Penny to the Rescue (1941) User Reviews

Saw this on TCM one morning before a film about the WWII home front

[HollyKrishna · 9/10 · 20 October 2005]

I have always loved "Hints from Heloise" and other useful, resourceful and witty comments to help the homemaker. One day, while watching Turner Classic Movies, I saw a short starring a woman named Prudence Penny. Little did I know she was the Heloise for the war generation. She was full of time-saving tips and helpful hints for the homemaker. In this entertaining clip, she proposed a basket of ideas to help the newlywed housewife make the perfect dinner party for her husband and the "big boss man." I know it sounds like a throw-back to Pre-Feminism, but it was delightfully entertaining and refreshing to see something wholesome that wasn't catering to commercialism or religiosity. It is truly a helpful and enticing clip, a bit like finding your grandmother's old Betty Crocker cookbook complete with personal notes and little nuances that you might never have known before reading it. I've looked for these shorts since the moment I first saw it, but to no avail. So if you do get a chance to catch them in between old movies from the 30s or in some pop culture channel that specializes in the outdated, watch them without rolling your eyes just once. I guaranty her remedies still work today, and it will make you smile.

Prudence Penny

[Eventuallyequalsalways · 8/10 · 17 February 2007]

This is a one-reel short narrated by Pete Smith which I saw on TCM early on the morning of Saturday, February 17, 2007. It is about a dingbat housewife who receives a telephone call from her husband stating he is bringing his big boss home for dinner. The housewife feels this is no problem since she has an excellent cook. She goes out to the kitchen to tell the cook to get ready for a big dinner party, but instead she finds a note on the table from the cook telling her that she has resigned. What to do? At this point, the narrator, Pete Smith, interjects his voice into the story and tells her that he has the solution. Next, the film cuts away to Prudence Penny in her office. We hear her taking a telephone call from Pete Smith in which he tells her to get over to the housewife's home to see if she can save the day. Prudence Penny arrives carrying a few supplies and proceeds to take charge in the kitchen. The rest of the film involves cooking and cooking tips, some of which look very useful even today. For example, the housewife is cutting up an onion when Prudence arrives, and is complaining about the smell of the onion on her hands. Prudence advises her to dampen her hands with water, then sprinkle salt liberally on her hands, rubbing it in everywhere the onion scent might be, and then to rinse her hands. Pete Smith indicates this will get rid of the onion smell. Next, the housewife has burned her soup. Prudence Penny proceeds to mix some peanut butter into the soup, and he tells us that the peanut butter will get rid of the burned taste. Next, the housewife is attempting to peel some carrots with a knife. Prudence Penny shows her how you can clean a carrot using a metal pot scrubbing mesh. To remove the skin from a tomato, Prudence Penny holds it over the heat of a stove eye and the skin is loosened and easily pulled off of the tomato. For the main course, Prudence Penny uses a small slice of ham topped with a pineapple slice topped with a couple of sausages and some sauce and baked in a 400° oven. For the desert, Prudence Penny takes a half gallon of frozen ice cream and slathers it with a whipped meringue egg-white mixture and bakes it in the oven just long enough to brown the meringue icing. The ice cream was placed on a wooden platter so that it would be non-heat conducting. There were a few other hints which were equally useful, but which I cannot recall exactly at this time. One of them had to do with glazing the carrots. When the program came to a close, Prudence Penny told the housewife that the entire meal had only cost $2.83 and enough food was prepared for four people. Since the short was made in 1941, it is difficult to imagine in 2007 that such a meal could have been prepared for such a small amount of money. This was a very interesting little short and it was certainly prophetic of our era in which we have an entire TV channel devoted to food and food preparation.