Kathleen Marple Kalb's Blog, page 14

WHO WANTS TO BE THE SPARE?

It’s no wonder Prince Harry didn’t like being thought of as the spare – who would? But, the history around the designation makes his choice of memoir title even more interesting. Not to mention more of a slap at the Royals.
Let’s start with a little background.
Women weren’t quite livestock before the 20th century, but they weren’t that far from it, either. And human and animal husbandry get disturbingly close when we start talking about aristocrats and inheritance.
Anyone who’s watched THE TUDORS knows about Henry VIII’s need for a male heir. (And anyone who knows what happened when his daughter Elizabeth took over knows just how wrong he was!) Things hadn’t changed much by the Regency, which is why the romance landscape is littered with penniless younger sons desperately hoping for an attractive heiress.
It all comes from a very simple idea: if the oldest son gets almost everything, the family wealth and power will remain consolidated. For titled families, there was usually some kind of entail, a legal setup that kept all the major property with the holder of the title. There might (or might not) be additional family cash to provide daughters with dowries, or younger sons with a start in the church or military.
Which meant that the wife of a titled British aristocrat – or royal -- had exactly one job: produce an heir. Usually an “heir male,” as the entail would put it. A few peerages – usually ones with Royal or Scottish history – allowed the title to pass to a woman, but that was very rare.
Nothing but a boy would do.
You know how well that turned out for Henry VIII, and you may be aware that it didn’t work remarkably better for Princess Diana’s parents, Prince Harry’s grandparents. They tragically lost one baby boy, but kept trying through more daughters, including Diana, until they had an heir. And not much of a marriage left.
Most aristocrats, though, had better luck. In the Gilded Age, the “Dollar Princesses” used the whole system to get some freedom for themselves. After they’d done their duty of producing, as Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough, famously put it, an “heir and a spare,” they were free to enjoy the partner-swapping fun of Edwardian house parties.
And they did.
Of course, the chief house partier was King Edward VII, and one of his favorite companions was Mrs. Alice Keppel, his last mistress. Oh, and incidentally the grandmother of one Camilla Shand, better known to us as Queen Consort Camilla.
When her stepson refers to himself as the spare, he’s shining a bright light on centuries of sexism, tragedy and misery in his mother’s family, and the expectations placed on his parents’ marriage. And more.
By using that particular term, with its Gilded Age throwback association, he’s landing a very specific slap at Camilla. He’s reminding the world that unlike Camilla’s grandmother, this mistress became queen. That this mistress, unlike Alice Keppel, didn’t “know her place.” And, Diana’s boy doesn’t want us to forget what it cost to make that happen.
Talk about making a statement.

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CLEAN HAIR DAY

We’ve all had those bad hair days where you know it’s only going to look better after you wash it again and start over.
But what if you had to wait for a month?
In the 19th century (and before) people washed their hair a lot less often than we do, and when they did, it was a much more elaborate project.
Well, at least for female people.
Men could always just stick their head into the tub or basin, rub it off and shake it out…maybe throwing in a little soap.
One more way life was easier for guys back then.
When a woman wanted to wash her long and lovely locks, it was an hours- or even day long production. The advice books suggest someone with oily hair should undertake it every week or two…with most ladies able to wait a month between washes. To many modern folks used to frequent shampoos, it sounds pretty nasty. But remember, these ladies weren’t wearing their hair short, or loose in springy curls.
No decent woman ran around with her hair down. At the very least, she would twist it back into a quick knot with whatever pins or sticks she could find. If she had the time, energy and resources for more, it might be elaborately braided and swirled into some kind of fancy do.
However she wore it, a woman would brush or comb out her hair daily. Great-Grandma’s “one-hundred strokes” weren’t just some kind of fetish, though there were plenty of men who enjoyed watching their wives brush their hair or helping them with the task. But there was real science at work: it helped re-distribute the natural oils and keep the hair sleek and in good shape. If it happened to provide a little private spice, too, so be it.
But when hair washing day came, it was time to clear the schedule. Anything that we would recognize as shampoo was still decades away, so the hair got the same soap as the body – and sometimes the clothes! Women would shave off little flakes from the bar, add it to water, then work the mess through their hair, and rinse as best they could. Remember, most folks didn’t have showers then, either. Once the hair was clean, it was time to detangle it and let it dry.
Of course, that was almost as big a project as the washing. Imagine trying to work a comb through knee-length wavy hair that’s just been washed in hard water and harsh soap! Women used all manner of oils and potions to smooth the process, but it still had to hurt.
And then, finally, once combed out, you get to sit there with wet hair.
Hopefully you had a good hot fire and the time to enjoy it. The modern hair dryer wasn’t coming anytime soon, either!
Very few women would be able to take hours to let their hair dry fully. Most probably braided it up as soon as it was manageable and got back to whatever work was waiting. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course; damp, well-conditioned hair can dry into lovely smooth waves.
No wonder, though, that women only washed their hair every few weeks…or that frequent shampoos only became part of basic cleanliness in the late 20th century. A lot of basic cleanliness, after all, is determined by what most people can do on most days.

