recipes.
One summer, my mother gave me a task that would require hours of work, extreme organization, and most importantly, a deep, abiding love for recipes. Her giant yellow 3-ring binder was bursting with recipes that had at one time been organized. The binder had tabs for breads, salads, meats, and all the usual recipe categories, and was stuffed with handwritten notecards, torn pages of magazines, and computer printouts. It had ceased to be a useful reference book, and had become a recipe graveyard.
My job was to somehow make sense of it all. And after several days of covering the kitchen table with recipes, making stacks of faded magazine and newspaper clippings that referenced similar food groups, I presented my mother with the yellow binder, now able to open and close, as well as a separate dessert collection, my own idea. Using an old photo album, I stuffed dessert recipes in the pockets, and tried to organize them by cookies, cakes and pies.
Now that there were two functioning recipe collections in the house (in addition to the shelf of cookbooks next to the refrigerator), I could flip through them slowly, reflecting on the recipes that defined my childhood:
- Hawaiian chicken (torn out of a 1990 issue of Family Circle). I always requested this as my special birthday dinner.
- Crab-stuffed mushrooms (re-named "Best Ones" for my mother's note in the margin of a mushroom recipe booklet). Required appetizer for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter meals.
- Blueberry cake (on a notecard in my maternal grandmother's handwriting). The cake my mother, little sister, and I brought to every new neighbor that moved to our street.
- Cranberry Jell-O salad (typed out on old, thin printer paper - the kind with perforated edges - on the stationary of the travel agency where my paternal grandmother worked). Made at every holiday, two different ways: one batch with nuts, and one batch without.
I've been collecting cookbooks since I left for college 11 years ago. In addition, I've been hoarding magazines with good recipes (I am the person who will buy a $4.99 magazine without even opening it, simply because there's a gorgeous chicken pot pie or chocolate cake on the cover). Our small cabinet above the microwave is crammed full. And this weekend, after we decided to host a Memorial Day barbeque, I knew I had to give myself the same task my mother had given me so many years ago.
First I started with the magazines. Issues as old as 2006 of Family Circle, Whole Living, Cooking Light, Real Simple, The Food Network Magazine, and Everyday with Rachael Ray had been stuffed in between the cookbooks, corners folded over and sticky notes marking recipes that I swore I'd make someday. I flipped through each one, page by page, seriously considering if I'd ever make the recipe. I tore out each recipe that made the cut, creating a tattered stack on the table while dropping the rest of the magazine guts on the floor.
Next I dealt with the computer printouts. Recipes I'd found online were splattered and stained, far less suited for the kitchen than a firmly bound cookbook. But the printouts had dates, and notes of my own: Awesome! Triple this recipe. Used salmon instead of chicken. I considered printing out clean copies, but decided I liked the history of the dried stains, the creases from folding and refolding, the shopping list for ingredients I made on the back, the pieces of tape I'd used to stick the recipes to my cabinets before my now husband bought me a cookbook stand. The recipes I knew I'd never make again got tossed on the floor (for example, choco tacos, made for a silly dinner with friends, and a Weight Watchers recipe for a cake that I only pretended to like).
Then there were the family recipes, stuffed into a manilla clasp envelope with a list of recipes to collect for the family cookbook I hope to make someday. These, too, could be cleaner. There's a scrap of paper with my grandmother's lasagna recipe on it, the same scrap of paper I follow to make giant pots of tomato sauce. A piece of stationary from my father's old business where I wrote down the recipe for chocolate delight. An email from my aunt before my grandfather died (next to the step "Slice grapes lengthwise" she typed, "Grampy is very good at this!"). A faded photocopy of the recipe for Hawaiian chicken, sent through a very old fax machine. And my other grandmother's blueberry cake, written in fast, almost illegible handwriting (I must have asked her for it over the phone).
It occurred to me that I could buy a set of recipe cards and write them out neatly, legibly, and store them the way people are supposed to store recipes. But at the cost of what memories? The memory of being young, single, and really needing a good recipe to impress a guy on our second date (handwritten recipe for my mother's salmon patties. It was our last date, but I don't blame the salmon). The memory of hosting my first married holiday (an email from my sister with the recipe for Best Ones). The memory of making the first of many lasagnas (and perfecting the sauce that would feed a roomful of people in my tiny attic apartment during a December blizzard in Boston).
Instead of stacking these with the other recipes, I leave the family recipes together and place them on the far side of the table. I separate the stack of magazine clippings and computer printouts into two piles: sweet and savory. I then divide the savory pile into two more piles: meat/fish, vegetarian. Each recipe gets its own plastic sleeve, unless it only takes up a portion of the page. In that case, I carefully cut around the recipe, tape it to a piece of paper, and make a patchwork quilt of several recipes. I also throw away recipes that, the more I think about them, I realize I will never make.
The plastic sleeves go into a blue binder, and each section gets a divider tab: Meat/Fish, Vegetarian, Sweet/Dessert.
And then I take the family recipes. There is no neat, clean way to deal with them. They do not easily divide into categories, so I just keep them together. Even if my cousin's pumpkin chocolate chip cookies are next to my mother's blackened tilapia. Even if I have to tape a recipe card to a piece of paper, knowing how frustrated I'll be when I have to un-tape the card to flip it over to read the rest of the recipe. But it's just how it goes with these, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Finally, I add in the photocopied recipes in my mother-in-law's handwriting, the ones she brought to our first married Thanksgiving, because part of growing up and getting married was remembering that I'm not the only one who grew up with familiar plates and bowls on the table. So an apple pie and a sweet potato casserole go into a plastic sleeve, right alongside my grandmother's manicotti and my aunt's pineapple chutney dip. This section gets its own label: Family Faves.
I flip through the binder, seeing holidays and birthdays and funerals and regular weeknight meals flash by like grainy slides on a projector. I see meals made in advance when life was too hectic to think straight, desserts brought to bridal and baby showers, and bland, simple meals brought to the sick. I see myself as a little girl getting the spatula stuck in the mixer, as a teenager begging to make dinner for the family, as a college student trying to cook on a budget, as a graduate student hosting my first dinner parties, as a young professional following strict diets, as a married woman expressing my love with elaborate meals.
It felt good to carry the heavy stack of magazines out to the recycling bin, the burden of so many un-made recipes lifted as I surveyed the organized binder. And I vowed to revisit the recipes every six months or year, to toss out anything I still hadn't made. Because at the end of the day, no matter how many mushroom recipes Cooking Light prints, I'm always going to make the Best Ones.