The Recipe Book

[rareboy]

Do you keep your own recipe book?

We have two volumes now of the recipes we have have made our own over the years...or the ones that are the go-to faves from family, friends and the great cooks with a few tweaks.

I couldn't believe that after all these decades, I finally had our handwritten pizza dough recipe committed to print. It was so covered in little notes...and yet is incredibly simple.

For Easter dinner this year, we have pulled out my mother's recipe box to go through...just for old times sake...and to pass along to my niece's husband.

I actually pulled a number of recipes we use from a book my Aunt had that contained my grandmother's and Great Aunt's recipes from 1920's...the best legacy.

 

[cityboy-stl]

I have a ton of recipes on a bunch of individual pieces of paper and notes that go all the way back to my great grandmother.

I should put them all in a big document.

 

[Vannie]

I have all the recipes from my Great Aunt Betty Crocker.

 

[NotHardUp1]

I have a ton of recipes on a bunch of individual pieces of paper and notes that go all the way back to my great grandmother.

I should put them all in a big document.

Same here, plus several family and church cookbooks where I knew the contributors personally, so it feels like I have about six to eight "family" cookbooks, plus my scraps.

A few are committed to Word and in my laptop.

 

[eddielee]

I have my mother's, grandmother's, and great grandmother's recipes. They date back from1880 through the 1960s.

 

[fabulouslyghetto]

Yes and no. Do I have recipes stored? Yes. Some are facebook posts saved to a recipe folder, othes are text I've copy/pasted into emails, some are bookmarked in chrome, they're in about 1,000 different places between my phone and laptop and one day someday I'm going to condense them all into one place cuz that's how you adult.

 

[NotHardUp1]

I have all the recipes from my Great Aunt Betty Crocker.

I don't know if I ever shared it here, but when we were in elementary school, it was the mid-1960's, and bastardy was a serious stigma, and not only in small towns in the South. As Mother remained dependent on her parents and grandparents, in many ways, she kept us in her hometown, where using her maiden name would have been a big problem for us kids at school, so she registered us with aliases, even though our birth certificates and Social Security cards were in her maiden name.

So, for some weird reason, the Wheel of Fortune needle stopped on "Crocker" as she chose a last name. !?!

We were invariably teased with "BETTY CROCKER!" by taunting lil asshats whenever trouble arose on the playground.

To this day, I'm a Duncan Hines fan.

 

[Alistair]

^ same. I usually just search the internet for a recipe.

Unfortunately I don’t have any family recipes because my grandmother did everything by memory. She was a very good cook and I miss a lot of her meals.

 

[rareboy]

We actually recorded many of our family recipes by working with my grandmothers and great aunts to make different things...watching them like hawks and then measuring and weighing as we went along.

We ended up with some wonderful recipes as a result...and some that are hilariously inexact and dependent on us having a real sense of baking or cooking.

Fortunately, my partner is a chef and we enjoy the whole process of learning. After 40 years, we finally committed our recipe for pizza dough to a print version and even then, my recipe book for pasta and bread looks like the Torah...annotated by endless notes.