This may not look like much to you:

But to me it’s the end of an era.

Cornstarch is a white powder resembling – well, cocaine, I guess, since cocaine is always described as resembling cornstarch or baking powder. (Oh. I guess I could have just said it looks like baking powder. Huh, there’s my first inappropriate remark of the day.)

You use it in sauces and stews and baked goods, especially those grandma-era recipes that call for things like “cream of tartar” and “allspice.” It also has some more arcane uses:  comb through un-fresh hair as an emergency shampoo substitute,  or mix with water to make a paste to soothe bug bites.

Nobody does these things any more, of course. An American talent for endlessly diversifying product categories, plus aggressive advertising, has pretty much ensured the death of the home remedy.

No one may really need corn starch these days, but those who buy it now have the convenience of new packaging. Which is good, because the old packaging sucked. It was impossible to get it out of the box without making an unholy mess.

This is the old box. What you can’t see in this photo is that it’s a simple hard cardboard box with a wax fold-over  liner and no easy-pour spout. Once you sawed through the box top with a tomato knife, it was impossible to get even a quarter teaspoon out of that box without getting a dusting all over the countertop that made it look like you were cutting bricks with the Colombian cartel.

So to summarize, Argo’s got a nifty, neat new package for their product, arguably a little late, but the home kitchen’s going to be a tidier place now, right?

Right. Only…it’s made me a little melancholy. Wrestling with the cornstarch box was part of a bigger battle that I think I caught the tail end of – the competitive housewifery that lasted well into the seventies.

I was trying to find this ad that captivated me around, oh, 1975 or so, when I was a wee little girl hoping to grow up to look just like the va-voom betty crocker lady. It was an ad for flour, and it showed a plate of light, fluffy biscuits – with one flat, dense, burnt loser of a failed biscuit on the top. Each biscuit had an arrow and its measurement – 2.25″, 2.37″, etc. except for the top biscuit, whose arrow was labeled “We don’t want to embarass this cook by telling how flat her biscuit was!“

Oh, the shame olympics – they reached their ugly tendrils far, far into the American housewife’s workspace. The poor gal had a pretty unattainable standard to live up to; trying to be a sexpot in an apron and convince your husband that dusting was better than foreplay must have been exhausting.

I remember teaching my younger sister to make biscuits. She did everything wrong, and I was happy to tell her so. “You’ll never be a good cook,” I assured her, with considerable glee.

You know where this goes, right? Child of mine…Vengeance is, yet again, thy name.  I showed my 14-year-old daughter the new Argo container the other day, with great excitement. I told her all about the old box, the struggles to keep it in the box, the impossibility of measuring a level spoonful – and then I told her about the biscuit ad.

She looked at me with that special combination of derision, incredulity and contempt that is the exclusive province of the early teen years and said “You’re saying women let these people into their house to measure their biscuits?”

- – and I must say that I didn’t have an answer for that. We not only let them measure, we bought the magazines that printed the ads that mocked and shamed the cooks who bought the product. And we judged each other over something as trivial as our baked goods.

(By the way, you’ll be happy to know that my sister has forgiven me for my kitchen cruelty. Here she is with Junior, passing on the family kitchen skilz…)

In my adventures, I came across a wonderful book that I think exemplifies the best-ever attitude toward homey things – that we should learn them because they improve our lives, not because they’ll make us more virtuous or womanly or, for heaven’s sakes, marriageable.

The book is called HOW TO SEW A BUTTON – AND OTHER NIFTY THINGS YOUR GRANDMOTHER KNEW, and it’s by a remarkably hip and fun person named Erin Bried. The reviews of this book are great – one reviewer says it’s full of “crystal clear, friendly, and funny instructions on how to do hundreds of little things that your mother forgot to teach you-not just sewing on buttons, filleting fish, and making gravy, but balancing your checkbook, tying a necktie, and (my personal favorite) how to waltz.”

So anyway, ya’ll – anyone have a favorite vintage kitchen memory to share? I’ll pick one commenter who will receive a copy of HOW TO SEW A BUTTON, signed to you by Erin herself!!