Blog Posts about Children's Books

I just completed a post about small vintage children's books.  You can find more blog posts about children's books and illustrators here at The Estate Sale Chronicles:

A Bear Called Paddington
http://estatesalechronicles.blogspot.com/2014/12/finding-paddington.html

Beautiful Joe
http://estatesalechronicles.blogspot.com/2014/07/beautiful-joe-and-band-of-mercy.html

Strongheart the Wonder Dog
http://estatesalechronicles.blogspot.com/2014/06/strongheart-wonder-dog.html

Horse Book Illustrators:
Paul Brown
http://estatesalechronicles.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-horse-book-illustrators-part-one.html

Wesley Dennis
http://estatesalechronicles.blogspot.com/2014/06/horse-book-illustrators-part-two-wesley.html

Sam Savitt
http://estatesalechronicles.blogspot.com/2014/06/horse-book-illustrators-part-three-sam.html

Walter Farley's Horse Books
http://estatesalechronicles.blogspot.com/2013/04/old-friends-on-shelf-horse-books-by.html

Winnie-the-Pooh
http://estatesalechronicles.blogspot.com/2014/02/happy-birthday-to-pooh.html

Old Friends
http://estatesalechronicles.blogspot.com/2013/11/remembering-old-friends-childrens-books.html

Read-Aloud Children's Books

On International Children's Book Day (April 2, which is the birthday of Hans Christian Andersen), it's good to remember the books that someone read to you when you were little.

Any child born between the 1940s and today, who was blessed enough to have books in the home and someone who read to them, probably remembers Little Golden Books, Wonder Books, and others like them.

I find a lot of them at estate sales.

Having Ladybug Hitch Hikes Home, a Bonnie Book,
read to me is one of my earliest memories.

They were small, sturdy, easy to read and (in a child's eyes) wonderfully illustrated.   They were inexpensive and, importantly, available in grocery stores, variety stores, and other places where grownups liked to shop.

Ponies, a Rand McNally Book-Elf Junior book.

In the 1950s and 1960s, cartoons and other pop culture figures found additional life in small children's books.

Tweety and Howdy Doody and the Monkey Tale were published by Whitman. 

Many small children's books featured Disney characters such as Bambi.

The Lone Ranger: Desert Storm was a Tell-A-Tale book by Whitman.

Dondi was a Wonder Book (with Washable Covers).

Walt Disney's Savage Sam was a Little Golden Book.

They made good Christmas gifts, too.

The Christmas Puppy was a Wonder Book.

Huckleberry Hound and the Christmas Sleigh was a Little Golden Book.
It looks like Pixie and Dixie the mice are in the sleigh, on the cover.

The most important thing about these small books is that they facilitated reading aloud.  The importance of reading aloud to a child cannot be understated.  

When I was a kid, it was almost a given that your parents or grandparents told you stories and read aloud to you, particularly at bedtime.  They showed you the pictures and talked to you about the story.  

You wanted your favorite books read to you over and over again, and if the adult grew tired of this and skipped a page, you corrected them and made them go back and read the part they'd missed.

Walt Disney's Lucky Puppy was a spin-off of the animated version of 101 Dalmatians.

  

Then there came a momentous afternoon, when you picked up your favorite book and no one was available to read it to you, so you read it to yourself.

What book do you remember from your childhood?  Do you still have it?  If not, find a copy from an online retailer, or at a yard sale or estate sale.  

Read it to yourself.  Enjoy the illustrations.  Read it to someone small, and pass it along.

Reposting for Pi (e) Day, 3.14.15

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Pyrex Bowls and Pumpkin Pie

September marks the start of autumn, so to celebrate a few days early, I decided to make a pumpkin pie using sweetened condensed milk (the thick kind that comes in a can, containing added sugar) and an old recipe for pie crust.

To start, I needed mixing bowls.  I'd found this set of four stackable Pyrex mixing bowls at an estate sale.

I'd also found a copy of a 1951 women's magazine with an ad for this set of bowls at the estate sale: the original owner paid $2.95 for the set.

Next, I needed to decide which recipe to use for pie crust, so I consulted the Good and Easy Cookbook, first published in 1954 -- which I also found at an estate sale.

I selected a recipe, got out the largest, yellow, Pyrex mixing bowl, preheated my oven to 425 degrees, and set to work.

Recipe for Single Pie Crust (8 or 9 inches wide)

1 cup flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup shortening

3 tablespoons water (I used ice water)

Mix the flour and salt in a large mixing bowl; cut in the shortening.  Sprinkle with water and form into a ball.  Place the ball on a floured flat surface -- in this case, the cloth pastry frame I found at another estate sale.

Put some flour on the rolling pin and roll the dough flat from the center outwards (roll from the center to the top, then from the center to the bottom, center to right, center to left, and so on until the crust is the desired size and thickness).

Roll the dough until it's about an inch larger than the pie pan you're going to use.  Carefully lift the dough and place it in the pie pan, then cut off the jagged edges and flute the edges crust in the pan with your fingers.  

I used a pale yellow Fiesta Ware pie plate.

What to do with the extra pieces of pie crust?  Place them on a flat baking sheet and sprinkle them with cinnamon or pumpkin pie spice and sugar.  You've already preheated the oven to 425 degrees, so while you are making the pie filling, bake the crust shards until they are golden brown.  Remove them from the oven and let them cool.  This gives over-eager pie aficionados something to snack on while the pie itself is being baked.

