I usually publish a year-end rant about this time. I'd even started making a few notes for one.

But with all that's happening — so many people out of work, on furlough, taking pay cuts, losing benefits, falling into arrears on their bills, trying to learn how to live in a world they hadn't counted on, it didn't seem like the time for ranting.

It seems like a time for encouragement and education.

And as usual, I dug back into my memory and remembered someone: Sister Ambrose Irene, who was both my eighth-grade teacher and my home economics teacher.

Younger readers will need a little home economics primer before we get started: Home economics was the science of running a home efficiently, healthily and creatively. This career path, occupied largely by women, began with a curriculum developed by early feminists at an 1899 conference in Lake Placid, N.Y., and burgeoned in the land-grant colleges, where women students were more readily accepted. By the 21st century, home economics had undergone name changes ("Life Skills," and other euphemisms) and effectively disappeared.

Women, the primary home managers, had gone out to work during World War II and many of them never went back, or did so reluctantly, raising their daughters with broader ideas. By the 1980s, we were eating out every day and making use of take-home or take-and-heat meals.

At first, the impetus for home economics (besides broadening the opportunities for careers for women) was to help poorer families and young wives learn to feed their children nutritional meals on a budget, sew their clothes (then cheaper than buying them — this was before Ross, Target, Kmart and Wal-Mart), and keep the house clean. And manage their time.

Nutrition-related diseases such as rickets were common in many areas. (Today, it's child obesity and diabetes that are the problem.) Then, many people had trouble getting enough to eat; now we've got the opposite problem.

Early home economists struggled to get respect and establish programs at the college level, and they succeeded. Eventually, they took on key roles in the increasingly affluent country: teaching housewives to use the new appliances that were coming into homes, caring for textile collections, teaching in schools, overseeing school lunch programs.

The next step was entering industry: writing and testing recipes for utilities, food companies, newspapers and magazines (some would say they sold out at this point, but many of the old recipes we cherish were developed by home economists).

But back to Sister Ambrose Irene and whoever it was that taught home economics at Lahainaluna (I'll be darned if I can remember her name; I think it was Miss Dove, a Mainlander who passed through).

Here's what they taught us about keeping an economical and nutritious kitchen. They're practices almost none of us follow anymore.

• Make up a food budget and stick to it.

• Plan your meals for the week, including lunches.

• Gather the recipes you'll use, and calculate your needs. Make a pantry inventory and make sure you don't buy more than you need or duplicate ingredients you already have.

• Shop only once a week.

• Be aware of fuel costs when you choose where you'll shop; driving all over town to find bargains may eat up the savings.

• Avoid shopping when you're hungry or rushed.

• Shop with a list, and do not deviate from it.

• Don't use coupons for things you won't use. But do use them when they benefit you.

• Do shop sales, but only for necessities and items that won't spoil before you can use them.

• Grow a garden.

• Bake your own bread.

• There weren't many prepared foods in those days — okazuya specialties and "TV dinners" (in compartmented metal trays) — but home economists weren't real big on them as nutritionists mostly are not today.

• Make your own desserts and base them on fruit or other healthful foods.

• Plan for snacks for children, but make them light — both in size and nutritionally.

• Barter with neighbors for vegetables, fruits, fish, fresh-baked bread.

• Plan for leftovers, and don't waste them. Transform them into another meal.

• Make use of recipes that stretch easily: soups, casseroles, noodles.

• Make use of beans, legumes and grains instead of meat or fish for a few meals each week.

• Involve your children in shopping and cooking so they learn not just the skills but the value of a dollar.

• Eat dinner as a family; give everyone a job so they learn what it takes to put a meal on the table.

While we may view these ideas from a different perspective than Americans did in the early 20th century (when homemaking was considered solely a woman's responsibility), they resonate strongly today for both genders, and whether or not you live alone or with others.

Think it's time to revive some of these practices?

Send recipe requests, and answers to queries, to Wanda Adams, Food Editor, The Honolulu Advertiser, P.O. Box 3110, Honolulu, HI 96802; fax, 525-8055; e-mail wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.