Monday is the unofficial start of summer, so people are ready to grill! If you don't have a grill, but 1.) own your own land with plenty of space 2.) have money to invest in building supplies 3.) and a ton of free time (or a contractor whose time you can buy), and 4.) you want the grill done in time for the unofficial END of summer on Labor Day (if you're lucky!), well,
The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery (Helen Evans Brown and James A. Beard, 1955) has some grill plans for you.
Good luck with that project! I didn't risk any muriatic acid burns, but I did get tired just scanning all those pages.
Instructions on building grills were not too unusual in old cookbooks. If you want a cheap and relatively easy portable DIY grill,
one of my very earliest posts has instructions from the 1954 Betty Crocker's Good and Easy Cookbook. Happy grilling!
Ha! I'll stick w/ my Weber
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like a sensible plan. (I just use a tiny grill we saved out of the garbage when a neighbor moved away.)
DeleteIt's a good way to fill a few extra pages in a cookbook. It seems to me that the show "I Love Lucy" had a show where they tried to build one of these things. I guess people in the 50's even knew this one was a bad idea (or at least fodder for comedy).
ReplyDeleteA lot of old do-it-yourself guides seemed to assume waaay more competence for the average reader than they probably should have. I'm sure Lucy was a good person to point this out.
DeleteOh, yes, there was a British show about deadly hazards in the home during various points in history. One of the eras covered was the 1950s, and they did list DIY projects as being a major hazard.
Delete