Will Feminist Innovation Never Cease?

I fully support your ambitious idea, Pogonip. I recall that the cookbooks of my mother’s generation were full of common sense and practical ideas, not the latest fads, or How to Make your Meal Look Like a Pagoda. Mum and grandma knew all sorts of clever non-cooking uses for things like vinegar and baking soda. These days I wouldn’t know where to look for baking soda in a supermarke.
And if you can include appendices on the Elements of Grammar and Spelling, and Ordinary Everyday Politeness, that would be a welcome bonus.
Harrrumpph.

One look at vintage photos from the early to mid 20th Century is to see people as well dressed as they could afford.
I’ve been interviewing for what is hopefully my last job. I wear a suit and tie to interviews. If I have to sit down across from one more f’n millennial or x-er in cargo shorts, flip-flops, and a concert t-shirt from a band their mother was too young to have attended, I’m gonna strangle somebody.

Hi ACToldfart: You find the baking soda in the same area you find the cooking oils, the seasonings, the flour, and often the cake mixes. So as not to make it too easy, the cheap white vinegar is usually in with the salad dressing.
I also hate modern cookbooks, full of trendy, expensive ingredients.
I’d like to find an old book (40’s—ca. 1965) about housekeeping. The new ones waste too much time reassuring readers—or, more likely, the editors—that it’s really okay to like your abode and want to keep it pleasant, which is hard to do if you ignore spills or cat puke for six months because liberated women aren’t interested in housekeeping. Don Aslett’s books are great for the mechanics of cleaning but he doesn’t address making your house a home. Martha Stewart did, but she assumed you had unlimited time and money. There used to be books on the subject for the average woman.
I didn’t get to take shop either. I wish I had.

I’m gonna strangle somebody.
I’m 7 months and 8 days until retirement. Just hope I can find enough peace in that time not to shove one of my perpetual jr-high mean girl staffers down 4 flights of stairs in the meantime.
I’m SO done.

I also hate modern cookbooks, full of trendy, expensive ingredients
I have a fair number of cookbooks, but my usual “go-to” one is “The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook” published 1980. It isn’t just recipes but all sorts of information on food – like cuts of meat — and cooking & baking tips and techniques. Photos and drawings.

His honor is right. There is too much money in the wrong hands. Jeff Bezos should pay taxes on his billion dollars, especially since he’s been caught using it to give his U.S. employees heat stroke. OSHA got involved in that one, and I can assure you that OSHA’s not going to touch anything unless it’s likely to result in mass casualties.
Conservatives often confuse the (somewhat) defensible idea that’s it’s OK to have a billion dollars with the indefensible idea that a guy who has a billion dollars is always a good guy and so he should get a free ride. Our grandparents knew better. During the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, the top marginal tax rate was somewhere around 90%. Not coincidentally, that was the height of U. S. prosperity. Civilization costs money to maintain. We all benefit from civilization, but people like Bezos benefit more than the rest of us and thus should pay more. The idea that they should pay NOTHING but get all the benefits everyone else gets, and a lot more besides, is one of the ones that has destroyed America.
I guess I better add a Civics section, too. 😄. My 8-volume “Stuff Grandma and Mom Knew” can sag the shelf beside Darleen’s 6-volume “The Joys of Mending.”

I don’t think we have tinsmiths in the U. S. any more, at least not on a scale small enough to serve people needing a few muffin rings. It’s hard enough to find a good knife-sharpener.
If you can find a copy, get Best Recipes From The Backs Of Bottles, Boxes, Cans, And Jars by Ceil Dyer. There were originally 3 slim paperback volumes, all worthwhile, but they were consolidated into a fat hardback that’s the better buy, if you can find it. Good quick recipes with ingredients that are readily available. (Another annoying thing about modern cookbooks, written, as they are, by and for people with lots of time and money, is that they tend to send you on quests for $50/lb grass-fed Iranian unicorn meat and $20/lb Szechwan red fairy dust.)

In defense of the cookbook authors, people with time and money are pretty much their market. Consider an 18-year-old in Detroit, the sole support of her two children and their fathers. NO cookbook will do her much good unless she finds the means and time to learn how to read it, and even if one father or both were willing to stop playing video games and start cooking, he probably can’t read either. Or consider a grandmother along the Kentucky/Virginia border, working several minimum-wage jobs to support the grandchildren of whom she has custody. She probably can read and probably had a cookbook, but since they couldn’t make the rent and are now living in a motel, no hot plates allowed, no refrigeration except in winter, she can’t use a cookbook either. Nowadays cookbook writers have no market except the relatively affluent. So they write what those people want, and because those people don’t know what they don’t know, it will never occur to them that cooking can be anything but a status symbol and hobby.

My wife got as a Christmas present a cookbook from one of those trendy paler chefs. The recipes have an undoubted flair and creativity, but the ingredients are utterly depressing: barely a single thing that is recognisable as food. All powders and extracts. He’s one of the guys behind the boom in ‘protein powders’ that you’ll now find at chemists.
I find her a tad annoying, but in Australia, Stephanie Alexander’s cookbooks are an absolute treasury of cooking information. Of the trendy U.K. cooks, that Fearnley-Whittingstall chap is very good. It’s no coincidence that both cooks focus on the traditional meals.

Sorry. Amend ‘paler’ to ‘paleo’. I blame my spellcheck for thoughtcrimeracism!

Technology is not my friend today. 🙁

https://theothermccain.com/2019/03/10/bad-sex-advice/
I have just applied to Cosmpolitan for position as Dodgeball Editor. Never played it except under duress and hated it when I did, so obviously I’m best qualified to cover it.
I’m not laughing at that poor sick girl, I’m laughing at Cosmopolitan. I hope they don’t fire her when they see that. She’s got enough problems without losing her access to medical care.

