>It’s the economy. Or maybe it’s due to the increasingly common food-borne illnesses like salmonella. More and more people are turning to buying locally and cooking from scratch. Where do they get their recipes? For many of today’s cooks, the basics and the preserving tips skipped a generation. Our mothers (and occasionally our fathers) cooked from mixes and made convenience foods whenever they could. These frozen foods and boxed mixes made it easy for working parents to feed the family when they got home. For a long time, there was no desire to go back to the old ways of slow cooking, starting with the basic ingredients. Time-saving was time-saving, and thank goodness for that!
That’s how food blogger Drew came up with the name for his web site and blog How to Cook Like your Grandmother. Drew recently asked readers where we get our recipes and where we keep our cookbooks. You guessed it, readers. I grabbed my camera.
The main batch of cookbooks, the ones I use most often, sit on an easily accessible shelf next to the kitchen. It’s on the main drag in the home; you can tell by the keys/ change bowl in the center and my purse on the right.
A second shelf of cookbooks takes up space inside the cupboard. It fills about half the shelf. My 13 by 9 pans, muffin pans, and cooling racks sit to the right. Below, well, you can see below! Slow cooker, mixer, immersion blender, coffee grinder.
Now back to our main event: cookbooks and recipes. I also have a file on my laptop aptly named “Recipes.” Subfolders include cookies, canning, and crock pot. There’s a similar folder on the family desktop computer, the one I use very little these days. Between two of the cookbooks inside the cabinet are two old-time files — manila file folders — filled with printed recipes and inspirations cut from magazines and newspapers. Some day (some summer day, most likely) I’ll make a project out of organizing them into a binder.
I don’t really cook like my grandmother. I cook like me. Only the future will tell how my daughter will cook, and so far she’s doing quite well. I might even let her take a few favorites away to start her own cookbook collection. Maybe.
