Do You Ever Hang Clothing to Dry?

an umbrella clothesline -- what I remember
from my own childhood

When my parents married (in the 1950s), my father made a couple of vows in addition to a lifetime of faithfulness. He vowed that my mother would never have to keep a vegetable garden and he would buy her a tumble clothes dryer as soon as they could afford it. My father grew up feeling poor. My grandmother was raising 5 children as a single mother. My father and his older sister were put in charge of the housekeeping and vegetable gardening (as well as tending the 3 younger siblings) during the summer months while my grandmother went to work. Both a large vegetable garden and a clothesline were reminders to my father of feeling poor. 

My mother did need to hang dry the laundry for the first several years of their marriage. But when I was about six years old, they moved into a house with a spot for both a washer and a dryer, and they had the means to afford both. My mother would continue to hang or lay flat some clothing items to preserve their shape and lessen wear, however.

When my kids were young, I hung the laundry to dry as a matter of necessity, even after my in-laws purchased a washer and dryer for us when we bought our house. I hung it all -- baby diapers, towels, sheets, and all of the clothing for 5 people. I once calculated the monthly savings by hanging everything to dry each week. I think it was about $18 per month savings. When you have just a tiny amount of wiggle room in the household budget, $18 is a significant amount.

Although we can afford to tumble dry all of our laundry now, we continue to hang some clothing each week. While we do this to save money, it's not the savings on our electric bill that we have in mind. It's keeping our favorite clothing for as long as possible that motivates us. (Washing also puts wear on your clothes. But  so far, I haven't found a way to keep my clothes clean and odor-free without washing.) All of that lint you pull out of the lint trap? That's part of the fabric of your clothing and other textiles! Both heat and rubbing of fabrics against each other is hard of fibers.

In a 1999 study reported by Science Daily, high heat drying can reduce cotton fabric strength (and lead to tears) by about 25%. In addition, tumble drying wet cotton fabric resulted in more wear than tumble drying partially dry cotton fabric. 

I didn't know about this study when I was hanging our laundry to dry all of those years ago. But for many years, I sort of intuitively knew this through my own experience. I just didn't know how much line-drying prolonged the life of our clothing. If it seems that pieces of your clothing hold up longer when exclusively line-dried for it's life, it's not your imagination.

Here's my math. If I can extend the length of a shirt's useful wear an additional 25%, that's like buying one fewer shirt every four years. My favorite, around-the-house shirt right now is on the rack shown in the photo. I always, always hang this one to dry. It's developing tiny holes near some top-stitching in different areas. I'll be sad to relegate this one to the rag bag, as it's so comfortable and soft. I bought this shirt in 2015, ten years ago. I've worn it once per week, almost year round, for those 10 years. If the Science Daily estimates apply to this shirt, I imagine it would have worn out about 2 years ago.

I have 3 portable indoor racks for laundry-drying. In nice weather, we move them out onto the deck. They're collapsible. So when we have guests over, I can fold them up and stand them against a wall of the laundry room. While these three are very practical, what I'd really like to have is something like this:

Isn't that a beautiful clothesline? Practical tools don't need to look boring. I have just the spot in the garden for one like it. Perhaps someday I'll get some help building a set-up like that. 

How do you feel about hanging laundry to dry? Does it call to mind feelings of economic disadvantage? Would/do you line dry specific clothing items so they would/will last longer?

Two Great Depression Ways to Extend a Few Eggs

Meals Tested Tasted And Approved, Good Housekeeping, 1931

I got the go-ahead to eat most of our normal foods today at my one-week post-op visit with the surgeon. I still can't have things like carrot sticks or nuts, but most of the rest of our foods are now a-okay. I came home and had a slice of bread, all in one piece (not cut up into small cubes). And I didn't puree our chicken noodle soup plus ate the biscuits as is. It was only a week, but I was really tiring of everything blended, pureed, liquified, or made soggy in liquids.

from page 59, Meals Tested Tasted and Approved

Anyway, one of the foods I did eat when needing things to be very soft were eggs, prepared in two ways that were popularized in the Great Depression: 1) soft scrambled eggs stretched with water, and 2) eggs with bread crumbs (as in the recipe above for Crumb Omelet).

The first egg variation, with lots of water, was a way to stretch a few scrambled eggs to look like more food for a family. Obviously, one would be filling out the egg meal with cheap starches like macaroni, biscuits, or potatoes, plus whatever vegetables or fruits the cook might have access to. The upside to stretching eggs with water (besides looking like more eggs) is that they come out very soft and easy to mash against the roof of one's mouth with their tongue. 

To extend eggs with water, I used 2 tablespoons of water for 1 large egg, beating well together, adding salt and pepper then scrambling in a hot skillet with fat. I cooked the egg until it was set, but not dried out. The water in the egg not only extends the egg, but it also creates steam which puffs up the egg, making it look like more volume. Most instructions for adding water to eggs recommend between 1 and 2 tablespoons of water per large egg.

The second egg variation extended the few eggs with bread crumbs, again making a few eggs look like many. For my purpose, I incorporated the bread crumbs this past week as a way to add soft grains to my meals. 

The recipe above calls for making this omelette-style. I made mine as scrambled eggs. As you can read in the recipe, this omelette was made with 4 large eggs, yet it served 6 people. That's 2/3 of an egg per person. Again, I would hope that the cook would be filling out the meal with lots of other filling and nutritious foods, perhaps a dandelion salad and a dish of fried potatoes.

Many home-cooks weren't fortunate enough to have a lot of eggs to work with each week in the 1930s. Stretching the eggs one did have to feed a large family was a bit of a challenge. We're rather spoiled in comparison, with the idea of two eggs as the normal serving per adult. In the cookbook pictured at the top of this post, most recipes provide 1 egg per serving, but there are a couple of other recipes that call for 5 eggs to feed 6 people.