When Labor Day rolled around after a summer at Dewey Beach was when the real work began
Maybe it was the summer vacation that had just ended. By the Labor Day weekend, the household where I spent my first years suddenly snapped out of the August reverie.
My grandmother Lily Rose and her sister, my great Aunt Cora, never stopped working. The final weeks of summer energized them. Could it be the past weeks’ salt air and change of scenery at their rented cottage at Dewey Beach or Rehoboth that made them eager to get September fired up?
The end of August meant farmers’ tomatoes were ripe and available, that is, cheap.
This was a cue to make homemade ketchup and store it in old Pepsi-Cola bottles. That ketchup really paired well with scrapple fried in a cast iron skillet.
They cooked from memory but maybe consulted the well battered Lowney’s cook book that rested in the dining room sideboard’s top drawer. It called for a formula: 24 ripe tomatoes, peeled onions, green peppers, salt, brown sugar, ginger, cinnamon and mustard. After you’ve mastered the assembly, you cook the ingredients for six hours, “stirring often.” Six hours in the kitchen? Does anyone have the patience to stand in a kitchen for six hours with a spoon? This was normal.
They tortured the old Oriole-brand gas range. Start time was 6 a.m., finish up by noon, make tea for lunch and decide that roast pork might taste good for dinner.
They operated around the days of the week. Get out of the kitchen on a Monday. They bleached, disinfected and scrubbed that day. They made use of their homemade lye soap that day.
Throughout the year neighbors saved their grease in tin cans and gave it to my family. Then, on soap making day, about once a year, the ladies mixed the grease with cans of lye (caustic soda or sodium hydroxide) — stay out of the way of that nasty stuff. They mixed the lye and grease in a basin. It smelled awful, of course. The soap took a couple of days to firm up, then they used a blade to cut it into chunks.
A Tuesday might mean noodle soup (actually a German-style homemade egg spaetzle, dried in sheets over a radiator) with chicken stock or a pot of vegetable soup on the stove before 7 a.m. That was considered a light day, meaning one pot, but not without a tasty homemade dessert. The sweet that night was a homemade Baltimore-style cinnamon cake, made in a single layer pan.
On such a one-pot day, there was another agenda — a trip downtown for shopping.
A taxicab would be called by about 10 a.m. and off they went to Howard Street for serious shopping. There may have been an 11 a.m. conference with Augusta “Gussie” Curry, the fabric buyer at Stewart’s department store, then a lengthy consultation at the dressmaking pattern counter across Howard Street at Hutzler’s.
Buttons? Nothing would do except an energetic walk down Baltimore Street for the Morton Schenk Co. with its dizzying inventory of buttons and zippers stacked box by box on high shelves. It was not self-service and the decision making process could be excruciating.
There might be a side trip to the New York Sewing Machine Co. for parts, say a leather strap for their manual sewing machine that produced the outfits they made.
Wednesday was grocery shopping. They walked in a family caravan from 29th Street and Guilford Avenue to an A&P store on Gorsuch Avenue in Waverly. My mother pushed a baby carriage, which on the return trip served as a wagon to transport the week’s purchases.
Thursday and Friday brought room cleaning. They were proud of their oak parquet floors. They applied heavy paste wax by hand, on all fours, after using steel wool and a solution of a noxious cleaning agent Varnolene. They had an electric waxing buffer suitable for a bowling alley to finish the job.
And while the floors would appear smooth and spit-and-polished, they could also be slippery. A heavyset guest unaware of this condition could do a tail spin on a scatter rug.
The seasons of the year guided their habits. They changed rugs and curtains in winter and summer. One of their more fastidious practices was the lampshade change. There were winter shades, covered in cotton or silk, and summer shades, made of paper.
About 2:30 p.m. Thursday, the doorbell sounded, announcing the seafood delivery for Friday. By 7 a.m. Friday morning, the crabcakes had been made, the oysters padded and the shrimp steamed in vinegar, maybe with a dash of Old Bay. Did I forget the homemade potato salad and slaw?
Saturday was kind of a day off, except that this was also a big cooking day. The rule was either spaghetti with homemade meat sauce, simmered all day perfuming the house — or — roast rib roast of beef, with baked potatoes and tiny canned peas.
After all that was consumed, my grandmother appeared in the kitchen about 8 p.m. to make the following day’s buckwheat cake batter. This called for yeast and the mix had to sit overnight.
If Sunday was a day off, it was news to me. A huge homemade breakfast, perhaps a nap, then a light supper of creamed chicken with mushrooms and the from-scratch baking powder biscuits I still dream about.