What was Grandma (or Grandpa) doing in the kitchen or outside all day?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, whenever I’d visit my grandparent’s or aunty/uncle’s home, grandma or aunty would always be in the kitchen. Sometimes preparing lunch or dinner, but rarely just sitting there. And if she was sitting, she’s usually be busy doing something like stringing beans. What did they do all day in the kitchen? Grandpa and uncle were usually outside doing ?something? and no one was ever just sitting on the couch during the day.

If we stayed for dinner, Grandma would sometimes, though not always eat with us, then clean up the table and disappear into the kitchen again, then go to bed shortly after, sometimes with the radio on. If we where there, Grandpa would sometimes sit on the couch and sometimes (rarely) watch TV with us before retiring to the bedroom (he and grandma had separate rooms) and you could hear his radio. The only time I’d see him stay on the couch was during the sumo tournaments which he’d watch on the TV or listen to on the radio.

I’m late born, so my grandparents and their siblings were all in their 60’s and mostly retired or close to retirement.

2

Oops…Mods please move. Should be in Mundane Stuff…

3

They were working. Cooking, cleaning and serving meals takes time.
There are always chores outside if you own property of any size.
That kinda work is never ending.

4

Preparing meals and cleaning up afterwards took a hell of a lot of time in the past.
Also, it was the only place my grandmother could drink in peace.

5

I understand and accept that kitchen work is time consuming, but my grandma and aunts were just cooking for themselves and their husband, often eating leftovers from lunch for dinner. They were always able to put together extra food if we visited unexpectedly, but the only time we were explicitly invited for dinner was when my grandma would make soup, which took the better part of the day to simmer.

We stayed with my aunt and uncle (who were old enough to be my grandparents) for a few weeks one summer and had to sneak past the kitchen (where she always was) doorway because my if my aunt saw us she’s call: “Eaty, eaty” and she always seemed to have something new to feed us. I’m sure part of this was because she she grew up very poor and left home early to relieve the burden.

6

Grandad was always in the club basement watching a game and avoiding the rest of the family.

7

My Uncle was always either having a (very long) bath or fixing his car. Actually avoiding my dad :slight_smile:

8

Aren’t relatives great? :wink:

9

My grandma baked bread from scratch, put up all the year’s preserves and pickles from her orchard and garden, dried apricots and prunes, made soup from home made stock, picked processed and froze peas, beans, corn, and many other vegetables from her garden, and still had time to go camping, drive to Alaska by herself back when the alcan was mostly gravel, and many many other things. She loved to cook and bake and probably made twenty kinds of cookies for Christmas.

She called it being retired. When she was feeding and clothing (sewing clothes and quilts from flour sacks) a family on a wisconsin dairy farm during the 1920’s through the 1940’s, that was work.

Most of my famly growing up were girls and women, and we were in the kitchen too, helping. No mysteries about what grandma was doing, for me.

10

Ahh…memories are coming back!

On the rare occasion I’d see my paternal grandma on her sewing machine making patchwork blankets or doing needlepoint. I got the last blanket she made and cherished it until it fell apart. It was baby sized because she didn’t have the strength to do a fill size one. We also got her last needlepoint work. There was pre-printed pattern of a tree and a rising sun, but she couldn’t see it well enough and wasn’t able to follow the pattern, yet she somehow managed to get the shape right inches off the pattern. She passed way in her 80’s on my 16th birthday.

Thinking about it, she was was probably in the kitchen preparing something and expecting us to stay and eat, which we didn’t always do as we usually visited because my Dad (I was usually the one who went with him “Up the house”) to fix something. SIGH Thank you Obaban! :slight_smile:

11

You didn’t say what decade your memories are from. During the Fifties and well into the Sixties, all the convenience foods you have today were almost nonexistant. And there were no microwaves, then, either. Foil, plastic wrap, and baggies were rare and expensive. Plastic bags were washed and used over and over. No Teflon, no PAM, so foods stuck to pots and pans and had to be scraped and scrubbed.

There were canned foods. You could buy frozen vegetables, but they were usually in a square block of ice. Most vegetables were fresh, and they take a lot of cleaning, chopping, and cooking before they are ready for the table!

Chicken usually meant a whole bird, so it took some kitchen counter butchery to yield t usual pieces. Nowdays, you can buy a tray of boneless and skinless chicken breasts. That would have been so wasteful “back in the day.” Bones would be saved for soup, and then Mom or Grandma would have to think of meals using the legs, thighs, backs and wings very soon.

