that's good eatin' you don't know what your mouth is missng".

 

[Viola]

Hey Rosie, chicken gizzards are GOOD. So are their hearts. I'm rather fond of veal heart as well. Organ meat has its place.

 

[Caledonia]

Quote Histwardrobe: Caledonia - when I lived in south London (Lambeth North / Walcot Square) as late as the mid 1990s we still had a rag and bone man who drove a horse-drawn cart and called out for "any old iron?". He was ancient then and he's probably now gone to rags and bones himself. Last relic of a vanished era?

Sounds like it! Wow, I've not heard anybody still seeing them as late as the 1990s. I thought they went out in the 70s. Today's equivalent is the low loader truck with junk scavenged from skips, people's yards and such, but with none of the character.

I'm also a washer of tubs, glass jars, and used to make paper bricks for the stove, but they don't burn that well, so now I make chunky paper knots. I also recycle the ends of candles and make new ones, very badly, using toilet roll tubes as the mold, but they work. And let's not forget compost as one of the easiest and possibly longest standing ways of using kitchen waste and any biodegradable material from the house and garden, unless you have pigs that is. In terms of managing your household I suppose compost wouldn't have been much use though unless you had a food garden or allotment, and I'm wondering if communal compost bins were on the go during the war period when everything had to be saved. That would work if you didn't have a place available on your own property. Anybody know the answer to that one?

 

[Fleur De Guerre]

My Grandfather was held in Stalagluft III during the war and lived the rest of his life without wasting a scrap of food due to his experiences there. He used to say how they'd feed them the water from boiled potatoes as soup, with maybe a few skin shavings thrown in. As such he would eat everything off everyone's plates, including gristle, soft bones, cartilage, everything. Sadly, his high fat consumption eventually led to heart disease.

 

[Absinthe_1900]

Let's not even talk food! The things my dad said he ate when he was a kid . Scrapple http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple

My parents were both from Philadelphia, so I learned about scrapple early in life, and actually like the stuff.

Being born far away from scrapple ground zero, you didn't see it too often down here in years past, but that has apparently changed, and the scrapple hungry masses here are well stocked.

Whenever I buy some, I usually get asked "What the heck is that stuff"?


I love their expression when I tell them.

 

[Viola]

As a Philadelphian, I believe the correct answer among my scrapple-eating brethern is, "you don't want to know, but it sure tastes good." lol