For the past several weeks I have been working on entering my vast collection of recipes - some "favorites and some "want to try" - into a recipe database. Yesterday, I finished the first "wave" of recipes - my file folders filled with "want to try" recipes. Once I finished that I was ready to begin my next recipe project - entering in the recipes from my Grandmother's recipe box.

This box has roughly three hundred recipe cards in it (I'm guessing probably more.  I'm just too lazy to count each card since I will, over time, access each and every one of them.  THEN I can tell you exactly how many there are.).  I expect it will take me quite some time to get them all entered into my database (with pictures scanned of the card itself), but I'm twenty cards into the project and already having fun.

This index card has the recipe for Butterscotch Ice Box Cookies. It's just one of the many recipe cards in my grandmother's recipe box, yet it holds so much information and history. The fact that they're called "ice box" cookies already indicates their age, and my grandmother, who always had a refrigerator from the time she went out on her own, grew up with an ice box.  In fact, my great grandmother didn't replace her ice box with a refrigerator until around 1950, and only then because it was getting more and more difficult to get ice.  After all, the ice box still worked (sure, what's to break on a box that holds ice cubes?), and apparently she was quite frugal.

The card itself is tattered, yellowed, and has food splatters on it attesting to its age and "favorite" status among the recipes.

The date, "5-22-43", carries with it a sort of Pandora's box of historical information;

• the first US jet fighter was air tested on this day
• Stalin disbanded Komintern (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comintern in English, or in German here http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kommunistische_Internationale) which was an international communist organization dating back to 1919
• the German submarine U-569 was sunk by US Avenger aircraft in the mid Atlantic and its crew sent to a POW camp in Perthshire Scotland
• newspaper headlines are filled with war news like "Allies Down 285 Planes Blasting at Italy", and "USAAF Smashes U-Boat Bases in Reich"

And (my maternal grandmother) a young wife from central Illinois (living alone in Virginia at the time, I believe) writes down recipes from her mother while her husband is serving in the US Navy aboard a small battleship converted into a "flat top". He is now aboard the USS Card.  Only two weeks before he would have been on the carrier USS Lexington in the Battle of the Coral Sea where "Lady Lex" was hit.  Because of the flames, the US Navy would "scuttle" her before nightfall, but not before getting as many men off the ship as they could.

I would later hear from my grandfather how he helped move the wounded from the sinking Lex to the rescue ship.  He was one of the last able-bodied sailors to leave the Lex and board the rescue vessel.  Men, trapped below deck on the burning, sinking Lexington, sent final messages to their families by way of the ship's radioman.  Such a sober task. Such a haunting thought.

Now aboard the Card, my grandfather was on the flagship of a hunter-killer group formed to hunt German subs; a task it and its crew did quite well, apparently.

So much rich history wrapped up in one 3x5 recipe card!

Gingerbread!

My first official holiday baking is now complete. I quintupled my gingerbread recipe so that I could make two gingerbread house forms, a Christmas tree, and lots of gingerbread men and snowflakes.

Perhaps tomorrow we can do some assembling of the houses and tree.