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IT WOULDN'T BE CHRISTMAS WITHOUT A SHIFT!

Scrooge wasn’t the only boss who expected people to work Christmas Day or else – though he might have been the meanest. When Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol,” the round-the-clock business of the Industrial Revolution had begun, and the workers’ movements that led to paid holidays and decent conditions were still far in the future.
Poor Bob Cratchit was the extreme case, but plenty of people, in factories, docks, and town houses, would have been working on that Victorian Christmas Day.
Even before our Covid-influenced 24/7 cycle of email and work from home, there were always jobs that had to be done each day, every day. Servants, for example, had to get their “betters” homes clean and their fancy dinner cooked and laid out. They might get a half day and a small gift from the mistress if they were lucky.
As social conditions improved, and more people took – and expected – time off, the idea of working holidays became unusual, or actively bad.
Still, though, some places simply can’t shut down for the holidays: police and fire stations, hospitals – and newsrooms.
Some people even choose to work the holidays for any number of good reasons.
Many of my Jewish colleagues offer to work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day so our Christian friends can be with their families. It happens a lot, at least in radio – the owner of a Vermont station where I worked was Jewish, and he had the engineer teach him the bare minimum he needed to know to stay on the air so his employees could be free for the day.
Holiday work can also be part of a larger picture. I’m not the only mother who chooses to work weekends and holidays so I can be home at the end of the school day.
Working holidays is really just part of the deal in many industries – and especially broadcasting. Early in your career, you’re taking those shifts as a foothold at a better station…later you’re scoring an occasional shift just to stay in the game.
At least for us, it can be a good thing. Some of my favorite holiday moments have been in newsrooms, especially Christmases with the 1010 WINS team. We’ve become a “work family.” Even though I was technically home for Christmas in 2020 because we were working remotely, it didn’t feel like home – or a holiday -- without the gang. Special shout-out here to Jon Belmont, living treasure anchor, king of the headline, and master of gallows humor, who worked every Christmas for decades. Still miss you.
Honestly, holidays are just fun to work. The bosses are out of the building, the mood is looser and more fun, and inevitably, things happen.
Say, the year I worked a double shift at the tiny radio station in my Western PA hometown. We were running all-Christmas music on reel-to-reel tapes -- yes, this was a very long time ago! The tenth or twelfth time I heard “Happy Christmas, War is Over,” I realized something.
John, Yoko, and the kids weren’t singing what I thought they were.
Country girl that I am, I’d thought the lyric was:
“It wouldn’t be Christmas without any beer.”

Whatever your holiday brings, may it be safe, happy and full of joy!
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HANUKKAH, AMERICAN STYLE

