concludes suek in our discussion on cookbook extinction.

She writes:

I’ve started transferring some of my recipes – usually the ones the kids have asked for – into digital form, but I still need my index cards. Much more practical for working with in the kitchen.

And besides – some of them are still in my Mom’s handwriting, or my Dad’s. Of course _I_ know that – and recognize them – but I doubt that others would. And of course, the handwritten ones from friends along the way…

Like Carolyn’s “Burnt Kitchen Candy”… she was making the recipe one day when I picked her up to go to a luncheon event. She thought she turned the stove off (electric stove – did I mention I dislike electric stoves intensely?), but instead she turned it to high. By the time we got home, her house was filled with smoke – greasy smoke…the recipe called for a pound of butter, I think … that penetrated throughout the entire house. What a mess. Fortunately, the cupboards above the stove were metal, so although smoke stained, nothing burned but the candy.

Memories like that will _never_ make it to the internet!

She’s right. And that’s why there will always be crappy old cookbooks and notecards and marginalia.

The tangible (notecard with handwritten recipe) connects to the intangible (memories) in ways that  don’t exist in the digital world.

Mom’s Pie Crust recipe

See?

Mom’s Pie Crust recipe, among some other crappy old stuff.

I suppose it is more of a relic now than a working notecard. I know the recipe by heart and even if I did need to look at it, it’s in Mr. Big Food’s Big Food Manual and Survivalist Flourishing Guide.

But. What if the lights went out and we were wanting to bake a pie in a gas Viking Range? And I’d forgotten the recipe? Who is looking pretty forward thinking now, he/she?