Recipes Through the Years

My grandmother and mother collected recipes. Most cooks do. You can always tell a favorite cookbook, it's not only worn, dog-eared, and stained; it's covered in notes. If a cookbook hasn't been mauled and the pages aren't coming out, it isn't worth keeping. At least in our family. We have loose-leaf binders coming out of our ears covered in menus, modifications, stars, and exclamation marks. Try this --> marks abound, and sometimes huge slash marks with NEVER AGAIN scrawled in bold letters. LOL

Many recipes are cut out of old newspapers, yellowed and faded, some with questions and attributions from "Mrs. C. J. in Sask." and others. 'How to Save Money Making Your Own Maraschino Cherries' from LOWE FARM, Box 165, Man. next to a personal ad saying 'Ready to Settle Down' from Homesick in Sask. calling for girls from 20 years old and up to correspond who live in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario. They're pinned in with sewing pins, or stapled, or just left loose between the yellowing pages of a plain black wirebound notebook with my grandmother's precise old-fashioned script next to my mother's sloping and hurried hand. It's a fascinating time capsule of farm life, the bits and pieces of what was important to a woman alone on the prairie.

I remember when I was first married and subjecting my husband to my inexperienced cooking looking through Grandma's books and being so frustrated because I didn't know what so much of it meant, and wishing I could ask. What was a medium oven, anyway? And yet so many things were so carefully written, even recipes for liniments, and so many kinds of pickles you just wouldn't believe it.

I barely knew my grandmother, yet she lives in these handwritten pages. She didn't journal in these books, but between the recipes and the clippings are favorite scriptures carefully written. In this I see a faithful mother and wife, a spiritual woman who nurtured all around her. Of course, my childhood memories of her are surrounded by foods, and gardening, and of course, pickles. :)