Once in a while you’d get a treat of store bought boxed macaroni and cheese, or Rice-a-Roni. But for the most part, side dishes were prepared from scratch, and rice takes a while to cook. Potatoes take even longer! Many families consider bread to be an important part of every meal. Bread baking takes a lot of time. Biscuits are quicker, but they still take longer than the pop-the-tube biscuits you can buy now.

Salads were prevalent in the main meal. Lettuce, especially leaf lettuce like romaine, is very tedious to clean, unless you want to polish your fillings with sand. Carrots need to be peeled, celery washed and trimmed, radishes scrubbed, tomatoes cored and sometimes even peeled, and then everything is chopped-chopped-chopped. The resulting bowl of salad results in a tremendous mess that must be cleaned up, too.

In the Fifties and Sixties, women’s magazines were filled with hints and meal ideas. Baking a cake or pie would have to be done long before dinner is started. And imaginative dishes with gelatin need plenty of time in the refrigerator to set.

Sweeping and mopping were done daily. Cleaning out the refrigerator had to be done often, because refrigerators were much smaller than the ones we have today. Refrigerators also had to be defrosted regularly, and that is a messy and time-consuming job. “Frost-free” refrigerators didn’t become common place until the Seventies, or later. Ovens had to be cleaned with caustic chemicalsand lots of steel wool. Rubber gloves were mandatory. The fumes were awful.

Meal preparation was an everyday thing. Take out was a rare bucket of chicken, and going to an actual restaurant to eat was for special occasions only.

Was Mom’s or Grandma’s washing machine in the kitchen? Along with meal prep, laundry was an integral part of a homemaker’s day. Especially if there was no clothes dryer, and laundry had to be hung on a clothesline. We woneven discuss the extra work required by a wringer washer.

Modern conveniences–even such small things like non-stick pans and packaged mixes and crockpots and salads in a bag–all certainly mean that people (usually the women) spend much less time in the kitchen today!

Thank God.
~VOW

12

Missed the edit window: I see you mentioned the Sixties and Seventies. My thoughts are still valid!
~VOW

13

Well, in the early 70s when I was old enough to help in the kitchen with mom, on days I did not have school [typically Sundays] we would bake for the week upcoming. A typical morning after breakfast was to make the sponge [water yeast, flour] to start baking if we were not using sourdough. Once the sponge was proliferating [about 1 hour] we would do the breakfast dishes and gt the kitchen cleaned and set up for baking. Make the dough and set in the oven to rise, about 90 minutes [lower of the double wall oven] while that was on, desserts would be made - some things like cookie dough needed to be refrigerated as logs before cutting, some things like pie filling needed to be cut up and simmered, pie crusts need to be made, set and rolled out then blind baked or filled and blind baked while waiting for the dough to rise. Punch down and form, second rise, another hour and a half to clean up and start something for lunch. Eat, preheat oven then shove bread in to bake, cal it 30-45 minutes. That knocks off 4 loaves of bread, at least 2 pies and at least 4 dozen cookies for the week. 2 ovens is a lifesaver =) Depending what was for dinner, as above, generally a tossed salad which meant prepping lettuce, carrots, onions, radishes and we got lazy and used good seasonings dressing mix. Meatloaf takes around 15 minutes to prep, 30-45 minutes to bake, you can bake potatoes at the same time, though the joke was traditionally you had green beans [frozen, canned or fresh] and mashed potatoes [never from a mix] and something we mad for dessert.

So yes, even in the 70s ‘modern’ home, housework was an all day thing between cooking, cleaning and shopping. Everything was brick and mortar though Sears [and Monky Ward?] did have a mail order function, as some stuff in the backs of magazines [Yankee had stuff, jewelry, candy and some limited New England touristy crap]

14

Even in this century, my mother spent most of her leisure time in the kitchen. Sure, she cooked, but she sat at the kitchen table and watched her bird feeders outside the kitchen window. She played solitaire at the table. She smoked and chatted by phone with her friends. She wasn’t a soap opera person, but she loved Jeopardy! and doing the newspaper crossword and Jumble at the kitchen table. The family life revolved around the kitchen table in my family.

