She writes:
I've started transferring some of my recipes - usually the ones the kids have asked for - into digital form, but I still need my index cards. Much more practical for working with in the kitchen.She's right. And that's why there will always be crappy old cookbooks and notecards and marginalia.
And besides - some of them are still in my Mom's handwriting, or my Dad's. Of course _I_ know that - and recognize them - but I doubt that others would. And of course, the handwritten ones from friends along the way...
Like Carolyn's "Burnt Kitchen Candy"... she was making the recipe one day when I picked her up to go to a luncheon event. She thought she turned the stove off (electric stove - did I mention I dislike electric stoves intensely?), but instead she turned it to high. By the time we got home, her house was filled with smoke - greasy smoke...the recipe called for a pound of butter, I think ... that penetrated throughout the entire house. What a mess. Fortunately, the cupboards above the stove were metal, so although smoke stained, nothing burned but the candy.
Memories like that will _never_ make it to the internet!
The tangible (notecard with handwritten recipe) connects to the intangible (memories) in ways that don't exist in the digital world.
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| Mom's Pie Crust recipe |
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| See? |
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| Mom's Pie Crust recipe, among some other crappy old stuff. |
I suppose it is more of a relic now than a working notecard. I know the recipe by heart and even if I did need to look at it, it's in Mr. Big Food's Big Food Manual and Survivalist Flourishing Guide.
But. What if the lights went out and we were wanting to bake a pie in a gas Viking Range? And I'd forgotten the recipe? Who is looking pretty forward thinking now, he/she?
Heh. Crisco used to be the "modern" choice. These days, it's "transfat" and definitely bad. I've always preferred lard, and don't have much experience with butter as a pastry ingredient. That's a pretty high ratio of fat to flour, though. And the recipe I've seen that called for vinegar also called for an egg.
ReplyDeleteI saw a very interesting article online about pastry...it seems that if you weigh your ingredients, the ideal ratio is something like 3-2-1, with 3 being the shortening, 2 is flour and 1 is the water. I think. I hope I wrote it down somewhere.
Which is another problem with online stuff. You have to save it, or it disappears, or you can't find the link again.
Which reminds me - I need to get at cleaning out my bookmarks again. Maybe I'll find it. I bookmark a lot - then have trouble finding the right one, or I find that the original page has either disappeared or been taken over by commercial idiots of one sort or another. Trying to file bookmarks is a problem as well - alphabetical is useless, topically is semi-useful but a bit tricky.
Although "Recipes" is pretty clear!