Old Recipes

Marilyn and I like to collect old cookbooks and she once purchased a batch of three from eBay. When the books arrived, they included an unexpected gift – some person’s lifelong collection of personal recipes.

All the recipes were loose leaf and bundled together in a badly worn, cardboard, MASH 4077 presentation folder. Many of the recipes were clipped from the pages of the New Orleans Time Picayune, and others entire pages from the Public Service Company of New Orleans apparently included with the monthly utility bill.

From the dates I found on the newspaper recipes I could see most were collected between the late seventies and early nineties. I was soon mesmerized as I glanced through the thick stack of neatly clipped recipes. This woman’s life - I presume the collection belonged to a woman although I have no way of knowing - was revealed to me as I read through her recipes.

She liked desserts, especially chocolate desserts. Shrimp was her favorite seafood as she had more shrimp recipes than any human could ever prepare in a lifetime. She also had several recipes for elderberry wine and ginger beer, and many desserts containing rum or whiskey. In my fiction-writer’s mind, I imagine she and her deceased husband were both teetotalers and that they had never graced the inside of a liquor store. Still, I feel strongly that she brewed and tried the elderberry wine, drinking every drop of the alcoholic concoction herself.

I had mixed emotions as I flipped through the recipes. I was happy because I could feel the pleasure that collecting and preparing the recipes the faceless woman must have felt. It also made me sad that no one in her family (if she had a family) realized that their mother, or grandmother, or aunt’s old recipe collection was quite possibly the most precious thing she owned.

I only have a few of my Mom’s recipes and I would never throw them away. Perhaps the person that sent us the books discovered the tattered recipe collection at a garage sale. They must have realized their intrinsic value because they bundled and sent them to a complete stranger, hoping that a person that liked old cookbooks might also value the combined memories of someone’s culinary life history.

Fiction South