Wednesday, July 11, 2012

My recipe collection dilemna

My Recipe Book


Heat damage


The sad state of my recipe book
that was started more than forty
years ago.  I cannot quite pin point the date but judging by the style of my printing I was 12 or 13 years old.
My journalist father always had a portable typewriter at home and I loved typing so sometimes I typed the recipes.

This book has been my faithful companion up and down the country, Dunedin, Wellington, back home to Dunedin, Christhchurch, Nelson and now Wellington again. Also backwards and forwards on holidays to family as a teenager, and latterly to the bach and now between town and our other home at Waikanae Beach.

Tonight I came home and made date loaf, Aunty Alice's recipe. Aunty Alice was my Nelson grandfather's sister, my great aunt and she lived in Dunedin.  The recipe had been given to my mother when she moved to Dunedin from Nelson in the fifties to study.


 
I decided very early on that the book would only have recipes that I had actually cooked or tasted.  It is stuffed full of pages from magazines and newspapers waiting to be tried.

This book was started in the days when purchasing too many cookbooks was beyond our budget and of course way before the internet.  I seemed to stop adding recipes about the time I discovered Usenet and rec.food.cooking in 1996. 
Each page is a trip down memory lane.  Caramel square, (above) something I have not made for many years, was  one of my Dunedin grandmother, Tiny's specialities.

And now the book has collasped totally, the pages have fallen of the spirals.  What am I to do?  Even though I refer to the net for new recipes, spend far too much money on magazines and cookbooks, this recipe book is still very much needed.  I just wish I could figure out the best way to preserve it.