My father spent a lot of time in his basement workshop when he wasn’t at work. He didn’t live to see retirement, so I don’t know what he would’ve spent his time on if he hadn’t had a job.

StG

15

With the going to bed part, I would just assume they were actually going to bed to sleep. The radio being on would be to help with this, either as something they always do, or to drown out noise. It may seem early, but older people seem to tend to have a diurnal clock where they like to go to sleep and wake earlier.

For what grandma was doing–I’d assume chores, cleaning up, and such. Both my grandmothers would do this. Granted, it didn’t take them so long in the 1990s, but they did it.

Granted, neither she nor grandpa would go to bed while there was company, even if that meant my paternal grandfather would fall asleep in his chair. They’d go to the living room in their chairs, or, sometimes with my paternal grandparents, stay in the kitchen and play cards and such on the kitchen table.

16

One of my gf’s uncles (92) died recently. When we’d stop by to visit, he was invariably working in his shed. I’d join him and watch as he put a carburetor back together or sharpened a mower blade. He’d peek out the window, toward the house, then sneak out his hidden bottle. We’d each take a few pulls, then he’d carefully hide the bottle again. When he eventually went in for dinner, he’d be tipsy, but they played this charade where she didn’t know he drank.

He was tough as nails. Ever time he went to the doctor, they’d discover a new disease or cancer. Like the energizer bunny, he just kept on going. He had bone cancer in his spine and so used a four-footed cane. Yet he managed to go up onto his flat roof to reapply sealer, pulling his buckets and tools up with ropes.

17

For both sets of grandparents, the kitchen was the social center. Maybe one person would be taking care of the food and the others would be visiting, but normally, especially once the harvest started, it would be all hands on deck. My one set of grandparents had a garden about the size of a football field. The food they harvested was not just for them, but for siblings, and their families.

One I’d the things my grandma would make is a big pot of green beans with some ham for flavoring. She would portion it out and put it in the freezer. If my grandfather wanted something to eat and she wasn’t available he would go to the freezer, put the contents in a microwave safe bowl and enjoy. He never cooked from scratch. My grandparents rarely bought any fresh vegetables as they always ate from the garden.

18

your mom was my grandma …grandma always had the radio on too … once in a while shed go in the living room to do a puzzle or watch tv … we played cards in the kitchen too

19

Well, I just spent a good part of the afternoon in the kitchen. Mind you, I absolutely availed myself of every possible shortcut and cheat, and I still was faced with a mountain of work.

I’ve posted of Mr VOW’s recent heart attack and concurrent congestive heart failure. This means a LOW to NO SALT diet.

No fast food.

No convenience foods.

Almost no canned stuff.

No mixes.

A lot of my time is reading labels!

I decided on chicken and roasted vegetables. A stroll through the pantry and refrigerator turned up quite a collection. We’re probably like most households–we buy the good, fresh stuff, and then we get caught up with something and before you know it, OHMYGAWD, IT’S MEALTIME! Fast food, frozen something, dig out a can of spaghetti sauce…

Those fixes all have too much salt.

My vegetative safari trapped a lot of things that were not long for this world. I had to sort and wash and cut away and trim and peel and sometimes I had to mutter last rites as I pitched something gone bad into the garbage.

Some of the veggies had been cleaned. All needed sorting and evaluation. Then I had to chop stuff to approximately equal size. Don’t you watch the Food Network? I ended up with multicolored mini sweet peppers, baby carrots, chopped red onion, a few baby potatoes, some mushrooms, and a small bag of Brussel sprouts. These got dumped into roasting pans, drizzled with a dab of olive oil, a tiny sprinkle of vinegar, and a dash or three of no-salt seasoning mix. After roasting for about an hour, the veggies are nicely caramelized and smelling yummy.

Definitely not “nuke the frozen vegs” and Shake-n-Bake the chicken. Thank heavens I’m retired and can invest that time in my kitchen efforts! Back in my working mom days, I’d blow in the front door and hit the ground running. I have and entire repertoire of super fast, super easy meals. Perhaps when the OP was a kid, his mom was a working mom Wonder Woman. Those ladies assemble dinner, wash a couple of loads of clothes, supervise baths, check homework, and insure everyone has something to wear the next day! Hell, sometimes I didn’t even PEE until 8 PM!

The point of this post? Times change. And sometimes they circle back around and we find ourselves in echoes of the old days again!
~VOW