Home Ec

68 this morning, overcast and still humid.

On a radio cooking show on NPR the other day, people were calling in with their memories from high school of Home Ec classes. Some of them were funny, others were grateful they'd had the class. The calls made me think back to 8th grade--which was in what was called "junior high" in my school days--and the one Home Ec class I took. 

Eighth grade was a miserable year for me; my memories are of dark, cloudy, lonely days. It was my first year of public school. My class at the Catholic school had all of 14 kids in it, and the whole school was well under 100 students. Marstellar Junior High, on the other hand, had hundreds of students, and I know only five or six of them as my Catholic schoolmates went off to different schools, depending on the district in which they lived. It was confusing to be changing classes, having several different teachers, and add to all that the fact that I was 13, had gotten chubby over the summer, and let's not even talk about hormones. I was about as unhappy as a girl could get when I walked into Home Ec class that year.

The first project in the class was to make an apron. Yes, an apron. Of course the class was all girls, and I suppose the teacher consider an apron a necessity for us if we were to cook in her class. We had to supply our own material. My fabric was cotton, with tiny pink flowers sprinkled with a few yellow buds.  We were to make half aprons, not the full bib type. 

Apron image from eBay. Don't I wish mine had come out half as pretty as this one.

Now I often sewed at home, by hand and by machine. So what was it about that class that made my poor apron so difficult? I'm not sure, but I think it was all the instructions to do this and then that, and the teacher looking over my shoulder all the time. The apron came out all right, which was a good thing because we were to wear them every day of that class. I actually kept that apron, and wore it, for years afterward.

Next up was making butterscotch pudding. I loved pudding---but butterscotch? Why not chocolate, I wondered? It wasn't all that easy either. I cooked all the time at home, because Mom wasn't doing so well. I think this was the year that Julie, baby number 13, arrived, so my next sister in age to me, Judy, and I were often cooking dinner for the whole family when we got home after school. But if we made pudding, we made it from a box. There wasn't any instant pudding back then, but I was fine with making the cooked kind.

This butterscotch pudding, however, had to be made from scratch in class. I remember that the process involved scorching the sugar--well, that was how mine went. I guess we were supposed to brown the sugar but mine went a little beyond that. It was tasty enough in the end, but sure seemed like a lot of trouble when there was Jello pudding mix in the stores. Now, I make pudding from scratch sometimes and it's no problem. But I've never attempted butterscotch again. Yuck. However, if you want to give it a try, click here for the New York Times recipe.

We had to make something called blancmange too, and baked custard. Maybe in those days these were the kinds of desserts that were popular. I don't know, but I did not enjoy making them. At all. I'd have far preferred making cakes. Or cookies. 

The biggest project in the class was wood refinishing. We were to bring in something from home for approval, and then complete the project at home, sort of as a homework assignment. That meant asking for Dad's help. He wasn't the most approachable person that year either; Mom was in bed a lot of the time, the house was a mess, there were all these kids, and he still had to go to work every day. I screwed up my courage one evening and went down to Dad's workshop to tell him about the project. "Hmmmm," he said. Dad loved woodworking and making things but refinishing wasn't something he did, that I can remember. We went up to the living room and he picked up a little Duncan Phyfe style end table. "Take this," he said. 

"How can I get it to school?" I asked. "I can't take it on the bus."

Online image of a table exactly like the one I refinished all those years ago.

The next day Dad came home early from work. When I got home from school, he met me at the car--we actually had a car that ran at that time, a rare thing in my childhood--and we took my table and a can of walnut wood to the school. I was mortified to walk through the halls with my Dad carrying the table, and now I have to wonder why. Was it because he was in work clothes? Was it because the table looked so shabby? Or was it just that I didn't ever want anyone to look at me that horrible year, and here we were looking so conspicuous.

The teacher was still in the classroom as she had promised, and she approved the table for my project. Back home we went. Dad took off the glass top and we found that the veneer under it was nice, although it had one small chipped area. 

Each evening, I went to the basement and worked on my table. The base turned out to be a beautiful walnut, and the top, when sanded, had the deep reddish-brown glow of mahogany. When it was finished, Dad brought it back to the school for the teacher's inspection. This time I didn't feel embarrassed. The table was a pretty little thing and I was proud of it. Dad and my teacher had a long conversation about woods and furniture, and my little table earned me an A.

Thankfully I didn't have to take another Home Ec class. In 10th grade I tried to sign up for Shop, the boy's equivalent, but the school counselor rejected my request, because girls weren't allowed in Shop class. Then I tried to sign up for Electricity class, but Shop was a prerequisite, so I was stumped there too. Today a girl can take either one. I am sure the young girls I know think nothing of the opportunities they have now that didn't exist for me, and you know, I'm glad of that. I'm glad that they can take these little things for granted now, things that required years of effort to change. They'll never know that. And that makes me feel that in some small ways we are slowly, slowly moving ahead. But boy do we still have a long way to go.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.