On Friday, I do quite a good deal of my Saturday's work, add the finishing touches on Saturday, bathe the children and fix something for Sunday dinner.
Sunday breakfast is substantial and dinner, which is served as near 12 o'clock as possible, is as follows: One hot dish, prepared while getting breakfast or doing up the work, this dish consists of scalloped potatoes with chips of smoked ham cooked with them or baked beans, or cabbage boiled with sausage balls, adding dumplings if wanted, or it may be any of our tomato mixtures, or macaroni dishes. Farm women know all about such dishes. In warm weather this dish is kept warm on a burner of the oil stove turned low. Dessert is pie baked on Saturday, or jello, or sometimes just a dish of fresh fruit with cream and sugar. One of our favorites is plain pie-plant stewed, strained and the juice thickened, flavored and sweetened and left in a cool cellar until wanted, then used with whipped cream. Of course, we have bread, butter, cookies, pickles or any little onions when in season, and hot coffee.
Dishes and food are placed on the kitchen table and the men told to come in and help themselves. Some of them find chairs in the kitchen, some in the dining room, and in hot weather, they go out on the porch or under the trees. They are told to come back and fill their plates if they want more.
The dishes are piled up as they are brought back to the table and I am not a half hour washing them. In fact, the whole dinner never takes an hour's time.
Supper is usually eaten around the table and is nothing more than a hot drink with sandwiches, cold meat, some baking and sauce.
During harvest, threshing, silo filling and potato picking, we never have less than eight men and our men are hired with an understanding of how they will be treated on Sunday; we have never had any one of them "kick" on it.
As our Sunday School comes first in the morning and church service in the evening, the whole space in between is mine to do as I please. If visitors come they are treated just the same as the rest of us.