Washing Dishes

My coffee pot: cleaned by hand and left on a drying mat.
We make one pot of French-press coffee each morning, and then scrub the coffee pot.

Here’s something I never think much about: washing dishes. Someone has to do it but it’s not very creative or challenging. While I’m doing food prep, I usually wash things and get them out of the way as part of the process. I try to leave less to do after the meal, though some recipes don’t leave time for this step. In my early life in cooking and cleaning up, I sometimes left the dishes in the sink for the next morning, but eventually I found that unappealing. Plus I got a dishwasher. So now we usually don’t leave much of a mess — one of us cleans up soon after each meal.

Mugs and glasses in my dishwasher, which is one of humanity’s best inventions so far IMHO.

Recently, I read an article in Slate that said washing dishes was a neglected skill that needed more attention, and implicitly criticizing cookbooks because they didn’t explain how to clean up after making each recipe. I found this absurd. Who needs instructions on washing dishes? The author, Marian Bull, went ON and ON about washing dishes, mostly repeating the same things over and over, and saying how you need a whole book about washing dishes, and how clean-up should be discussed as part of every dish you cook. She mentions “the unending toil of grease, grime, heat, soap, water, scrub, exhaustion, and sparkle.” 

Ridiculous! But I started thinking a little about the topic, and remembering some things about people teaching me to wash dishes.

When I was in seventh grade, all the girls took a class called “Home Economics,” which taught us how to do household jobs in the kitchen. The boys took “Shop,” or more formally “Industrial Arts,” which taught them to use tools, though I really never knew what they did and incidentally, I never learned to use shop tools. 

Each week in our Home Ec class we would cook something like hot cocoa or another very easy dish — I don’t remember what else we did in school, though we had homework to make brownies and cinnamon rolls, which were memorably delicious. I’m not sure if we took turns or if each person in our assigned teams tried every task, but after setting out ingredients and cooking them according to very strict instructions, we would set the table with perfect etiquette-book arrangement of plates and utensils. After formally serving and eating our work, we would wash the dishes. The prescribed method used two dishpans: one with soapy water and one with clean water for rinsing. We dried the dishes with a clean dish towel and put them back in the cupboards in the kitchen classroom. Everything was methodical and kind of boring.

Dish towels in my cabinet as they are today, not as they should be: straightened up.
Also a box of rubber gloves.

I think I remember the dishwashing part of Home Ec more than the cooking part, though I never really subsequently followed the procedure that I had learned in school. At home, my mother believed in rinsing dishes in running water to be sure all the soap was removed, which is how we did it when it was our turn to wash dishes (complainingly, I regret to say). I think my mother was right about this, and Miss Gordon the teacher was wrong. 

Ad for Old-Lady Shoes

A little more about Miss Gordon -- she was EXTREMELY old and prune-faced and wore drab-colored shapeless dresses and a kind of lace-up medium heeled shoe that doesn’t seem to exist any more except on vintage websites. Except for a few newly-graduated teachers, all our teachers from first grade onward wore these "old-lady" shoes. I think that teachers like that haven’t existed in many years, which is a blessing. Junior high school was a nightmare!

Blog post and photos © 2023 mae sander

Shared with Elizabeth at Altered Book Lover