Washday Dish

This recipe is from a 1940 United Farm Women of Alberta cookbook, from the days when you had to spend an entire day doing the laundry. Naturally you did not want to cook an elaborate meal after all that fuss with the mangle and the starch and the clothespins and everything.

I have a household guide from 1941, the New York Herald Tribune Home Institute’s America’s Housekeeping Book, that devotes six whole chapters to laundry. It’s quite an arbeit, as my grandmother liked to say: the sorting, the soaking, the washing. The rinsing, the bluing, the bleaching and the starching. And then all the troubles you may have with these tasks. Followed by the drying, the sprinkling and the ironing (see separate chapters).

 And then after all of this – you have to take care of the washing machine. After each washday, it is suggested that you remove the lint, wash the inside of the machine, and wash the wringer rolls with nice warm soapsuds. Lucky for you you don’t also have to sing to it and give it a little snack. If you did, though, there’d be plenty of Washday Dish to go around. And cooking it doesn’t require any heavy lifting, which is a good thing after all you went through with the wash.

 Washday Dish

Place in a baking dish thinly sliced potatoes, seasoned with salt, pepper and onion, and dredge with flour. Fill until you can see, but don’t cover with milk or water. Places slices of bacon or salt pork on top of potatoes. Bake in oven until tender, about 1 1/2 hours. Turn meat when brown. If meat gets too crisp, cover.

The photos above are of washing machines from a British 1951 Good Housekeeping Home Encyclopedia. They are probably pretty similar to the sort of washing machines that the Tribune was telling housewives to clean with warm soapsuds. (And isn’t the machine already pretty clean? I mean, didn’t it just have warm soapsuds in it?)