Food, Fashion and Home

A defining feature of This Week was the abundant space devoted to service and women’s interest articles, much of it from the Herald Tribune’s Home Institute. Unlike present-day "Lifestyle" sections, the emphasis was on the practical rather than the luxurious. The high-end consumer was not neglected entirely. This week, Katherine Vincent, the newspaper’s fashion editor, presented a photo spread of spring clothes from the Young Timers shop at Henri Bendel's, a collection of suits and dresses priced from $36 to $60. Emily Post advised on the proper etiquette when dealing with one’s household help. She mentioned this had become particularly important in light of the difficulty finding qualified people to fill service positions in homes, restaurants or hotels since the beginning of the war, a common whine of the upper levels of the pecking order of the day.

Food columnist Clementine Paddleford shared recipes for Easter brunch from top New York caterers. Esther Foley, head of the Home Institute, offered up some food and table decorating ideas for Easter breakfast. She advised playing down food by blending it into the other colorful symbols of Easter. For a children's Easter breakfast she suggested a basket centerpiece with individual baskets for each child with a decorated egg, a few jelly bean eggs and a chocolate bunny. She surrounded the baskets with small flowers, like narcissus, around a paper grass base. In the center of this display she placed traditional Easter bread such as pannetoni (sic), Russian kulich or Hungarian streusel cake. For a more adult table she used an Easter bonnet as the centerpiece and prepared a buffet pineapple salad that included sweetened pineapple cubes, orange cubes, diced bananas, and a pint of berries dressed with mayo thinned with cream or fruit juice. She garnished with banana slices that have been dropped into lemon or grapefruit juice. She put the salad into halved pineapple hulls and arranged them on a serving board along with a bunch of grapes. She said the result was half dessert and half salad.

Julius and Hazel Rockow provided recipes for beef hearts, which they advised must be cooked slowly to avoid toughness. Wartime and postwar meat shortages had led many homemakers to familiarize themselves with organ meats they might never have served in the past.

Readers were invited to submit recipes that used jelly as an ingredient. The first prize was $10.

“A Place for Everything” suggested erecting a two-way wall between the kitchen and dining room to solve the kitchen storage dilemma in smaller houses and apartments.

“Careful It’s Cheese” detailed proper methods of cheese storage.

In “The Homemaker Asks” section this week the experts at the Home Institute assured readers that emergency flour, the bran-laden flour mandated by government regulation to help cut grain consumption, could be used successfully in most bread and cake recipes. Finicky bakers might complain that it made a less than perfect cake but the home economists at the Home Institute had used the flour to make biscuits, muffins, yeast bread, pastries and two-egg cakes. They reported that the crumb was a little darker, the volume was less, the textures lightly coarser and the bread had a “wheaty” bite but the results generally were acceptable. For three cents you could order a leaflet with detailed, tested recipes for pastry, gold cake, chocolate drop cookies and other basics using the flour. The Home Institute was also selling leaflets that week on gravy making, traditional Easter breads, cheesecakes, strawberry shortcakes, ways to stretch berry flavor and buffet supper dishes.

Geri Petri wrote about new tools available now in garden centers, such as plastic, kink-free garden hoses and seedling boxes, that would help the home gardener get an early start on spring planting. Three cents got you a pamphlet listing the places where you could find these products.

You could also buy a copy of this week’s “Has Anyone Told You” in pamphlet form. This magazine feature was a round-up of new gadgets and gizmos.. Among the innovations touted that week by the Home Institute were:

  • Electric ranges with lights on each surface as well as on the oven and broiler to alert the homemaker if a unit was turned on

  • Nylon combs and hairnets

  • Childproof bathroom cabinets with compartments for drugs that could only be opened from the top

  • Elastic plastic for handbags, surgeons gloves, hospital sheets and garden hoses

  • A textile chemical that weatherproofed fabrics and controlled shrinkage

  • A portable freezer that could hold zero temperature for up to two days

  • A midget fire extinguisher with a secret chemical that was said to be harmless to textiles and food

  • Paint directories with 10,000 tints that could be mixed by prescription at retail stores

  • An electric broiler unit that fit into a frying pan

  • A toaster with a pull-out compartment for toast and a hot plate on top, perfect for kitchenless apartments, dorm rooms or bachelor quarters

  • For the men (that’s what it says) a longer lasting, delicately perfumed lighter fluid, a gadget of plastic and stainless steel that could be used to chip ice in a glass, a bottle opener that wouldn’t break the bottle and a lawn sprinkler with a square spray that could water a patch as small as four feet

  • A paint hook that held a paint can securely to a ladder

  • A device for measuring legs for wrinkle-free stocking

  • Toe rubbers for toeless shoes in shades that matched stockings.

The April 14 Herald Tribune also included a separate photo supplement in honor of the New York Infirmary’s fundraising drive. It featured socialites, debutantes and celebrities posed in their finery often with a product tie-in. New York Infirmary, staffed entirely by women doctors, announced that month that it would be moving from its location on Stuyvesant Square in the Lower East Side after 75 years.