Early Retirement Extreme Forums

I've found that a lot of robust, low cost solutions for home economics problems can be found by taking things that were the norm >40 years ago replicating them. Examples include making soups during winter (cheap, filling, warms you up the from the inside, can use essentially any ingredients, cooking heat warms the living space etc), and clotheslines (cheap, easy, better for clothes).

Does anyone know good resources for finding these kinds of solutions? Things I've thought of are asking older relatives, and looking at old magazines. The interest of most people regarding this stuff would typically be out of curiosity, so that has made searching difficult.

And in case it is ambiguous, by home economics I mean solutions to household problems. How to do laundry, cook, clean, etc.

You can find Foxfire books at most used book stores and often libraries. https://www.foxfire.org/shop/category/books/

Foxfire is closer to 150 years ago.

You could try the 1960s hippies or 1970s back to the land types. Lots of contemporary books published e.g.

https://www.amazon.com/Back-Eden-Jethro ... 0940985101

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Book-Se ... 197&sr=8-1

i didn't know about the foxfire series, seems it's been around for a while. I'm curious about what other book recommendations people would come up with. While I don't personally follow them, there might be youtube channels devoted to historical dress and household practices as well.

in switzerland, wartimes cookbook are regularly reprinted. that might be a good start.

If they are right, it will be the Great Depression/WW2 resources. I think on this forum Ralph Borsodi is quite well liked, if not exactly 'tips and tricks' like.

guitarplayer wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 06, 2022 2:27 am

If they are right, it will be the Great Depression/WW2 resources. I think on this forum Ralph Borsodi is quite well liked, if not exactly 'tips and tricks' like.

The book is in the public domain and can be found here

"The Complete Tightwad Gazette" by Amy Dacyczyn is a fairly thorough collection of this sort of knowledge. I referenced it quite frequently during my SAHM years.

One thing to bear in mind is that the specifics of old-fashioned advice may no longer apply due to change in what is readily available or generally inexpensive. For instance, discarded cigar boxes and horse manure were much more easily found in 1922.

Mother Earth News

I'm not as familiar with the newer articles. Their archive is all online and dates back to the 60s iirc.

Thanks all for the answers - I will definitely check these out.

I think the 1970s is where the gold is. Many good books where written during the stagflating decade.

https://www.amazon.com/Living-Poor-Styl ... 0012X5QDK/ (there's a less edgy update, this is the original)
https://www.amazon.com/Possum-Living-Wi ... 0982053932

I actually learned most of my "tips&tricks" from a web1.0 site called "dollar stretcher". There's still a site with that name, but it doesn't look much at all like the original one which was extremely information dense (not the modern style of white space despair).

Tangentially, I'm continually flabbergasted how much and how quickly "common sense" knowledge has been forgotten as the world has become app'ified. Knowledge I take for granted but the new generations don't even consider. Perhaps this means I'm old now.

PS: Foxfire was apparently a scramble to ensure that even older and mostly oral knowledge (around Appalachia) wasn't lost to time. I'm just trying to preserve the knowledge that one can wash dishes without a dishwasher and dry clothes without a drytumbler.

A site that appears similar to your description of The Dollar Stretcher is accessible through web archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20050829190 ... tcher.com/

theanimal wrote: ↑

Mon Sep 12, 2022 1:58 pm

A site that appears similar to your description of The Dollar Stretcher is accessible through web archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20050829190 ... tcher.com/

Yes, that one!

Mrs. Ego and I constantly marvel at how our mothers learned the same frugal ideas and recipes from 1960s-70s Good Housekeeping Magazine and The Frugal Gourmet on PBS.

Pineapple Upside Down Cake anyone?

Here's a blog post listing some older books. There's also a bibliography at the back of Home Economics, [compiled] by Jennifer McKnight-Trontz, that I can drop here if anyone is interested.

If you can't find pdfs online, your local library or ebay might have them. I didn't see McKnight-Trontz's 2010 book at my local library, but they do have a copy of the updated version, This Modern House, on order. McKnight-Trontz's book is a compilation of public domain home ec textbook content from ~1900-1940.

Household Physics by Madalyn Avery looks interesting. It's a textbook on practical physics for college students in home ec.

Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson is a more modern housekeeping encyclopedia and so it has more modern dependencies.

Not home economics, but I ran across The Farm Shop by Wakeman & McCoy at a cattle ranch and really enjoyed it.

I looked at the Dollar Stretcher page at the Internet Archive, and none of the links worked.

jacob wrote: ↑

Mon Sep 12, 2022 1:00 pm

I'm just trying to preserve the knowledge that one can wash dishes without a dishwasher and dry clothes without a drytumbler.

Fighting the good fight against the commercialization of everything.

Quinn wrote: A great many of you consciously or unconsciously think of evolution as a process of inexorable improvement. You imagine that humans began as a completely miserable lot but under the influence of evolution very gradually got better and better and and better and better and better and better until one day they became you, complete with frost free refrigerators, microwave ovens, air conditioning, minivans, and satellite televisions with 600 channels. Because of this, giving up anything would necessarily represent a step backwards in human development. So Mother Culture formulates the problem this way: ‘Saving the world means giving up things and giving up things means reverting to misery. Therefore forget about giving up things. And, more importantly, forget about saving the world.’

(disregard the saving the world bit) I.e. culture tells us that anything new is necessarily better, and so the old knowledge from the 1970s (or, dare to say, even older) must be old and bad and will make you miserable / will make you seem weird or bad (since we changed things into *commercial products* since then).

I am a big fan of Townsends on YouTube.

Heres one I really enjoyed about shoe repair:
https://youtu.be/zqSa3fycEKE

Building a stool:
https://youtu.be/ey5JYMbI64I