How To Disappear Completely

upon cooking for invalids

To someone fascinated by history, interesting artifacts can be found within one's own family. I was browsing through my grandmother's cookbooks and she brought out a volume of German cookery that had been owned by her great-aunt. I was somewhat amused by a chapter devoted entirely to "Cooking for Invalids," complete with detailed instructions on appeal and heath:

"Meals should never be prepared in the sickroom, because the air becomes vitiated, and the noise and activity inseparable from the work itself is annoying to the patient, and is apt to diminish whatever appetite he may happen to have...Never bring more victuals into the sickroom than are necessary to supply present needs, because the air in the room and the exhalations from the patient act deleteriously upon the food and may prove dangerous."

The book cautions against soliciting a patient's desires regarding food, but I'm not sure I would be clamoring for Fried Calf's Brain on my sickbed...

Back in 1922, when the cookbook was published, the care of invalids took place largely in the home. (Only the poor went to hospitals...now it seems to be the other way round?) My great-grandmother contracted tuberculosis and had to be nursed back to health in a glass-paned room, quarantined from the rest of the house. Illness was a common element of life. Reminds me of Victorian parlor songs, in which numerous children or young mothers are always dying. At first the sentimentality seems maudlin, but death was always a present reality to the singers of these songs. And in the days before funeral homes, the young women were often the ones responsible for laying out the bodies.

The cookbook also elicited stories regarding my grandmother's three spinster great-aunts. Tales of parlors and servants evoke worlds I can only imagine.