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.