From the Archdruid, about halfway down: the Necronomnomnom. 😄😄😄
I gotta get a copy.
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/49966.html#comments
(If you like tentacled horrors, the Archdruid—Mr. Druid in business, Arch to friends and family—is your man. Not that he himself is a tentacled horror, but he also likes them and the topic comes up a lot. Cthulhu fhtagn!)

I’ll buy a Ronald McDonald costume and wear it to work if you like, but if you’re not buying my clothes, don’t tell me how to dress.
When you have a job that generally requires a bachelors degree and more often today, a masters degree, where you make from $75K-$150K per year, you don’t need to have your daddy employer clothe you. They shouldn’t have to tell you how to dress yourself, let alone buy your clothes.
Even putting that aside, any grown up should understand the responsibility to look presentable when leaving the house to do anything other than manual labor. I’m by no means a fashionista. I never really cared for wearing ties, especially in humid climates. Though there is a time and place for formalish dress. A simple polo shirt and at the very least clean and presentable blue jeans if not proper dress pants is not too much to ask. Poor people 50 years ago dressed better than many of the wealthy do today. This really shouldn’t be such a big deal and it stuns me that people who should know better fail to understand these things.

I haven’t watched TV in at least 15 years because there seemed to be nothing on at the time except “reality” shows and comedies written for 12-year-olds who like to giggle at dirty words. Nothing wrong with that, but I am over 12, been there, done that,and so those weren’t for me.
My son got fixated on the “Roseanne” rehash (the autistic get fixated on things for no reason they can explain to the non-autistic) and I watched the first two of those, thought they were terrible, and managed to be granted a dispensation from watching the rest.
Politically correct just ain’t funny. I once heard a pretty funny routine about “Gays Shouldn’t Be Blatant” (“your boss has pin-up girls all over his office, but you can’t have a microscopic picture of you and your real boyfriend anywhere, because gays shouldn’t be blatant”) but that was back when it was politically incorrect to be gay, so the rule was never broken.

Pogo:
…that Cajun cook whose name I forget…
Paul Prudhomme or Emeril Lagasse? Emeril use to say “BAM” when he through a spicy ingredient into the pan. By the way, if you like Cajun, check out the website NOLA Cuisine. The recipes are outstanding and easy to follow. I’ve been using his recipes since 2005. I made a big batch of Chicken/Shrimp/Sausage Gumbo this weekend. It really take the chill off of the dismal March we’ve been having in Southern Ontario.

Son says the guy’s name was Justin Wilson.
Paul Prudhomme wrote the Popeye’s chicken recipes. I like their chicken but not that seasoning they use in the side dishes.

Justin Wilson…”I gar-on-tee”

Seeing how as I never had a job requiring any sort of degree, I will cheerfully continue on in the grand tradition of organized labor, nay, of America in general: “You want it? Great! But you gotta pay for it.”
I do agree that the professions are a gray area here. Some people feel better if their doctor, lawyer, accountant dresses up. I was talking about average jobs held by average people, e.g. big-box employees.
Another of the insidious falsehoods that destroyed America was persuading everyone that a job and a profession are the same thing. Thus the tiresome lectures to “be professional” directed at minimum-wage employees and the pervasive nasal whining about same by young white female educated fools.
What IS it with that Godawful young-white-American-female whiny nasal accent? American men, American women who aren’t white, and white American women over about 40 don’t talk like that, so where on earth did the white girls pick up Kazoospeak?

Forgot about Justin.

Pogo they do have DST in the UK, however, they don’t switch the clocks until March 31st. I’m in the eastern time zone. There’s usually 5 hours difference between England and me and for the next couple of weeks there will be 4.

Darleen, in the unlikely event you can find it, the 1948 Good Housekeeping cookbook was the best ever. My mom bought that when she married and used it till, literally, the binding fell apart and the pages crumbled. The 1950 edition, black cover with little food cartoons all over, is much the same except it omits killing and butchering instructions.
Also, everybody, seek out the old Farm Journal cookbooks that were compiled and edited by Nell B. Nichols. Uniformly excellent.
David, can we have a topic about old books to recommend to each other and to young sprouts?
Nell was not only a darn good cook, she was also a prophet. Her books talk about how well country women do this and country women do that, implying that city people can barely fry an egg. And lo and behold, I hear a lot of anecdotes to the effect that this so these days.

2 more questions re my proposal:
1). Along with courtesy and grammar, should I address Kazoospeak, that your big presentation may well be better received if it doesn’t sound like a duck is quacking it out? It may be that most people LIKE Kazoospeak, after all. What do you all think? (We have a local TV weather lady whose forecasts are very accurate—but I have to read them on the Internet because of her Kazoospeak coupled with what is probably a neurological disorder—her voice is thick, shaky, and changes pitch at random. I can’t understand her half the time.)
2.). Should I address safety? A lot of young folks live in cities, after all, and they’re dangerous places. And there are everyday dangers too, like kitchen fires.

Ah, vocal fry as the successor to Valley Girl.

Hello again Pogonip. With respect, I think KazooSpeak is an nth order issue, where n is getting quite large. I suggest start from the centre and work outwards, ie look after No 1 first. Perhaps the volume on Defence of Person and Home Against Barbarity could include a section on How to Attain Satori through Clever Use of the Mute and Subtitle Buttons on Your TV Remote Control. The Kazoo speakers can fend for themselves.
Kitchen fires could be covered under a Chapter on Ingredients and Appliances No Sensible Kitchen Needs, perhaps with a little homily that our parents’ generation were way better cooks than we are, and the only use that entire generation had for a flamethrower was persuading Japanese troops that the defence of places like Saipan and Okinawa was not necessarily to their advantage.