I was tucking some recipes into their folder and thought - not for the first time - that I really should go through that folder. You fellow cooks know what I’m talking about here. These are the recipes torn from newspapers and magazines that we’ve collected for years, and tossed into drawers, boxes, or in my case, an overstuffed folder that’s falling apart.
My first thought was to throw them all away. After all, most are from an earlier time, before online cooking newsletters and google. And I have got plenty of cookbooks.
At first, I thought this would be fine. There were so many that looked similar. How many recipes do you need for fish stew? And then there were a lot that had made it into the file because I had thought they might be good, but never actually tried them. I tossed most of those, along with recipes with very long lists of ingredients. OK, maybe I kept one for fish stew.
But then I bumped into a problem. A number of the recipes I found were handwritten on cards by friends and relatives after a dinner party or because they loved a recipe and wanted to share it with me. Decades later, the sight of the cards was bringing back a memory of those people and a reminder of our connection to each other. My mother, my kids, old friends who have moved away, pals from work.
It turns out I couldn’t throw them away. They are tiny pieces of history, meaningful only to me, and they are now stored in a sturdy new file box.
I’m Deborah Booth and that’s my Perspective.
