Anything

From cleaning, to health remedies to food prep, my grandmother knew everything.  Read a couple of pieces in The Globe today that made me nostalgic for her vinegar solutions for cleaning and mustard baths for colds.

"Many of us don't cook anymore.  Only half of us spend any time cooking in a given day," writes Sarah Elton in her article, 'Grandmother knows best'.  How can any self-respecting mother run a household and not cook??  My grandparents didn't run to Walmart or the Dollar Store when they needed to replace some little gadget.  They fixed it themselves. 

Not to be romantic, but I well remember those mustard wraps my grandmother would twist around my chest when I had a cold.  Progress took the form of Vick's Vapo-Rub, which my mother used and at which my grandmother disapprovingly sniffed.  Vaseline was the cure-all for every scrape and chapped lip, glycerine and rosewater the remedy for rough hands and rubbing alcohol the cleanser for any wound.  Vitamins?  It was cod liver oil or nothing. 

When it came to food, she canned every summer -- now a middle-class fad -- and never put anything on the table that wasn't in season.  Salad in February?  Forget it.  Money tight?  It was onion pie -- the most delicious dish on the planet.  Oh sure, we had dreadful boiled-to-death cabbage, but now and then Grandma would throw precious sugar into the water to transform it into a very sweet side.  Throw potato peelings into the garbage, are you kidding?  One night it would be mashed potatoes, the next we dined on fried peels from the night before.  Absolutely delicious.   

"While many women I know love doing homey stuff for fun -- baking cookies and drafting DIY home décor -- being good at "woman (sic) skills has definitely decreased," echoes Kate Carraway in her article, 'Struggling with the guilt of not having enough "woman skills"'.  By "woman skills", Carraway means the hard skills our grandmothers deployed to ensure their families survived nutritionally on nothing.

All I can say is, bring back home ec.