Put On Your Apron, It's Time For Home Ec Class!




Sara Etgen-Baker



 
© Copyright 2023 by Sara Etgen-Baker
        Photo of Sara on her Schwinn bike.            
            Photo of Sara in the kitchen wearing the first apron she ever made.
 
Before the Internet, fast food restaurants, and takeout, high school girls of my generation took Home Ec. Class. It was one of the few electives available to us girls in 1965. Boys didn’t take home economics. It just didn’t happen and by all counts may even have been illegal.  We girls didn’t take shop class. Doing so was unthinkable!

We girls were thrilled with our Home Ec. elective; it gave us a break from academia and afforded us an opportunity to develop the prized homemaking skills we were told we’d need to care for our future husbands and families. As I recall, Home Ec. was divided into two semesters: The first was sewing, the second was meal preparation and nutrition. Since women of that time rarely cooked without wearing an apron, our first sewing project was making our own apron to wear in the cooking lab.

I chose to make a half apron and learned how to cut out a pattern; pin it to the fabric; cut the fabric; baste the garment; thread the sewing machine; and guide the material under the advancing presser foot. By semester’s end, I finished my apron and proudly wore it, for having my own apron was symbolic of womanhood and a rite of passage into it.

The next semester, I learned cooking terms, how to read a recipe, and how to create a balanced diet using the food pyramid. What excited me the most about cooking class were all the cookie recipes! I had an almost uncontrollable love for sweets, especially cookies. So strong were my cookie cravings that I was implicated in the notorious 1965 chocolate chip cookie dough caper my friends and fellow future homemakers engineered. Okay, I did eat a little of the dough, but wasn't involved in the actual heist. I was at most an accessory after-the-fact. Regardless, I was sent to the principal’s office and given a choice to either serve detention for a week or stay after school and clean the cooking lab ovens. I opted to clean the ovens all while wearing the apron I’d made.
 
At year’s end, most of my friends discarded their aprons as well as their love for homemaking choosing other electives like cheerleading, drill team, choir, and band. I continued taking home economics classes then majored in college home economics hoping to become a home economics teacher—until the day I set the cooking lab on fire. Apparently I didn’t have much of an aptitude for serious cooking. I did, however, have a fiery passion for words and writing; I switched majors and became an English teacher instead.
 
Now, I rarely cook or sew, but my love for sweets, especially chocolate chip cookies, remains. I occasionally give into my hankering; don my first apron; and make homemade chocolate chip cookies. More often than not, I indulge myself setting aside some refrigerated cookie dough that I secretly eat by the spoonfuls while ordering takeout and waiting for the chocolate chip cookies to bake.



Contact Sara
(Unless you type the author's name
in the subject line of the message
we won't know where to send it.)

Sara's story list and biography

Book Case

Home Page

The Preservation Foundation, Inc., A Nonprofit Book Publisher