Before Collecting - An Interest
My interest in cooking goes all the way back to my Granny! My mom wasn't really
interested in the food (just get that meal done and done!) but I enjoyed Granny's cooking very much. Of necessity, though, our life was very structured, and when I was growing up there weren't many opportunities for my creative bent to
emerge and grow. You did your
chores; you did your cypherin'; you went to bed. Of course the kitchen might have been a
chore, but you didn't necessarily have to do the same thing every
time. There was no variation to gathering eggs, except maybe to start at the
other end of the hen house once in a while. But COOKING the eggs opened up
a veritable plethora of opportunities to expand one's horizons. I just took to it, though I hardly could predict how much I would come to love it. (For a full account read at grandmother's farm part one and at grandmother's farm, part two" ...my grandmother
always had, and always would, smell like cookies...")
When I grew up, I left my rural home and went to live in New York City. There was no cooking in those early apartments. Things tended
to accumulate, and finding (and affording) a bigger apartment was out of the
question. I remember a few New York City apartments of friends that were totally
impassable. We had no choice in those days.
My first step into cooking came from an unusual source - prepared foods in cans. A single
guy living in a studio apartment with a hot-plate, I needed to subsist on cheap canned goods. For obvious reasons, I became
interested in adjusting (tweaking) recipes with various spices and
seasonings. At one point, when I lived in the city, I had a "balcony" that was just big enough to hold
a charcoal grill and me. I used it year-round, 'cause electricity was still awfully expensive. "Save-a-watt" was Mayor Lindsay's motto and mine as well, albeit for different reasons. I had
hamburger steaks on the grill for dinner. I enjoyed it all, but what turned me into a cook was when I hooked up with a woman who thought
that a turkey TV dinner was the perfect answer to a Thanksgiving
meal. (Okay, that's a small exaggeration!) Once I really started cooking, I thought of Granny's dishes. Slowly I began to realize that Granny's dishes were going the way
of the dodo.
Over the years, my life changed. When I started seeing rats as big as cats on West Eightieth Street, I decided to find something out of the city.
I commuted to the Apple for the next four years - out of the house at 5:45 to be at my desk by 8:30 - hardly ever home before 7:00 There wasn't much cooking until I changed my job,married and settled down.
I had been enjoying cooking since I was a teenager, but was really doing only meat and potatoes stuff without venturing into the unknown. After marrying, cooking became my favorite pastime. My wife,
Diane, is a West Virginia country girl who knows her way around a kitchen, but she considers it work, and is quite content to let me "play." Once cooking, I would remember home, and think to myself that Granny's stuff was going to be gone when
Granny went. That was my first revelation - if I didn't learn
how it was done, it would not be there for me to enjoy again - ever.
The First Collection
I was five years into my marriage, six years at the company where I still work when the defining moment came. My Granny passed away and one of my aunts handed over three cigar
boxes of Granny's saved recipes with notes. Granny had instructed her to make sure I got them. She didn't give them to any of her six surviving daughters, or to my mother. She gave them to me.
Up until then, I really didn't consider myself anything more than what we
would call today a "Hacker." My first attempt at a James Beard meatloaf
recipe resulted in a rock that would have made any catapult proud! But with those cigar boxes came a consciousness expansion, and a feeling that a torch
had been passed. And while we sorted, packed, disposed of other of Granny's things,
three more cigar boxes of cooking related stuff turned up. I almost cried when I found out they had been saved for me.
The first three were in reasonably good condition. There were hand-printed recipe
outlines, obviously Granny's, there were magazine clippings and newspaper clippings,
some annotated. There was even a recipe card or two - one of those "recipe
of the month" gimmicks, where you got 25 new cards every month and, " if you
act now, we'll send you this recipe box to keep your cards in." I will never guess how Granny came by anything like that.
The second three were in pretty bad shape- obviously older, many with mildew. They must have been in the root cellar or somewhere similar.
At that point in my love affair with the kitchen, I wasn't interested in
READING a recipe, let alone keeping it.
I was an avid cook, but not a very good one. I owned a couple of cookbooks that had been
Xmas presents. And, when I first started to go thru Granny's recipes, I'd review
one, type it up if I thought I might try it, then throw out the original, along with any that didn't look interesting or were too
skeletal. I didn't know what I had is my only excuse.
I didn't start any serious collecting until my cooking improved to the point
that friends and co-workers, family, etc. began asking me for recipes. "Hey! this is great! can I have the recipe?" a friend would ask. "Um.........there ain't one," I would answer.
One Christmas, my wife bought me a voice-activated recorder that
clipped onto a pocket or the apron bib.
It didn't help. I'd dump something into the pot and forget to record
it.
I'm a lot better now. I can actually get the same dish each time if I
behave myself. I'm also much better about logging in changes when I do
tweak a recipe.
Serious Collecting
I collected individual recipes for the first decade of my cooking.
Cookbooks didn't start to pile up until the food channel got going and I started being impressed with "authors" rather than recipes. Amazingly, my reading habits already manifested the "buying by author" syndrome, but I never related the advantages to cooking books. I used to just file them, willy-nilly, until i realized that they'd be SOOOOO much easier to find under sub-headings. Imagine my un-educated dilemma as to where to file an appetizer/fondue/ sandwich/microwave recipe, etc. My first use of the home pc was to catalogue, categorize, and alphabetize. I probably would have been fine with a data processor.
I started visiting food sites mentioned on the shows I was watching. This opened up the internet to me. When I realized that I had many recipes to share, I googled "recipe requests" and began a whole new hobby and started sharing what I had compiled with those who wanted it.
Sharing a Collection
I'm the "Johnny Appleseed" of recipes; I've shared with whomever has asked.
I share the product just as easily. My food budget is probably twice what it could be. For instance, during the winter, every sunday is soup day in my kitchen - the resulting eight to ten quarts go to our workplaces on monday. Twice a year, the office gals put together a feast day. I'm always given an assignment. It's the same for the company picnic; it's catered, but I'm always asked to do a salad.
In my first few years dealing with recipes EVERYTHING got a chili, cayenne, or cracked black pepper boost. It wasn't until I "matured" to the art that I actually would give a recipe that caught my fancy a chance to stand on it's own, at least once. Today, it always gets that initial shot. Sometimes, it gets filed "as-is" but not very often, I'm afraid!
And if I have a "baking" recipe, it's my wife, Diane's, not mine! My baking goes no farther than Bisquik!! I'm fond of saying, though I don't know the source,
"Cooking is an art-
baking is a science-
I flunked science !!"
Today I have a large collection of cookbooks, covering subjects a far-ranging as
eggs,
Amish,
Betty Crocker classic, James Beard's bible,
Kerr (canning),
Cajun and Creole,
cast-iron and kettle,
Chinese for hillbillies,
crockpot,
copycat and bone-fides,
grilling,
low-Carb,
Mexican,
Native American,
German,
Pasta,
many famous TV personalities,
and on and on. Not to mention the "Hillbilly Cookbook", Vols. I & II, which I've compiled myself. Granny would be proud!
Editor's note: Junior is true to his word and shares recipes easily. You will find them all over the site, in every category. We are happy to have such a friend, for recipes and for the spirit revealed in his articles. To meet Junior click here
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