At the end of A FATAL FIRST NIGHT, Ella Shane is lighting her menorah and enjoying an unexpected present from a friend. (Can’t tell you who because – spoiler!) The note points out that Hanukkah is not nearly as important a holiday to Jews as Christmas is to Christians…and that’s true, from a religious standpoint. By 1899, though, Hanukkah is taking on considerable cultural importance for American Jews, and that would only grow in the 20th century.
For Ella, and real people who came up from the tenements, Hanukkah was a marker of how far they’ve progressed. Poor new immigrants like Ella’s Jewish mother would not have brought, or spent limited family money to buy, a menorah. It just wasn’t that important an event to tie up precious resources. The High Holy Days in the autumn, and Passover in the spring were the holidays that mattered.
Hanukkah was a relatively minor spot on the Jewish calendar for centuries. But things changed in America.
As the 19th century went on, there was a deliberate drive among Jewish leaders to encourage immigrants to celebrate the holiday. Part of it was the way the Hanukkah story speaks to self-determination and religious freedom in a new country founded on those very ideals. Also, at least part of it, as immigrants wanted to assimilate, was the desire to have a December holiday too. Not that community leaders meant to encourage that – the whole point of the Hanukkah celebrations was to foster Jewish identity, not copying Christmas.
Someone like Ella, a tenement orphan made good, is exactly the sort of person who would start a more elaborate Hanukkah observance than what, if anything, she had as a kid. Prosperous families would send their children to special events, and light beautiful menorahs, putting them in the window in the Jewish tradition. Of course, people probably didn’t feel comfortable putting them in the window in every neighborhood…but the menorah in the window isn’t just a universal symbol of light against darkness – it’s also a very Jewish statement: We are here, we are still here, and we are bringing our light to help heal the world.
For Ella, and likely many others, it’s also at least partially an act of defiance. While her specific situation was unusual, there were plenty of people who were determined to hang onto whatever bits of their heritage they could, even while becoming and remaining wholly American. Hanukkah became one way to do that.
And about Ella. As the daughter of an extremely rare interfaith marriage, raised by her Irish Catholic father’s family after the death of her Jewish mother, she sees honoring and celebrating her Jewish identity as a way to keep her mother’s memory alive. So Hanukkah has a much more personal meaning to her, in addition to the religious and cultural one.
One more little note about Ella. While her friend imagines her lighting her candles to celebrate, that’s not what she’s doing. She’s actually lighting an oil menorah, popular in the 19th century…and a callback to the Hanukkah miracle of one day’s oil burning for eight. It’s also a callback to my family: my husband has his grandmother’s oil menorah.
Whatever you celebrate this season, may it be joyful and blessed!

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REALLY LITTLE WOMEN

Anyone who’s seen the First Ladies dresses exhibit at the Smithsonian – or any clothing from a few centuries ago – knows that it certainly seems like people are bigger now.
And the science backs up the clothes: we really ARE bigger.
This isn’t yet another screed about obesity and fast food and sedentary life and heaven knows what. You know where to find that if you want it.
We’re looking at old clothes and the people who wore them to get a sense of how real that size difference is.
This one’s personal for me.
I’m six foot one, and almost always the tallest woman in the room. It was weird when I was a kid but now it’s just part of the deal. Still, whenever I’m looking at vintage clothes for research, I can’t help feeling like a larger, less-evolved species.
And it always makes me wonder. Were the people really that much smaller – or is something else going on?
The easy answer is, yes, people really were a lot smaller than we are now. The complex answer is that there’s also a lot of other stuff going on, especially with clothing.
Archaeologists who measure skeletons say that people in the late Middle Ages were roughly the same height as we are – about 5’4” for a woman, and 5’9” for a man, depending on whose stats you use. But…by the 18th century, everybody was averaging about two-and-a-half inches shorter, which makes perfect sense to anyone who’s ever had to duck to get through a Colonial doorframe.
What happened?
Mostly the changes in health and diet associated with the early Industrial Revolution. People started crowding into cities, where there was more disease, and where it also took a lot more money to maintain the sort of nutrition needed to grow big, tall folks. Even if you come from a line of Scotch-Irish giants like me, you have to have the good healthy food to build those big bones.
That’s why people started getting bigger at the turn of the century, and the process really accelerated after World War I, when British and American officials were shocked at how small and scrawny the recruits were. That sparked major public health and nutrition efforts. (If you want to notice that governments started caring a whole lot more about hungry kids when they realized it affected the national defense, well…)
From that point, people did indeed start getting bigger for decades, finally tapering off at the very end of the 20th century.
All of which to say, yes, people absolutely were smaller a couple of centuries ago.
But at least with clothing, there are a couple of other things going on.
The big issue is the kinds of clothing that survived.
With very few exceptions, ordinary daily clothes didn’t make it.
They were patched, fixed, remade and redone until they could no longer be worn, then turned into quilts, rags, or whatever else might be needed.
People saved special clothes: wedding dresses, Sunday suits, a spiffy outfit for one or two holidays a year. And often, especially in the case of wedding gowns, the fit and size represent someone who would never be that small again – if she ever was.
The impossibly small waists, narrow sleeves and miniscule armholes do suggest tiny women…but they also suggest that the lady wearing the dress is not doing anything but standing there looking pretty.
Plus, in the case of gloves and shoes, there was a very strong fashion for women to have tiny feet and hands. So they bought the smallest size they could jam into…and again, we’re usually seeing the special occasion ones, so it’s only more so.
All of which to say yes, we are indeed bigger than our great-great grandmas…but not THAT much bigger!

