When my great-grandma passed away, I was able to create a digital version of her recipe box to share with the entire extended family. The recipe everyone was looking for? Her cinnamon rolls. She made them for Christmas, and every single one of her kids and grandkids remembered them fondly. The way they smelled, the way she rolled them, the way she banged the pan on the counter and they slid out glistening in syrup.
But the recipe wasn’t in the box.
The closest thing to it was a half written “sweet rolls” recipe, with no cook time, no oven temperature, and barely any instructions. Cinnamon wasn’t even listed as an ingredient.
I was a fairly inexperienced baker. I had no idea how to interpret this half-written recipe into something bake-able. But the idea that my great-grandma’s famous cinnamon roll recipe, a memory so attached to her legacy that everyone spoke of it, was simply gone was unbearable to me.
When my mom died, and I inherited her recipe box, there were family staples missing. Recipes we grew up eating, that were comfort foods for us kids, that we couldn’t recreate in her absence.
When in the midst of that grief I was talking to my grandmother-in-law, she was able to commiserate. When her mom had passed away, her dad had thrown away her recipe box and with it the german chocolate cake recipe she loved.
Food and how we feed each other is such an essential part of living that we often overlook how sacred an act it is. The homecooks of the world, primarily women, are typically incredibly self-deprecating of their labor and therefore don’t document it. After all, why would you document breathing?
The problem is, this leads to generational gaps. Memories and food are so intertwined they can’t be separated, and when a recipe is lost that memory starts to fade with it. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The idea for The Recipe Graveyard started over a decade ago, and is just now coming to life. I have been collecting cookbooks, primarily community cookbooks and handwritten recipe collections, with the intent of creating a database that allows people to find lost recipes. Around here, you’ll find essays about nostalgic foods from the past 100 or so years of homecooking in America. I’ll share tips on how to decipher old recipes and decode ingredients lists. But most importantly, we’ll talk about why people cooked the way they did from a place of curiosity, not ridicule.
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