Time to browse The New Art:

This cookbook/wish book showcased kitchens with GE appliances, and included recipes. It includes the recipes from the earlier Silent Hostess cookbook, along with other recipes to play to the strengths of other GE appliances besides the refrigerators.

First, they give you a few new 1934 model kitchens to drool over:

Wow, that double-wide Monitor Top in the first picture would be luxurious!

Then, a before and after kitchen remodeling image:

The old kitchen meant “lost youth and beauty, and impaired health.” Yikes! Better upgrade, to a “lifetime investment,” that is, until it’s out of style in a few years. How about this new range?

I’d buy one of these today. What a gorgeous stove.

What about a mixer, or even a dishwasher?

“No more tell-tale ‘dishpan’ hands”! And it washes all the dishes in 5 minutes!

And then there’s the newer model of the classic Monitor Top fridge:

…just what we need to make this colorful Melon Ball Cocktail, or the Ginger Ale Fruit Salad.

Of course, this was 1934. The world was in the depths of the Depression. The average family could only dream of a kitchen with a dishwasher and all of the other bright and shiny new GE appliances.

Let’s try the ginger ale:

GINGER ALE FRUIT SALAD

2 tablespoons gelatin
1/4 cup cold water
1/2 cup boiling water
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup chopped nuts
1 cup ginger ale
1 cup grapes
1 banana
1 apple
2 oranges

1. Soak gelatin in cold water five minutes and dissolve in boiling water. 2. Add lemon juice, sugar and ginger ale. 3. Cut grapes in halves and remove seeds. 4. Slice banana. Peel and chop apple. 5. Separate oranges into sections and remove membranes. 6. When ginger ale mixture begins to thicken, fold in fruit and nuts. 7. Turn into molds and chill. 8. Serve on crisp lettuce leaves with Fruit Salad Dressing.

Then again, I am still recovering from the last experiment with gelatin. Maybe I’ll wait to try this one later.

…a very cool 1949 cookbook for new owners of Hotpoint ranges. It has some recipes and a few very cool vintage pictures of that mid-century type with colors that don’t really seem real.

Then, on Wednesday night I was browsing the Seattle Municipal Archives photostream on Flickr, when I came across this picture, captioned “Marilyn demonstrating electric stove, 1949″:

It’s the same stove!

Jason and I once lived in a rental house that had a similar stove to this one, but I can’t recall if it was the same one, exactly. It did have the multiple ovens, which I loved. I think it may have also had a feature of this stove which most stoves don’t have anymore: the “Thrift Cooker.”

Apparently the Thrift Cooker was a built-in slow cooker, recessed into the surface of the stove. Pretty useful, really, though it means you have one less burner available. You don’t need counter space for a Crock-Pot this way, and how often do most people use all four burners at once? (The ad here seems to indicate you can use the Thrift Cooker as a surface burner too!)

Here’s a Life magazine ad for a similar Hotpoint stove from a couple of years earlier. And here’s a 1937 article on using the frying basket that came with the Thrift Cooker.

My house was built in 1911, and the kitchen had only been partially remodeled in all the years since — the original built-in “kitchen dresser” still exists on one wall. My dream was always to make it look like something in Bungalow Kitchens. But kitchen remodels — even period-style — are expensive, and I never thought we would be able to do one.

And then we saw this, and had to buy it:

Once you have a stove like this, it demands that the rest of the kitchen go with it. And so began the transformation of the kitchen into a modern version of a 1920s kitchen. (We didn’t quite go all the way back to 1911 style. 1920s kitchens have more storage.) It’s not finished yet. Normal people do this sort of thing in a more linear way, I suspect. But it is about 75% finished, and the kitchen is now usable. New Marmoleum floor, new cabinets, new (old) fridge, new big kitchen table to use as prep space and eating space — it is a dream kitchen, if you are a history geek like me.

The lesson, though, is be careful when you are planning to “just replace an appliance and maybe the floor tiles.” It doesn’t always work that way.

(About the stove — it’s not a true vintage stove. It’s a 1970s Country Charm reproduction, supposedly made from late 1800s molds, but with electric burners, a clock and timer, etc. It’s old enough to be vintage in its own way, but not a true antique. It works beautifully, though the oven is a bit small, and I like it. Eventually I might have to replace it with a gas stove, but currently we don’t have gas running to our kitchen.)

Jason opened up the oven tonight to try to fix it. As it turned out, there is a part in the stove that was fried pretty well. Fried enough that I am grateful that we did not have an electrical fire, because it seems possible that we could have. It might be possible to find a replacement part, but they are not all that cheap, and the stove is really pretty icky anyway. So we could maybe get a new one.

A new, shiny, 21st century sparkly modern stove, perhaps? Well, we could. But this weekend, instead, we may be going to look at one of these. Seriously. I have this idea to eventually restore the kitchen to its full 1911 splendor, and that would do the trick.

At any rate, I can’t bake anything until we have a working oven again.