It’s the most wonderful time of the year—holiday cooking and baking season! Though the slow rising of a dough or hand-mixing of a batter can be satisfying and soothing, sometimes we welcome opportunities to cut corners. Today we’ve mined the collection for technologies meant to make cooking just a little bit easier. Some have become mainstays of kitchens everywhere. Others (like the mystery heating appliance above) long ago disappeared to that impossible to reach top corner kitchen cabinet.
Thankfully, radium-coated cookware never gained great popularity. Promising to be impervious to acid and grease, to never burn or stick, X-Radium Cooking Utensils (below) were advertised at a moment when the element was finding its way into all sorts of consumer products, whether as an additive or just as a futuristic name. Our collection includes trademark registrations for a number of radium-infused or radium-inspired products, including suspenders, theatrical costumes, heaters, boots, paper, printing pigments, silk, soap, shirts, and hosiery.
Likewise, pressure cookers were highlighted as a means of conserving gas and preserving food.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, educators from the Farm Security Administration traveled the country extolling the use of the pressure cooker as part of courses in efficient home management. The photographer’s caption for this image notes “These homesteaders say that the pressure cooker should be put on the national flag for they think it’s saving the farm folks for America.”
Home cooks like Eulia Smart, below, made impressive use of the device.
Electricity is the star of the next photograph. Steam billows out as a woman opens the lid to her electric roaster to check on the state of her turkey, the power cord featuring prominently against the modern geometric countertop. A boy illuminates the scene with an electric spotlight.
In 1954, the electric appliance company Kelvinator commissioned architect Charles Goodman to design a home that would be offered as the grand prize in a short essay contest. According to advertisements for the competition, the home, which could be built in the location of the winner’s choosing, would be fitted with electric appliances designed to make every day feel like a holiday. Pictured here is the kitchen, featuring a sleek Kelvinator refrigerator, freezer, and oven.
Goodman would later design a series of appliances and cookware for the building materials company TECFAB. The items in these drawings, like the console below, have the monumental feel of architectural elevations.
Wishing you and yours happy (and efficient) holiday cooking!
Learn More:
- Read a blog post about kitchens in the Prints & Photographs Collection.
- View early twentieth century radium-related trademarks.
- View the many images related to pressure cookers in the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information archive.
Comments (3)
I think this es a very interesting piece and did enjoy reading it all. Quite interesting to learn about the items you mentioned.
Thanks
My husband inherited a General Mills pressure cooker -dating from the 1930s is my guess. Its gasket gave out; we called General Mills which provided the name and phone of a company that evidently had bought their inventory. Not only did that company provide the gasket, it included a pristine copy of the original booklet The Betty Crocker Guide to Pressure Cooking with the General Mills PressureQuick Saucepan.
This is interesting and enjoyable, thanks!
In one of the farmsteaders photographs the calendae on the wall says “VACCINES | SUPPLIES”.
A small detail that eludes an interesting point of comparison between then and some US rural demographics today.