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