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BY THE LIGHT OF A DARK LANTERN

Before flashlights came lanterns.
Long before flashlights. Lanterns date back to Ancient China, in the Han Dynasty, when people realized that they had a much better chance of keeping a flame lit by covering it, whether with paper, or pierced porcelain or metal.
So far, it sure sounds like a lamp, doesn’t it?
There is a difference, though, and it’s pretty simple: a lamp has a closed top and a lantern is open. The space allows for more air flow and makes the light brighter.
The basic idea of the lantern hasn’t really changed in the last few thousand years, but the look evolved in many different ways across cultures. Asian paper lanterns, Ancient Greek pottery, and Paul Revere’s lantern all have the same roots.
The Paul Revere style probably looks most familiar to Americans. It’s iconic because of the Colonial callback, but it was also something that many of our ancestors would have used every day.
It’s worth noting, though, that Revere’s piece was actually pretty high-tech for the time: it had glass panels. For much of the Colonial period, glass was expensive and rare. Before glass became more accessible, the panels might have been made of thin slices of horn – the same sort of translucent layer that covered the ABC’s in the famous “hornbook” primers.
The other possibility was more metal, pierced to let the light out, usually in some simple design. Pierced tin lanterns are almost – but not quite – as iconic as the Paul Revere variety, and many of them are prettier.
And then there’s the dark lantern.
It sounds mysterious, and indeed, it’s popped up in the titles of any number of projects to convey a gothic edge.
But it’s actually nothing more than the flashlight of its day.
A dark lantern has a panel of some kind over the light source. Sometimes it’s as simple and elegant as a metal plate that slides over the glass. Other dark lanterns, like the Victorian police lights, have a big round glass lens on the front, with the panel behind it.
In some really old designs, the whole front of the piece serves as the cover, and then swings away to reveal the candle. This one doesn’t seem to appear as often, which makes sense because it’s not really that efficient. There has to be some mechanism to secure the big panel, or you’re going to have a big chunk of metal just hanging out there. Not ideal.
Dark lanterns pop up all over Victorian literature, used by people trying to sneak around, or away, or catch a bad guy who’s up to something nefarious. That’s how Sherlock Holmes and his police pals used one in “The Red-Headed League,” hiding in a bank vault and waiting for the tunneling thieves.
While candle-powered lanterns are mostly just for decoration these days, kerosene and battery ones are still an important part of the emergency kit for many people. Some of these even have a dark option…though most of us probably won’t use them for catching criminals in the basement. We hope!

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A GOOD COLLAR

The bright, clean top of a dress shirt is so important that it’s become slang for the jobs that require one: white-collar. And not so long ago, you could buy the collar on its own.
Fancy collars of some kind have been around since Queen Elizabeth I and her friends swanned around in pleated ruffs, but the dress shirt and its collar are another 19th century evolution.
Until then, men’s shirts had been pretty much the same since the Dark Ages: shapeless, blousy, and long. (Sometimes REALLY long – before modern underwear, men sometimes just tucked the shirt end in around everything. Yeah, you probably didn’t want to know that.)
By the 19th century, though, as the Romantic Era gave way to the Victorian, men’s clothes started to settle into a familiar configuration: tailored jacket, vest, and trousers, with a somewhat fitted shirt underneath (and yes, thank you, actual underpants!). Early in the century, shirts usually had attached collars, often starched up and worn with a cravat, the precursor to the tie, either inside or outside.
As industrialization went on, more and more men were working indoor jobs like clerks, bookkeepers, and managers, and they followed the same dress code as their “betters.” But all that washing, starching, and ironing was more than many of them could handle – or afford.
In the days before washing machines, laundry was a huge issue, whether in cost or time. Somebody had to get those shirts bright white and stiff – a woman in the home, or an outside laundry, and either way, it didn’t come cheap.
Fortunately, a blacksmith’s wife in Troy, New York had gotten sick of washing his shirts every day. Hannah Montague cut off hubby’s collars in 1827, cleaned them, and sewed them back in place. A local minister picked up the idea and ran with it, and detachable collars and cuffs soon became standard menswear.
Then it got even more interesting.
In another corner of the Industrial Revolution, celluloid was being invented as an early form of plastic. It was used as a substitute for ivory, in billiard balls, vanity sets, and any number of other things.
In the 1870s, some enterprising folks figured out a way to make celluloid into thin transparent sheets, and collar makers quickly realized it was a great way to keep their products stiff, clean, and waterproof – forever.
The new celluloid collars cost the same, or a bit more than the original linen or cotton ones, but since they didn’t have to be washed – and in fact couldn’t be – they were much cheaper in the long run. Cost per wear, the calculation some folks use even today when considering a clothing purchase, was far lower with celluloid.
Celluloid collars were an affordable way for the Bob Cratchits of the world to meet Scrooge’s workwear standards without his laundry budget. As women began inching their way into the office world, they, too, started wearing collared shirts, and they also bought celluloid ones. Everyone went white-collar…literally.
Celluloid collars went out in the 1930s when fashions changed.
One of celluloid’s other uses, though, lingered for a much longer time: in film stock. It was the standard in the film industry for decades. Early formulas, though, weren’t stable, and many historic movies no longer exist because they’ve simply disintegrated.
Some of the collars have survived in better shape, so some pieces of the early costumes have lasted longer than the films, which would have been far more important to history than those bits of early plastic. Irony alert!

