Times Change
These gloomy winter/spring days are perfect for projects like my
recipes-to-computer exercise. I'm all out of teacups from my
grandmother's collection (I only have a few cups from her), but this one
is fun. It's the only (or one of the only) cup and saucer sets (that I know of) from a set of
china that belonged to my great great grandmother. The pattern was held
in a factory in Germany. That factory was destroyed during World War
II, and with it went the pattern for this china.
Well, I'm nowhere near finished with my project. Scanning the recipes and hacking them into my recipe software takes time. But I'm seeing some interesting trends as I go through these cards. I have seen recipes dating back to the mid 1940s, the 1990s, and everything in between. But even without the dates written on the cards, it isn't too hard to tell which era the recipe is from.
Recipes from the 40s and 50s mostly include whole/real foods, recipes are written in fountain pen (sometimes in beautiful script, by the way), and instructions are short and simple, if they exist at all, because nearly all women of that time would have been taught - since an early age - how to cook all the basics of the family menu. And many of these recipes are on card stock that is yellowed and brittle, and splattered from use.
Recipes from the 60s and 70s start to include "fake" food (think Velveeta cheese), lots of canned ingredients, and pasta starts to appear consistently. Fountain pens are gone, replaced by pencil and ballpoint pens. I can see a shift in my grandmother's handwriting; perhaps the result of arthritic joints.
By the time we get to the 80s and 90s, more and more recipes are clipped from magazines and fewer are written out in long hand. Oh, and the instructions are longer and much more detailed than ever.
It will be several more weeks before I finish this project (and then starts the editing), but I am so enjoying this walk through history and family experiences.
Well, I'm nowhere near finished with my project. Scanning the recipes and hacking them into my recipe software takes time. But I'm seeing some interesting trends as I go through these cards. I have seen recipes dating back to the mid 1940s, the 1990s, and everything in between. But even without the dates written on the cards, it isn't too hard to tell which era the recipe is from.
Recipes from the 40s and 50s mostly include whole/real foods, recipes are written in fountain pen (sometimes in beautiful script, by the way), and instructions are short and simple, if they exist at all, because nearly all women of that time would have been taught - since an early age - how to cook all the basics of the family menu. And many of these recipes are on card stock that is yellowed and brittle, and splattered from use.
Recipes from the 60s and 70s start to include "fake" food (think Velveeta cheese), lots of canned ingredients, and pasta starts to appear consistently. Fountain pens are gone, replaced by pencil and ballpoint pens. I can see a shift in my grandmother's handwriting; perhaps the result of arthritic joints.
By the time we get to the 80s and 90s, more and more recipes are clipped from magazines and fewer are written out in long hand. Oh, and the instructions are longer and much more detailed than ever.
It will be several more weeks before I finish this project (and then starts the editing), but I am so enjoying this walk through history and family experiences.
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