Friday, July 01, 2011

Recipe Gathering Evolution



Since we are talking about recipes, I thought I would share with you my first "serious" attempt at gathering family recipes together and filing them in one spot. This is a recipe notebook that I made for a class called Food Science. I constructed it during my junior year in college as a class project. It seemed to be such a major project. PCs were not something we had heard of in those days (all of a sudden I am feeling so old!). A typewriter, card stock, notebook dividers, a three-ring binder, and Elmer's glue all combined as tools for this cookbook creation. It seems like I spent hours on our family's old, clunky typewriter to get this project done. I was just happy the the typewriter was electric, even though correction ribbon was yet unheard of. It was strike-over or white-out, baby! So, alas, the typos and strike-outs remain. 




My Food Science teacher was a terrific woman. She had advanced degrees in nutrition.  I still consider her one of the best teacher's I ever had. She was a wealth of knowledge and had the highest of standards for all her students. Like me, she was a vegetarian and taught her classes from that perspective. She must have been in her early 30's during those years, but to her students she stood on a very high pedestal and was ageless! We were all somewhat in awe of her. She not only taught the home economics and dietetics students, but all the pre-med and nursing majors as well. Today, because I was thinking of her, I searched for her name on the Internet and was fortunate to find a video clip in which she was being interviewed.  I enjoyed ten minutes of hearing her speak again. I reminisced about old times as I listened to her talk. She lives in the midwest now where she is affiliated with a state university. I'm glad others are still learning under her tutelage.




I suppose one could say that it is not only recipes that bring back memories, but the pages and papers and ink that hold and present the words that make up those recipes. A few years back I thought that maybe I should revise my cookbook, giving it a new cover or even an entirely new notebook. It would have been easy to type up new tabs for section dividers and to re-glue magazine recipes that had been clipped and glued to a card stock page. But then the authenticity would be destroyed, and always one for keeping things real, I decided to leave it as it was created --- way back in 1976.

7 comments:

  1. What a wonderful collection, as well as super memories, La Tea Dah. Good for you.

    Hope your Fourth of July holiday is super! Susan

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  2. I think it's great the way it is and I wouldn't change a thing. I would love to see her interview. If I had the money, I would make a documentary about ladies who paint and interview some of the older ladies before they die and all their knowledge is lost. I'm glad someone took the time to interview her, she sounds like a neat lady and obviously very influential in your life is such a great way!

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  3. How wonderful to have a great teacher. That's a project that just keeps giving unlike many I had to do. I'm glad you are keeping it the way it is.

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  4. What a dear treasure! (I, too, remember those days of typing on some clunker or other. I would become so frustrated that I could have screamed. Wait. I think I did.) I'm sure that you can still carry on with a family recipe project from 1976 to the present with lots of wonderful photos as well. A cookbook in your future perhaps?

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  5. What a treasure La Tea! I, too, remember correcto-tape and white out. Our kids have no idea how nice cut/paste on the PC is!

    My SIL is now making a cookbook for our niece who will be marrying in July. Everyone in the family is contributing recipes for it.

    Jody

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  6. I am glad you left it as it was created. What fond memories you have. Mine are on cards in a basket, not the original box I started out with. Now I wish I had that original Bisquick box. I saw one at an antique shop recently and was tempted to buy it.

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