Nutritious meals cooked by loving mothers which didn't have to work two jobs to make ends meet. Family members spending time together sharing family values... Oh and I would trade a bread box full of home made bread for the microwave any day!
We had a wood-burner stove, only because we lived in the highlands of New Guinea in the late 1950's and early 1960's. It wasn't well insulated (that would have been too expensive to fly in). So it was rather inefficient. These things sound romantic and nostalgic, if you aren't the one chopping the firewood for it. That was often one of my chores. These days I'm more than happy to have a stove that can be activated by turning a knob.
I think this is slanted more to the 1930s. I was a young housewife in the 1950s...no wood stove at all. A GE electric stove, a Norge refrigerator plus a Mixmaster for cake mixing, etc. A GE washer & dryer, central heat and air. As I said this wasn't the 1950s as described in the video but 30s or even 20s.
That's the comment I was going to make. No one had coal or wood stoves in the 50s, or 40s, few in the 30s or 20s. No one had meat grinders in their homes either then. You went to the butcher's or butcher department and bought however much ground meat you wanted, and the butcher would scoop it out and wrap it in white butcher paper. While I was a child then, our household had the same things you mentioned, except air conditioning.
@@Catbooks Depends on where you lived. We still had 25 cycle electricity until the late 50's. Rural electrification was not universal, many people still had no electricity until the late 50's. I graduated from high school in Commerce Oklahoma 1956 and all of those items were still in existence tho we could afford few of them either because of cost or lack of space.
Have you ever tried using a manual hand mixer? Fun is not the first word that comes to my mind. Also love the iPhone on the table while he talks about 1950'S manual meat grinders.
I grew up in the US Midwest in the 1950's, and most of these were NOT part of our household. We did not bake bread, have an icebox, or cook on a wood-fired stove. Those were more from the 1930's, '40's or even earlier, way before my time.
In New Britain, Ct. My Father's parents home was a "museum" of older days. The wood fired iron stove was in the basement, when I came along in the late 1960's. There was a "pull out" stove in the kitchen. The oven was in the bottom section. We used the old "ice trays" as well, still. There was a modern fridge in the kitchen with the bottom slide ice box. An aluminum table set was in the kitchen for meals, and the formal dining room, with the big wooden table for 12 was in a dedicated dining room, with the formal credenza and Grammy's sewing machine. We still used all of the manual kitchen tools, as this video showed. All of the wooden (Formal Dining) furniture was made from Cedar, including her chest at the foot of her bed in her bedroom. We had a clothes drop into the basement from the second floor bathroom. She still used the top load agitator washing machine with the rollers to ring out clothes after washing, and they would either hang in the basement or go outside on the line, before they got a modern dryer later on. All of the 1930's and beyond "furnishings" were all kept in the basement. I do not know how they got that iron stove from the kitchen into the basement, beyond carrying it outside and down the basement stairs from the back yard. I can't imagine that they dropped it through the floor into the basement and rebuilt it. I was a bit too young to inherit the house and everything in it, so it was all sold off, and the property leveled, after both grand parents had strokes and were relocated to Florida.
We had all these except for the wood stove, ice box, hoosier cabinet (although my grandmother had one of those) and butter mold (she had one of those, too). The one I was most happy to see replaced was the ice trays. They were hard to open, and if you had the least bit of moisture on your hand, you stuck to them. Yikes!
This is the first time I've heard about hoosier cabinets, although I think I've seen them before in antique stores. I'm with you on those awful aluminium ice trays. Sometimes you had to run them under hot water before they'd release, and yeah I remember my hands getting stuck to them.
Several of the first items-- wood stoves and ice boxes -- were long gone by the 1950s. (Growing up in the 1950s I never saw either in any home I visited.) That kind of error makes the whole post of questionable value and I quickly tuned out.
I used a manual hand mixer this morning to help prepare a two-person omelet. As for the aluminum ice cube tray I still see those around, though they are a little worse for wear after going through thousands of freeze and thaw cycles. We have a manual meat grinder in our kitchen now, though it doesn't get daily use. The Pyrex casserole dishes had a nasty habit of randomly exploding. I still have some, but they're not in regular use.
Bingo Caveman, our first refrigerator was gas powered. Ice trucks disappeared in early 50's but not everywhere. My school, a 2 story brick school had outdoor hole in the ground toilets and was in service until the early 50s.
