Friday
After
the cow was milked, the chickens fed, and the milk put away; after
breakfast was cooked, eaten and Daddy gone; after all the dishes
and pots and pans were washed and the kitchen put to rights; after
the water tank was filled and the pigs were slopped; then the
Friday morning work began. If there was no seasonal work to keep
them from it, fresh aprons were put on and talk turned to what
we shall have for Sunday.
Cakes,
bread, and some pies could be made on Friday. But killing the
chickens for Sunday dinner had to wait for Saturday morning, as
did things like chess pies, deviled eggs and potato salad. Neither
on Friday morning nor on Saturday morning was there any rush.
Work moved steadily from one thing to another.
The
eggs were kept in a square, deep, wooden box that sat on the table
just inside the cellar door, there on the right, under the window.
The window was small and set out at the edge of the thick, stone
wall, so, the table and the eggs sat in shadow even when a beam
of sun streamed in. Aunt Merica and I emptied our basket into
the box every evening after we had gathered the eggs from the
nests in the hen house. Friday morning an estimate was made of
how many eggs would be needed to make the cakes, the boiled custard,
the cookies, and I went with my little basket to get them.
Mother
brought down from the cellar a crock or two, Aunt Merica got the
cream, butter and milk. The hinged lid of the flour chest was
lifted and laid back against the wall. The breadboard was removed
from its ledge over the flour, the fat rolling pin pushed aside
and flour measured out, off and on, during the morning for bread,
for cakes, for pies, for cookies.
Mama
put the crock in her lap and began creaming the butter and sugar
that Aunt Merica measured out. Cakes were truly made by hand;
Mama's right hand worked and squeezed, and mixed until both she
and Aunt Merica agreed that the mixture was creamed enough. Eggs
and milk, baking powder, flour and flavoring got added in their
turn. If it were jam cake, one of the stand-bys, the mixture turned
gray blue from the blackberry jam. The batter was put out in three
round, floured tins, baked in the iron stove's big oven, cooled
on white cloths spread out on the table and finally put together
with sea foam icing. Or, it might be a Devil's food or marble
cake, made in the loaf pan. Once each year, Mama made a hickory
nut cake.
Aunt
Merica made pie dough. Mama cut the apples into snitz or opened
a can of berries. These would be pies for Friday night or Saturday.
If the pies were for Sunday, then the pies were chess or chocolate
and made Saturday morning. Berry and apple were for everyday.
Sometimes Mama made cream pie. Just that, cream pie. Whipped cream
piled in a freshly baked shell. That was special and had to be
eaten right away before the cream collapsed.
Enough cookies were made to last all week, for lunch boxes, for
extra sweets, at meal time, for some of the occasions we could
plead food between meals, to serve a neighbor who came to visit.
The sweet, pale yellow dough was rolled thin on the breadboard
and cut with one of our two cookie cutters. The cutters were made
of dark gray tin. One was rectangle with a soldered-on scalloped
edge and a punched design in the top. The other was plain edged
and shaped like the ace of spades. They were old. Even Aunt Merica
called them old. The loaf cake pan that was used for the Devil's
food cake was gray and tin and old, too, with a funnel in the
middle and its round body flattened into eight sides. The cookies
were put out on cloths on the side table in the dining room, where,
as the morning went on, all the freshly baked cakes, pies and
loaves of bread were left to cool. In time, a white cloth would
cover them and they would wait for the time to come to be eaten.
Mama
made one kind of bread and Aunt Merica another. When Mama's cake
had gone into the oven and the things washed up from making it,
she dug down into the flour and found the glass jar she had buried
there the day before. It contained by now the most awful smelling,
stuff, which would be used to make my very favorite bread: salt
rising. She knew just how many sliced potatoes, how much cornmeal,
how much everything to put into the jar, and how long to leave
it buried there to ferment. Aunt Merica used cakes of soft Fleishman's
yeast to make loaves of plain white bread, which we called light
bread. Mama would make one, maybe two loaves; Aunt Merica three
or four.
Just
as on Tuesday morning when the stove was hot for heating the irons,
and this morning when the oven was needed for baking, some meat
or beans or vegetables were left to simmer along on top of the
stove for dinner or supper. Most likely Mama had run out to the
garden to get and clean the vegetables before the cake making
started or Aunt Merica had brought down something from the cellar.
The unvarying daily duties had to be maintained along with the
weekly routine. Squeezed in or adjusted to, as the months passed,
was the seasonal work.
Friday
afternoon
Don't misunderstand me, cleaning got done at our house, but it
never declared itsself like washing and ironing, mending and cooking.
It was a lesser demand. A bit of sweeping here, while something
baked; a bit of sweeping there after the mending was finished.
The relatives and the neighbors had clean houses, too, but the
only time cleaning got talked about was in the spring for spring
cleaning and in the fall for fall cleaning. If Miz Kinder had
to wipe the dust off the top magazine from the pile on the shelf
under the table in order to show Mama a new crochet pattern, so
what. There were more important things to do than spend it dusting
every day. Any daily cleaning that got done, got done in between
the day's work.
However, before Mama went to lie down after dinner an Friday,
she made sure the house was straight and the porch swept, for
somebody might come. Neighbors might come to visit any weekday
afternoon, but by Friday the week's work for all the neighbors
and us was finished. There was more time for visiting. In early
spring, Aunt Merica might go pull up a dozen or so young plants
of a new flower she had ordered from the seed catalogue or some
of the kind the neighbor had lost. She would put the plants in
a basket, put on a clean apron and her bonnet and go down to Miss
Cynthia's to visit.
Visits,
even sometimes when you were coming to spend all day (and that
was done with your good friends and relatives at a distance),
were never announced. You found something to take, changed your
apron, got your umbrella, and set out. Once I caught Miss Cynthia,
who had worked late in the garden, washing her feet in a pan of
water on the back porch. But most of the time neighbors were ready
in case someone came. You talked and talked, admired handwork,
the growing garden and left before it was time to go out but not
before your neighbor had slipped out and gotten something to put
in the basket you had used to carry the young plants or the big
tomatoes to her. Never let a neighbor go home empty-handed, Mother
said.
By
five, Mother and Aunt Merica were doing the evening work, Mama
getting supper, Aunt Merica out at the barn with the cow and the
chickens. After the eggs were gathered, Aunt Merica estimated
the number in the box and, depending on whether the hens were
laying well or not, she decided how many she would send to town
next day with Daddy to sell. On Saturday, Daddy bought and carried
the hundred pound sacks of grain from the car to the grainery,
but when he came into the kitchen, the egg or butter or cream
money got turned over to Aunt Merica.
