The Household Searchlight

Because of the events of another tumultuous weekend, Meta Cranky's clutter meter sounded this morning as clearly and insistently as the smoke alarm does when she attempts to fry fish. MC began the day with Cranky Family's effluvia waving from every flat surface.

She made incremental progress until she was distracted by The Household Searchlight. This ancient cookbook originated with her maternal grandmother. Cranky's own mother cooked from this book extensively, but because MC herself never developed a need to make Fanwood Chow-Chow or Oatmeal Gruel, this much-admired 1938 edition has served a reference function. What a revelation, then, to read the Foreword and discover the bohemian vibe of the Household Searchlight:

"The Household Searchlight is a service station conducted for the readers of The Household Magazine. In this seven-room house lives a family of specialists whose entire time is spent working out the problems of homemaking common to every woman who finds herself responsible for the management of a home and the care of children."

MC considers this information to be rather a bombshell. The tasteful house featured on the cookbook's cover was apparently the set for a Depression-Era reality show. Who knew that there was communal living going on in Topeka, Kansas? How are we defining "family of specialists" anyway: Was this Jersey Shore with bacon drippings and rendered lard? MC has a new-found respect for the the Kansas avant-garde.

A font of insight, the Household Searchlight (HS) also sheds light on MC's clutter issue. Open up the cover and what do you see?

Stuff. Two 1978 receipts for replacing the brushes in a Sunbeam mixer. The operating instructions for the wall heater. An onion-skin-carbon copy of the recipe for Berta's Fan Fan Rolls (hey, I've been looking for that one!). A cake recipe written on the back of a flier for the 1993 Azalea festival in Muskogee, complete with a tour of the Five Civilized Tribes Museum.

Meta-Cranky's HS is the Grey Gardens of the cookbook world. Clearly, MC's mother had a pressing need for all this data, and MC is grateful that her mother did not feed feral cats. But wait, there's more. Only when the oddments are removed do you see how MC's mother customized her personal copy of HS. Apparently, the Topeka family of specialists didn't provide an acceptable recipe for fudge pie. What's wrong with kids today is that they don't ingest enough Milnot:
There's also a pie crust recipe, because you can never have enough.

All this before you get to the title page. Each of the book's 25 sections is larded with loose papers; endpapers and margins are comprehensively covered with recipes that begin "1 yellow cake mix."

Today, MC's house is The Household Searchlight writ large. Perhaps a scientific scan could identify the clutter gene on her DNA, but she needs look no further than HS to see that she is predisposed to hoard small pieces of paper. She senses a potential research topic for a family of specialists.
--MC