Something *Special* in the Mail! Big Food, Big Garden, Big Life

Look what Kat sent us! A ~~crappy~~ old recipe box with ~~crappy~~ old recipes!!

Just look at them, would you? Newspaper clippings, cutouts from magazines pasted to index cards, a splattered list of handwritten ingredients. What a special surprise!

Kat said she found it at an antique store and she felt “morally obligated to get it” for us.

These were not hyperbolic words on Kat’s part. Moral Obligations are nothings to trifle with. She knows.

She went on to say– well, text but “say,” “text,” these days, what’s the diff?

I thought you would give it a good home. I feared someone would get it and throw the recipes away to just use the box. [It is a nice box.] Got to preserve that Americana, ya know?

We know!

She pointed Mr. Big Food to a special recipe she thought he would “get a kick out of.” Here it is:

Notice the “special” ingredient?

1/4 teaspoon monosodium glutamate

MSG. a.k.a.: ‘Accent’

We LOL’ed and :-)’ed over that. To quote Mr. Big Food, “Accent– monosodium glutamate… Don’t fear it.”

But seriously. That recipe sounds pretty darned good, doesn’t it? Fry up some bacon to render a couple of tablespoon’s worth of fat, … add a slice of warm beer bread and a cup of hot joe and you’ve got and especially good Saturday breakfast!

What a special surprise! Thanks, Kat!

2 Responses

It looks pretty much like my kitchen recipe box.

Kitchen recipe box because it has the recipes I tend to use fairly often. In the TV room, I have a corner shelf with notebooks of clippings I’ve cut out of magazines over the years – about the last 50 years or so. Obviously, with so many clippings, they got out of control – and were unuseable because they were completely random. In order to get them somewhat organized, I started to put them into plastic page covers and then into notebooks. That works well, because I can put them into the plastic page covers a bunch at a time, then it’s pretty easy to take the plastics and sort them into different notebooks. The theoretical next step is to scan them and computerize them – most of them are complete pages with extraneous material and/or recipes I’m not interested in, but I found out early that cutting out individual recipes resulted in loss of parts of the recipe and make them hard to save unless they were pasted onto a larger piece of paper. Easier to save the whole page. I also noticed that the very early magazine cut outs often had recipes on both sides of a page. Somewhere along the line, the magazines also noticed this – I guess – and started using recipes on one page and full page advertisements on the back side. Much better!

Also noticeable are the various phases the magazines have gone through – time saving recipes (when more women started working outside the home), budget saving recipes (really funny to compare the cost of the recipe with the same ingredients cost today) calorie conscious recipes…that kind of stuff.

The sad thing is that I won’t have anyone to pass them on to – my DILs have no interest, and my daughter has to be gluten free. So far, no granddaughters who show any inclination to be recipe keepers. Oh well. Craigslist, I guess.

Recipes from the magazines that I actually use and like eventually get hand copied onto index cards in filed in the kitchen recipe box. Also in there are ones that were hand written by my mother, father (yup – even he had a few in there!), and various acquaintences over time.

By the way – the bad news is that after I’ve spent time searching through recipes and recipes, books and clippings, sometimes I just lose the impetus to cook! Recipe fatigue or something!

Still – this week-end, my intention is to make an Apricot Glazed Buttermilk Pie. Got to use up some buttermilk. My recipe for coleslaw uses about 1/2 cup of buttermilk, and you can only buy buttermilk in quart bottles. I suppose buttermilk pancakes are an option…!