The Time-Honored Tradition
of Saving and Sharing Recipes
Adapted from one of Barbara's unfinished books
titled Stories in My Recipe Box: Kitchen
Tales, Cooking Tips, and Old Family Recipes
To many, the exchange of recipes among women would seem trivial, just something they have always done. But there’s more to sharing recipes today than there used to be. I doubt that men who like to cook ever exchanged recipes the way women did for generations—by writing them on slips of paper or 3x5 recipe cards for filing in a pretty recipe box. It’s much different today as thousands of men and women share recipes electronically—by email, social networking, Pinterest, countless cooking shows on TV and YouTube cooking channels, and more than 8,000 money-making recipe websites.
Sharing your family recipes is a way to honor your family’s history—a legacy that keeps family traditions alive. Recipe collections have always been handed down from one generation to another, and some of the recipes my sisters and I treasure and use regularly date back to our maternal great-grandmother’s day. Eliza left her recipes to her daughter Ollie (our grandmother), who gave them to her daughter Marcella (our mother), and the three Schaumburg Sisters left home with several hand-copied favorite recipes. Technology changed everything. Now if I’m asked to share a recipe I can scan it and email it as a PDF.
How Women Past and Present
Have Stored Their Recipes
Although my sisters and friends have been exchanging recipes throughout our married lives, I doubt any of us ever thought at the time we shared a recipe that we would live on in that person’s recipe box or collection long after we were gone.
I love that my Grandma kept her recipes in a teapot. Dodie, a dear friend now gone, said her grandmother wrote hers in ink in a school composition book. Then I heard about a 90-year-old woman who filed her ink-written recipes in a 3-ring binder but slipped them in plastic sleeves to prevent bleed-through.
Researching when 3-ring-binders were invented, I soon learned that German entrepreneur and inventor Friedrich Soennecken patented his 2-ring binder in 1859. Why he waited until 1889 to introduce his 3-ring binder is anyone’s guess since it quickly became the standard in the US and has so many uses it’s indispensable today.
I couldn’t find when the first three-hole plastic sleeves (or “sheet protectors”) were invented, but when doing this research ten years ago, I turned up a fascinating site (now gone) where countless people were leaving notes on how they saved recipes they found online. Each person had invented their own way to file and later find recipes using apps for their phone, Google documents, sending recipes to themselves by email and then saving them, and using sites like Pinterest and Google’s Evernote bookmarking program.
This discussion on Reddit explores how various people find, save, and file new recipes for future use. This 2023 article, “How Consumers are Cooking with Digital Recipes,” offers perspective on how shoppers use a mobile phone to buy ingredients for an online recipe.
I have written at length about how I computerized part of my lifetime collection of recipes, then “decaloriezed” and formatted them to fit two 6x9 three-ring cookbooks I designed with fancy covers and used to lose 50 pounds on Weight Watchers. (See “Starting Your Own Diet Recipe Books” in my PDF story, “Tired of Being Fat? How to Finally Lose that Unwanted Weight.”)
Memories in Our Recipe Collection
I never thought about the stories and memories in my recipe collection until the day I pulled a time-worn recipe written in the hand of an old friend no longer alive. As a wave of nostalgia poured over me, I suddenly realized how closely women have always been linked to one another by the recipes they’ve exchanged. A closer look at my recipe collection reminded me that many of my most treasured recipes were given to me decades ago by family members, relatives, and friends who are now gone.
Examples include Mother’s Old-Fashioned Cole Slaw and Boiled Raisin Cake; and my Grandma’s Potato Salad Dressing and Homemade Egg Noodles. From Harry’s school chums, I got recipes for Sweet Sauerkraut, Bohemian Fruit Dumplings, and Millie’s Pea Salad and Goulash. A recipe passed down through several generations of Harry’s family, given to me by one of his aunts, is for Houska, a sweet Czech bread. This recipe is unlike all others online because each family has its own version of it.
Just as authors who die remain alive in the hearts of their loyal readers, good cooks who move on to their eternal rest remain alive in the form of any recipe they’ve ever shared with another cook. In my nostalgic older age, what I see now in my favorite recipes are sweet memories of many women who enriched my life in one way or another. In every place I’ve lived, there has always been at least one woman with whom I’ve traded a recipe or two.
Each time I use a recipe from one of these women I am once again connected to her in spirit. And if I remember each of these women so fondly when I use their recipes, perhaps they remembered me through the years.
First published as a Brabec Bulletin on March 4, 2024.
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