A tiny recipe box like that is a trove of memories
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- May 6, 2023
- 623
High atop a bookshelf in my makeshift office is a small, darkened wooden box. Inside are the recipes collected by my mother and some from my grandmother and sister, now all deceased.
There’s Gramma’s recipe for “spaghetti,” likely from the 1920s or 1930s, which is really nothing more than macaroni and heated ketchup. Mom’s recipe card describing how to make her carrot cake is in there too. She made that cake for me for every birthday, as long as I agreed to grate the carrots, which she hated doing. She offered a standing deal: Any time I was willing to grate those 4 cups of carrots, I could have that cake. So I had it once a year.
She saved the wrapper from the first German’s Chocolate she bought ages ago containing the secret to German chocolate cake. I treasure it because it varies slightly from that found on the wrapper today.
There is her note for making raisin-filled cookies, which she made every Christmas with the help of Gramma and my sister, along with cutouts and the mashed potato candy that seems not to have made it into the box of recipes. Only my brother knows how to make those now.
I don’t have such a box of my own. I’m a product of the technological age, which exploded not long after Mom passed. Most of my favorite recipes are on my phone, either in typed notes or saved at websites like Pinterest.
Mom had, as I remember, three cookbooks, one of which I still have, a Betty Crocker job filled with recipes that don’t work very well. The first bread I ever made was sourced from that book, and it was dry and crumbly. I chalked it up to my teenage ineptness until I made the recipe again recently with the same result. The recipe, it turns out, is codswallop.
What will become of Mom’s little recipe box? The rest of it is filled with scraps of magazine bits, recipes from her co-workers for things that don’t sound good, and note cards that can no longer be read because the pencil is too faded or the instructions are obscured by decades of splatters and smears.
Those are my favorites because she must have made them a lot. Were it not for sappy sentimentality, I would find and toss the recipe card for baked zucchini in tomato sauce. When the people at work began to show up with free zucchini as big as a Buick, that’s what she made, every week. It was, as I remember, flat-out gross. I’d toss it just for revenge.
I wonder if anyone under 70 collects recipes in such a way anymore. Such recipe boxes must be a thing found only in the past as we can find instructions for anything we might want to make, from North African lentils to South Carolina slaw, ready at hand in seconds. Anything else I might want to make can be found in the cookbooks occupying a full 7-foot-high bookshelf in the kitchen.
I can imagine a day when Mom’s little box of scrawled notes will either be tossed or end up on a table in a thrift shop or antique store. If I saw such a thing, I would immediately want to find out what was stored inside.
A tiny box like that is a trove of memories, like a family photo album, another common 20th-century item that gets shunted off to auction at the end of a lifetime of gathering. Seeing the card with the carrot cake secrets, I always smile, remembering the love that went into every one of those simple sheet cakes with the cream cheese frosting. I can almost taste it, which is a good thing. I haven’t had a piece of carrot cake in almost 30 years. At this point I’m not sure I want to. Can it ever live up to my gilded memory?
Somewhere out there, there’s a student in search of a master’s degree essay, and the story of all these little recipe collections may be just the ticket, before they’re all lost.