The Idea

First and foremost, everyone should no that I am no cook. I do not love to pick out ingredients or find it cathartic to spend my time in the kitchen, creating wonderful dishes for my family to enjoy. To me cooking has always been something of a necessary evil, and I've never found joy spending lots of time preparing food that will be eaten in minutes, leaving me only with dishes and maybe leftovers to store.

So why, you may ask, am I writing a cooking blog? The answer to that is that this blog is not really so much about cooking, although that will be the activity written about, but about history; the history of some old handwritten recipes. My history with these recipes began when I was in college in the late 80's. I needed a recipe box in which to keep notecards for papers I was writing for my classes. (Pre-laptop days, people!) Over my winter break I was working as a waittress in Bloomington Indiana, and attended a flea market held on the town square. As luck would have it I found the perfect recipe box. It was wooden and had character. I picked it up and opened it, expecting it to be empty. Instead I saw that it was already filled with index cards, all of which contained recipes written in longhand. I shuffled through them in amazement. These were someone's grandmother's recipes, was what I thought. How could anyone part with them? I bought the box but never used it for the purpose I had originally intended. 20 years later, it has survived many phases of my life, and is about to enter a new one. Before now, I confess, I had only made one of the recipes in the box; the pumpkin pie recipe. Let me tell you it is the best pumpkin pie I've ever eaten, and I make it each year on Thanksgiving. But since, as I said, I am no cook, the other recipes have languished away in the box all these years, unused.

I recently told the story of my discovery of the box to a friend and she said, "Hey, that would make a great book! You could have photos of the recipe cards on one side and the recipe typed up with your comments on the other." And I thought, "What a great idea!" (thank you Kimberly!) My next thought was that if I did indeed intend to produce a book with these recipes, it might be a good thing to have made them all at least once. I mentioned the idea of this project to my daughter Maya, and she was on board immediately. And so we begin. In some ways, making the dishes detailed on the cards is like treasure hunting. Some of her (that long-lost grandmother's) instructions are kind of vague - at least to someone who is not a cook. Several of the cards give the instruction to 'bake in a moderate oven', with no specific temperature or time given. And then there are the ingredients. Lard factors in some of the recipes, and shortening in many others. (I called my Mom to see if there was any difference, and what someone in her Mom's day would have used for shortening, if not lard. She said unsalted butter). Our goal is to use the ingredients exactly as they are given if possible. We'll see how that goes!

Tomorrow we make her Dinner Rolls. I feel pretty confident about this one, as the one thing I do enjoy making, and make pretty well, is bread. Until tomorrow....