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THANKSGIVING RAGAMUFFINS

You may have grown up celebrating Thanksgiving the way most folks do now: eating too much and falling asleep in front of a football game (or marathon of a favorite show). You probably didn’t grow up celebrating it with trick-or-treating.
Unless you grew up in some parts of New York. If you did, Thanksgiving Ragamuffins are nothing new and exciting.
To the rest of us, including this rather history-savvy Scotch-Irish Western Pennsylvania girl, they certainly were.
From around 1870, especially in Irish neighborhoods, kids
would dress up in their scruffiest clothes, or even mom’s dresses and makeup, on Thanksgiving morning and head out. “Anything for Thanksgiving?” they’d call, as they knocked on doors, begging for candy and money.
It’s unclear where it started; it seems to have something to do with the then-new Thanksgiving holiday – first celebrated nationwide in 1864 -- and the much older tradition of trick-or-treating on Halloween. Whatever sparked it, the kids had a wonderful time, dashing around and collecting pennies and treats. Of course, it also got more than a little out of hand at times, especially once bonfires and the occasional street fight became part of the festivities.
In some neighborhoods, local leaders tried to control the tradition by turning it into Ragamuffin Parades, which looked a lot like our modern Halloween processions. The costumes that started as a relatively well-off kid’s idea of a beggar eventually evolved to include pirates, bandits and even movie characters.
But as time went on, and Halloween became more of the official “dress up and get candy” holiday, Thanksgiving Ragamuffins faded. City leaders were no longer amused by the idea of grubby urchins running around on Thanksgiving morning begging for money and treats, or even just marching down the street. In the 1930s, no less an authority than the New York Times published a series of articles intended to discourage the Ragamuffin Parades.
The Times and changing attitudes helped knock the parades down, but what really sent them into history was something a bit more spectacular: the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. When you can go see the giant balloons, the Rockettes, and – not for nothing – get a wave from Santa, why would you bother pounding on the neighbor’s door for a stray piece of candy?
The ragamuffins are still out there, though.
A few neighborhoods in the City and Westchester still have Ragamuffin Parades on Thanksgiving. There’s even a street named “Ragamuffin Way” in honor of the event in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
And the ragamuffins live on in the memories of the kids who spent their Thanksgiving mornings begging for treats…and like to tell the grandchildren how they didn’t start the holiday by just sitting down in front of the TV and watching the balloons go by.
There’s nothing like a great “when I was your age” story to start the holiday…and unlike the “walking barefoot through three feet of snow to school” one – it’s actually true!
It’s also the inspiration for a short Ella Shane adventure. “The Thanksgiving Ragamuffin” (a 2022 Derringer finalis!) is just one of the many stories in the wonderful New York Tri-State Sisters In Crime Anthology, JUSTICE FOR ALL: MURDER NEW YORK STYLE 5.
I hope this post is a fun start to YOUR Thanksgiving. A very happy and safe holiday to you and yours. And always, always, thank you for reading!

