America’s Recipe Box

I’ve been on a whirlwind tour promoting my new book, Perfect 10 Cookbooks, Family Secrets. I love talking to people about their culinary interests and food preferences. It seems there is a real resurgence among home cooks to prepare nostalgic recipes with contemporary adaptations. You know, real food, with ingredients that you would have stocked in your pantry. Food that is comforting, satisfying and makes you want to hug someone! Watch your favorite celebrity chef shows and you’ll find them making such recipes as Mac & Cheese, Mile High Lemon Pie, and Chicken Fried Steak. Create TV has even started showing reruns of Julia!

In my quest for those perfect recipes, I spend my few days off each month chasing down auctions, estate sales, and yes, even garage sales. I’ve become an expert at identifying which ones will hold my next treasure. I know exactly where they’ll be hiding and seek them out quickly, because recipe hunting is becoming quite a trend.

Our incredible culinary predecessors have left us legacies and stories, if we just care to listen. I have been known to openly yelp with excitement when I discover a cache of personal recipes hidden between the pages of old cookbooks, or sealed in yellowing envelopes.

I once discovered the personal records of an accomplished chef from Arizona. Over 280 hand-written recipes from the 60s and 70s (that was the “yelp” time!) His chocolate cake recipe was the best I’ve ever made and needed very little substitutions.

Another time I discovered a collection of Gourmet’s annually bound, hard-cover magazine collection, circa 1953 to 1973, in pristine condition.

I regularly monitor eBay for old recipes, too, but they are very hard to win because there is such a demand for them. Recently I was outbid time and again for four recipe boxes of hand-written recipe cards, circa 1940s. I had bids on five other hand-written recipe books and cards, and was consecutively outbid each time. I have no idea what the final price merited, I just know I stopped bidding at $40, $50 and $60!

Recreating my favorite recipes when I get back to the kitchen is the best part of the hunt. After updating a few basic ingredients with more health conscience alternatives, (i.e. no lard; even though it makes the flakiest pie crust in the world and cooks fried chicken like nothing else) I seek to prepare those dishes that deserve to be enjoyed across timelines.

I, for one, refuse to let our culinary legacies of the passing generations go silent. I embrace the new, but will never forsake the past, as this is where the cornerstone of today’s culinary foundation was laid.