World War II was over at last.

The new Montgomery Ward catalog had gasoline-powered washing machines and unheard of pressure cookers. We ordered them both.

Neighbors came to watch me wash on the new gasoline-powered washing machine.

Boy! It was an improvement on the old washboards. It even had a roller wringer like the homemade cotton gin, so I didn’t have to twist the clothes before hanging them on the clothes line outside. Sometimes if I flooded the little motor I had to stomp and stomp the petal to start it again. I yet had to bring water from outside, but it was much faster and easier.

In warm weather I heated water in a big black kettle outside over a fire and boiled white clothes with homemade soap and a pillowcase half full of peach tree leaves. We hadn’t even heard of bleach yet.

Learning to operate the pressure cooker was harder than learning to use my new computer!

The first trial was cooking a big hen for my mother-in-law. She had wrung the chicken’s neck, scalded and plucked the feathers and tied the legs together. Later she planned to brown it whole in her over.

Instructions said “Caution! Watch the temperature gauge! Moving the cooker to lower heat keeps the temperature from becoming too high! Follow instructions for correct temperature and time for different foods.” They just said chicken so I cooked it for twenty minutes.

When I let out the steam and removed the lid ­– “Oh, Lord!” the disappointed old lady said. There was just a rack of bones. I had cooked all the meat off them. It would have taken hours instead of minutes to do that the old way. Oh, well, it made good chicken and dumplings anyway.

The next mistake I made with the pressure cooker was worse than the one with the old hen. An old bachelor neighbor was a coon-hunting buddy of my husband. He always cleaned the coons and shared them with us after he had soaked them in a spring overnight, then parboiled them with herbs slowly and finished by baking them in the oven with sweet potatoes. Delicious!

He and I cleaned the big coon one night by light from a kerosene lamp. I soaked it overnight in salt water, parboiled it as he had instructed me. Instead of twenty minutes as I had for the chicken, I kept the pressure up for 15 minutes. I slowly let out the steam – PEO-O-O-U-U-U!

So that was why the old guy had told me to cook it slowly with no lid!

The steam smelled worse than 40 polecat sprays. The coon dogs went over the mountain howling. Everyone else in the house ran outside. To make matters worse, I was pregnant. I threw coon, cooker and all out the high back door. One of the old folks nearly had a heart attack and the kitchen smelled awful for days.

The next calamity with the cooker could have been worse. In the summertime I mostly cooked out in the yard on an old time wood burning cook stove. I had a small pan of white beans inside the cooker when I let the gauge go so high it blew the safety valve.

A stream of steam was going up in the sky so hot it was red and blue. Beans were going up like bullets. It was squealing and would have blasted a hole in the ceiling if it had been in my kitchen. Oh, Malarkey!