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BOOT UP

Boot season, when the talk of snow sends most of us digging through the closet to reacquaint ourselves with our warmer footwear, is a fairly new thing.
For most of shoe history, the majority of people had only a pair or two and wore them until they fell apart. And for much of that time, those shoes were boots.
It makes sense.
If you can only afford one or two things to protect your feet, you’re going to buy (make, scrounge) the most useful thing you can get. And in any part of the world where there’s bad weather, that meant boots.
Boots started out as a status symbol in the warmer corners of the ancient world, where the Greeks, Romans, and Ancient Egyptians wore them to differentiate the important royals and generals from the barefoot lower orders.
By the Middle Ages, men were wearing high boots, and women were wearing ankle-length things we’d recognize as “shooties.” The powers-that-be were extremely serious about boot styling at the time: one of the charges that got Joan of Arc sent to the stake was that she wore male footwear: thigh-high boots.
Upper-class women who didn’t have to worry about trudging through the snow have always worn lighter, softer, and prettier shoes, sometimes with high heels (another post for another day!) but working women needed sturdy, sensible footwear.
Regency maidens and Romantic heroines were fond of sweet slippers, but their maids would have been wearing the same pair of boots until they couldn’t be repaired any more. Same with the men working in the fields or stables.
Shiny riding boots started becoming a thing for men in the 18th century, starting in military uniforms and spreading to upper class fashion. As women do with any good male style, the ladies quickly realized riding boots looked just as good on them, and they became part of the female kit, too. The guys were happy to share – from the number of portraits of women in riding gear showing off their boots, they were clearly a thing.
For pioneers and really poor people in the 19th century (and well into the 20th in some areas) it was boots or barefoot. Kids ran barefoot all summer and put on boots for school and/or cold weather. Often, the boots were hand-me-downs, with the oldest child getting a new pair, and everyone else getting the outgrown ones.
As mass-produced footwear became more common, and the growing middle classes had more money, women (and men’s) attention naturally turned to expanding the shoe collection. But people still wore boots much of the time. A good pair of boots was the start – not the cold-weather extra.
It helped that by the turn of the 20th century, standard daily shoes were more like boots anyhow. The high-button shoes we associate with this era would be boots if you wore them with a modern outfit. (Which, by the way, is a great idea!)
Many ladies even wore boots for dress-up. In some memoirs from the time, graduates wax lyrical about the white boots they wore with their lovely dresses. For some girls, those white boots were the first shoes they ever owned that weren’t plain and serviceable.
These days, you don’t have to be a Gilded Age dollar princess to have a shoe wardrobe, and however you feel about snow, bringing out the boots is still a fun way to mark the change of seasons.

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LIGHT N'FLUFFY

For something so light and fluffy, whipped cream and meringue sure take a lot of hard work!
Until the late 1800s, there was only one way to get that wonderful light texture: beating by hand. From long before anyone started writing cookbooks, people used branches of twigs, sometimes of aromatic wood for flavor. Surviving Shaker recipes suggest using peach twigs, bruised to release the scent.
Japanese tea masters started using bamboo whisks for their ceremonial matcha in the late 15th century, and still do.
Eventually, cooks realized that wires would work as well as twigs, and they’d last longer and be easier to clean. The balloon whisk was invented sometime in the early 1800s and was the kitchen standard by later in the century.
None of this was fast and easy, though.
Old cake recipes calmly advise cooks to beat the egg whites for an hour. It probably really did take that long, and there really was some unfortunate servant whose job it was to beat eggs for hours on end. My arms hurt just thinking about it.
Everything changed in the last quarter of the century, at least in the U.S. Rotary beaters were invented in the 1860s, but there were a bunch of different designs, and it took a while for the standard design we know now to become popular.
Once it did, though, things got a lot lighter and fluffier!
Angel-food cakes had been around before the rotary beater, at least for anyone who had the time to beat the egg whites, or a servant to do it for them, but once beaters were available, they really took off. Recipes for angel-food start showing up in prestige cookbooks around the turn of the century…along with all kinds of fanciful meringue preparations taking advantage of the new ease of beating whites.
Interesting note, here, though: rotary beaters didn’t catch on nearly as much or as quickly in Britain, and cookbook writers didn’t seem to see the need. Which kind of makes you wonder about who was writing the cookbooks – and who was doing the actual cooking!
While somebody got the idea to stick an electric motor on an eggbeater as early as the 1880s, powered mixers didn’t make it into the home kitchen for decades. Sunbeam and Kitchen-Aid models much like the ones many of us have today started appearing in the 1920s, and became more and more common after World War II, when more people could afford them.
And then, of course, there’s the blender.
While it has swirling blades, it actually evolved on a whole separate track: stemming from the machines used to mix milkshakes at soda fountains. And even though it’s a kitchen – and wedding gift – fixture, it’s not used much for whipping cream or eggs – even though some folks (my mom!) swear by blender hollandaise.
Let’s just leave food processors for another day, since they’re a much later innovation.
However you get there, one thing is certain: light and fluffy things involve an awful lot of heavy metal. Or lifting!

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