My Grandma’s Recipe Box

I started this blog intending to methodically document and share recipes from my Grandma Sara’s recipe box. I inherited it not long after she died – which was in 2005. And, while I’ve plucked a few gems from its collection, I must admit that I found it a bit intimidating:

Look at it. It’s packed full to overflowing, with index cards, scraps of paper, and more than a few clippings and torn-out magazine pages. Where would I even begin? I’m a procrastinator at heart; I closed the lid and didn’t think about it for (*counts on fingers*) 14 years. But, this past weekend, I had a few hours all to myself at home. I spied her recipe box on a shelf and thought, let’s take a look.

I started pulling out cards to see if I recognized any of the recipes, and saw a few that were familiar. I started photographing them. As for the newspaper clippings and magazine pages, I was inclined to toss them automatically: Who among us hasn’t compulsively torn pages out of Good Housekeeping thinking, I shall make this one day and my family will shower their praise upon me! If this recipe box counts as evidence, I come by it naturally. For years, I kept a binder full of things I’d torn from magazines or printed from the internet, intending to make One Day Soon. Guessing that Grandma Sara’s thinking was similar, it’s likely she never made most of those recipes. So, unless she had marked the clipping to indicate she liked it, I tossed it. That felt like progress.

Fun fact: There were 5 or 6 different versions, all clippings, of a recipe for Chocolate Mayonnaise Cake. Don’t laugh – this was a thing back in the day, supposedly during War World II when housewives had to get creative because eggs and butter could be hard to come by. Heading further down this rabbit hole, I checked Grandma Sara’s 1972 Pennsylvania Grange Cookbook and sure enough, there were THREE similar recipes for it in that book alone. But my 1950 Grange Cookbook didn’t have a single one. So take that theory with a grain of salt. A skeptic would say, this was a recipe invented in the test kitchen of a mayonnaise manufacturer. Sure enough, a Google search yields a recipe for it from each of the big-name mayonnaise brands. Whether she ever made it, I do not know – but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted to try it myself.

Anyway, I sorted the contents of her box into piles:

The back stack is the aforementioned clippings, which I reviewed and then tossed. The tidy pile on the right are ones I photographed as I went, intending to write about them eventually. And the pile on the left is ones I still need to photograph.

TL;DR = I have a lot of work ahead of me.

I can’t promise I’ll try to make all the recipes, but I do hope to share them, and invite those who knew Grandma Sara and were fortunate enough to eat the things she made in her farm kitchen to share their memories and stories as I go.