After the folks bought a farm south of Dexter, 1952, Mom longed for a handier kitchen. When Dad installed her steel Youngstown cupboards and black countertops, she was just delighted!
Mom decorated her clean white kitchen with pink and green. She even had pink and green square Melmac dishes which were large enough so that Uncle Bill didn’t have to pile food on top of food when he worked with Dad and had noon dinner with us.
It was the kitchen where I learned to cook, kinda. I could stir gravy, to ward off lumps, but didn’t know how came about in the first place. I could mix up a spice cake from scratch, but Mom took over from there–baking and frosting. Dad enjoyed spice cake so much that sometimes it never got frosted.
For 4-H projects, we had to learn to bake a cake from scratch to finish, to plan and cook a meal. All done in Mom’s Youngstown kitchen.
Mom stirred up her famous caramel-pecan cloverleaf rolls in that kitchen, and her sought-after Christmas caramels, her wonderful potato salad.
Later, I see, she changed the pink and green to red. Their son-in-law bought the large spoon and fork on the wall when he was stationed in Vietnam.
At some point, even Mom’s kitchen was remodeled again, but it seems like she’d been even more satisfied with those clean white Youngstown steel cupboards in the 1950s.
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Were those cabinets metal? My parents had cabinets that looked much like the ones you show, and they were metal. I now have them in my garage.
Yes, steel! I didn’t provide a very good link for that. I think some of Mom’s ended up in a shed. Are yours white?
My mother had those Melmac dishes for every day use. They were turquoise and stained very badly.
Mom’s were surprisingly unstained after so much use!
I had a metal sink/cupboard unit in my house. I never learned to appreciate metal over wood or laminate. The colors look nice in your mom’s kitchen, though. We’re the countertops metal, too?
No, Dad built the countertops, probably some kind of wood.
It took my dad 25 years of promising my mom new cabinets. He finally made beautiful oak cabinets and shelves with style and rail doors replacing the falling apart plywood eyesores as mom called them. They are probably the treason the old house has not been torn down to this day.
Sounds like your dad was an artist with wood! Did he do more?
I like how your mother decorated her kitchen in pink and green. It is cheerful. (I like pink very much anyway!) It sort of reminds me of a garden theme looking at those dishes…like springtime in the kitchen! 🙂
Spring was also her favorite season!
We had that exact Melmac dish set when I was a kid in the 60’s. I still have a couple of pieces left from it.
Same colors? We had some for several years but I haven’t even seen them in the basement. hmmm
We had the pink and green pieces.