
Feb 23, 2025, 07:42 AM
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Member Since: Oct 2017
Location: TX
Posts: 7,001
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Tart Cherry Jam
My grandmother grew up without fridges and her own mother (she died long before I was born) would put perishables in woven sacks and suspend them from a window during winter months. She also reboiled soups to kill bacteria, every day.
Obviously, we had refrigerators, but my grandmother was still in the habit of reboiling a pot of soup every morning. And she would refry leftover fried foods. All of it made the taste and texture of fried-and-refried food horrible, but it was impossible to talk her out of her ingrained habit. She appreciated having a fridge and she did not suspend perishables in woven sacks from windows during cold months, but she reboiled and refried leftovers.
I do not know how they kept perishables during warm months. Probably kept them in cellars dug deep under houses.
I should add to your list SquarePegGuy: MODERN fridges. The fridges I grew up with required maintenance. They had to be regularly defrosted. That meant everything was taken out, the fridge unplugged, water that would accumulate regularly collected and thrown away, then the whole thing washed, wiped dry, and plugged back in. What I remember from this laborious procedure was that my grandmother would keep butter inside a bowl of cold water to keep it cold while the fridge was being defrosted.
My aunt would also shout at me if I left the fridge door open for an extra split second when taking something out, such as milk. The idea was that you minimize the time the fridge is open. This is probably still a good idea from the energy preservation standpoint, but I live alone now and can afford keeping the door open when I take a half-gallon of milk out, pour from it, and put it back in, and nobody says a word. So I do that, enjoying the freedom to do whatever I please. Perhaps I should stop doing that.
And regarding pasteurized foods, @ Nammu: we had pasteurized milk in the city but had to boil raw milk that was sold in the countryside. It actually changes taste if you boil and then cool it down.
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My grandmother had the so-called "icebox"; she still calls a refrigerator an "icebox" (she is 91 yr. old) and so did my mom when I was young; I didn't even know they were called refrigerators until I started school (though we did have an actual refrigerator when I was growing up); where you'd buy a block of ice, put it in the bottom to chill things, buy another ice block when the first one melted & so on in warm/hot weather. Living in southeast TX, most of the year was very warm, even times in winter can get quite warm. They had a local delivery who would go around selling blocks of ice. She had no AC or fans; there wasn't power in the country where she lived until she was 10 or so, so it was kerosene lamps. She told me once they got electricity she felt the house was way too bright! She walked to school but could only go through 8th grade as her father would have to drive her to the high school, but in the winter, I forget which part of it but the car would freeze and she wouldn't be able to make it to school (no school bus ran out to where she lived). She had no library to go to, and only owned one book a teacher had given her (Black Beauty, which she later gave to me). In addition, her family was poor and tenant farmers (yes, even poor white people had to become tenant farmers, i.e. sharecroppers), there was no welfare for them). Her parents only spoke Czech at home, and she had to learn English completely when starting school (which I realize there are people in similar situations these days though often the language is Spanish, but now many students in foreign schools in Europe do learn some English in school including the Czech Republic as when I visited there most young people had at least rudimentary English). She had no washing machine, churned butter, those days had to be so hard; there were no food banks they had to make do with the food they could garden & chickens to butcher & lay eggs and what littele they could afford, and then there was food rationing in WWII. In addition, they had zero warnings of upcoming hurricanes (which happen more than one would like in these parts). Growing up back then had to be so difficult!
Then, to make matters worse, when my mom was growing up (around 13 yr. old) her brother (around 19 yr. old) & one of her sisters (around 17 yr. old) drowned in a river swimming together. This was in the 1970s! These days, any decent church & charity group would have offered a free funeral & burial because the family was still indigent and couldn't afford to bury their own children. But their church wouldn't. No church in town would until finally one stepped forward. How awful is that?!
There is SO much to be grateful for these days!
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Last edited by Blueberrybook; Feb 23, 2025 at 09:20 AM.
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