In the Beginning Was the Recipe…
I was looking for my mother’s recipe for Mincemeat Cake. It was not in the yellow binder where I keep the family recipes copied out by my sister in her meticulous art school handwriting and decorated with whimsical drawings.
The recipe wasn’t in the manila folder where I keep the loose recipe cards and the torn magazine pages and the newspaper clippings and the scribbled instructions on the backs of envelopes, school notebook paper and old invoice forms from my grandfather’s general store. (There’s even a recipe copied out on a soft paper napkin worn to the consistency of Kleenex.)
My mother had a recipe box like all good mid-century housewives and she kept many recipes in that box, but the ones she cherished the most and used the most often were in an old school binder with a coarse cloth cover that was rubbed through to the cardboard beneath. By the time I inherited the binder, it was falling apart and I transferred the contents over to the aforementioned yellow binder.
A lot of the loose recipes in the folder are starting to fade with age. Some of the oldest date back to the early 50s and the paper has browned and the ink lightened until you almost need to be a forensic documents examiner to piece together the instructions. My mother’s recipes are written out the way she talked and almost seem interactive with their asterisks and inserted comments. “I usually use twice the amount of ginger,” she notes on a recipe for ginger snaps, making me wonder why she didn’t just write out her version of the recipe.