For the pumpkin pie filling, combine in a mixing bowl (your choice of colors, but one of the larger ones):

1 can (15 ounces) pumpkin

1 can (14 ounces) sweetened condensed milk

2 eggs

2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

A pinch of black pepper

Beat the ingredients together thoroughly and pour into the prepared pie crust.  Bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes, then reduce the oven temperature to 350 degrees and continue baking the pie for another 30-40 minutes or until a knife inserted near the center of the pie filling (about an inch or so from the center) comes out clean.  Remove the pie from the oven and let it cool.  Serve warm or chilled with whipped cream or a small scoop of ice cream.  Refrigerate any leftover pie.  (I'm told that pie is also good for breakfast.)

Food tradition: My grandmother always added a tiny amount of black pepper to recipes that called for cinnamon, ginger and/or nutmeg.  She said the pepper helped bring out the flavors of the other spices.

Food history lesson: Sweetened condensed milk was patented in 1856 by a Mr. Gail Borden, of dairy fame.  He (and others) developed canned milk in response to the fact that fresh milk didn't keep very long, back then.  Adding sugar inhibited bacterial growth.

And there it is: an old-school pumpkin pie, baked with love and some help from things I found at estate sales.
_______________________________________

Here are some more food-related blog posts on The Estate Sale Chronicles:

A recipe for sugar cookies from the Good and Easy Cookbook:  http://estatesalechronicles.blogspot.com/2014/08/sugar-cookies-from-good-and-easy.html

The cloth pastry frame:  http://estatesalechronicles.blogspot.com/2012/07/pastry-cloth.html

Here's a link to an article on the history of canned milk (regular and sweetened condensed):  http://homecooking.about.com/od/milkproducts/a/canmilkhistory.htm

And a website devoted to the love of Pyrex: http://www.pyrexlove.com/

Reposting: Vintage School Valentines

This post originally appeared last year.  It seems appropriate to revisit the mid-century designs and wordplay of Valentine's Day many years ago.

Valentine's Day Traditions

One of my favorite things to find at estate sales, is an old greeting card.  It's even more fun to find a box of old greeting cards someone has saved, because the images evoke a certain time in our history.

Anyone who went to a public elementary school in the mid- 20th century will probably remember the traditions surrounding Valentine's Day.  

In some schools, a few days before February 14th, you brought an empty cardboard box from home (such as a shoe box or an oatmeal tub) and decorated it in class with red, pink and/or white construction paper.  The teacher showed you how to fold a piece of construction paper in half and use your blunt-nosed school scissors to carefully cut half a heart out of the paper.  When you opened the half-heart, it had transformed into a whole heart!  

Then you pasted the hearts you'd cut out (probably using your fingers or a small flat round-edged wooden tongue depressor to apply the school paste) onto your box and wrote your name on it.  

There were no glue sticks back then, and there was no standardized test based on your classroom activity.  You were learning to follow instructions, to work quietly at your own desk, to develop hand/eye coordination, and to problem-solve when you forgot about cutting the heart out along the folded side of the paper and ended up with two half-hearts instead.   

You persevered, and your box was complete.  Then you cleaned up the little paper shards around your desk as best you could, and washed the school paste off your fingers at the classroom sink.  That is, unless you were the proverbial kid who ate school paste, but we won't go into that here -- we need to move on.  We need to get some Valentine's Day cards.

Sometime before the 14th, you also had to make or buy Valentine's Day cards for each of your classmates.  Perhaps you were stuck at home one evening with your scissors and your red construction paper, cutting out dozens of hearts and writing "BE MINE" on the middle of each (writing "BE MY VALENTINE" a couple of dozen times was too labor-intensive).

Or your mom took you to the drug store to buy a package of the appropriate number of school valentines.  These usually came either pre-cut in small flat boxes, or in book form that you could punch out.  

Some of the cards were interactive (although we didn't use that word to describe them).

You usually signed your name on the back of each card, although you also had the option of writing "FROM ???" ("ANONYMOUS" was too labor-intensive) if you didn't want the recipient to know that a) you liked them; or b) your mother told you that you had to give them a card even if you didn't like them -- it was The Right Thing To Do.

Note the cut-and-paste stickers on this page.  You'll need to get out your school paste again, or if you don't have school paste at home, the can of rubber cement or the golden-brown bottle of LePage's mucilage with the weird rubber nozzle.

There was usually a special card you could give to your teacher, who certainly deserved some extra love for all her hard work and especially for her patience.

Then on Valentine's Day at school, you set your decorated box out and your classmates (you hoped) filled it with their own valentines.  (I'm certain that the teachers kept extra anonymous valentines handy, so that everyone would get at least a few.)  Some kids gave a valentine to everyone in the class (probably at their parents' insistence); others would only give cards to the people they really liked.   

Either way, you always gave the cards you liked best to the people you liked best.  And sometimes you saved back a card for yourself because you just couldn't stand to give it away. To You, From You.

I'm keeping this one.

I found these old Valentines at some estate sales over the last couple of years.   Enjoy, and share them with your own Valentine.

I'm keeping this one, too.  

Happy Valentine's Day!