7 Things Amish Women Never Buy — And What We Use Instead

My name is Darlene Hollis. I cooked in a school kitchen for thirty-five years, feeding four hundred children a day on a budget somebody in an office set for me, and that job taught me more about a home kitchen than any cookbook ever did. You buy paper towels every week. You buy the spray cleaner, the boxed broth, the bottled dressing, the softener, the breadcrumbs, the baking mix. You do it because that is what a stocked kitchen looks like. Then the money is gone again by Friday and you cannot point to one thing on the table that it bought you. Back in June I drove out east of Lexington for canning tomatoes and stood looking through an Amish woman's open screen door. What stopped me was not what was in that kitchen. It was what wasn't. No paper towel holder. No plastic spray bottles on the sill. A crock of wooden spoons, a stack of folded cloth, a jug of vinegar with the label worn off, bread cooling under a dish towel. That woman feeds nine people three times a day. I counted seven things she never buys before she handed me my change. Most folks think she is doing without. That is backwards. She is doing instead. A wipe-up cloth instead of a paper towel. A jug of vinegar instead of six bottles of cleaner. A pot of broth instead of a carton. Nothing in your kitchen does a job her kitchen leaves undone. The difference is not what gets done. The difference is who gets paid. And none of this started with the Amish. When the Smith-Lever Act set up the Cooperative Extension Service in 1914, the government hired home demonstration agents to ride out to farm kitchens and teach exactly this. By the mid-1920s over a million farm women were enrolled. It never was a secret. It just quit being taught. A rag has grip to it because terry cloth is covered in little loops of thread that pull water up into themselves. Cloth drinks. Paper blots. A paper towel is wood pulp engineered to fall apart, because falling apart is the business model. A six-roll pack runs about seven dollars here and a busy house goes through a roll a week. Call it sixty dollars a year, every year. My rag line cost six dollars once, and half of it cost nothing at all. In this video I show you how to build a rag line with a drawer and a pail, the half-vinegar half-water spray that cuts hard water film, the scrap-bag broth that replaces cartons, the three-to-one dressing in a jelly jar, vinegar in the rinse cup for towels, breadcrumbs off stale heels at 300 degrees, and self-rising flour made a cup at a time. I also tell you where it falls short. I keep one roll of paper towels in the pantry for raw chicken, and vinegar spray does not belong on granite or marble. --- Subscribe if you want more of the old kitchen work done plainly, one thing at a time, the way it was taught before it quit being taught. #amish #frugalliving #oldways #homemaking #kitchentips #depressionerarecipes #thrifty #homesteading