Recipe Box

Before the time of on-line recipe files, cooks had recipe boxes. Some of the recipes with hand written directions, were passed down generationally and others were gifted collections given at wedding showers. In a present paring down of effects phase, I have the pleasure and pain of reviewing and saving or reluctantly  discarding these little pieces of paper. Some of them are tattered at the edges or stained from use but they bring back many memories. A few are ones I have memorized by now and they are standards in my kitchen. It's the simple ones that have lasted the longest. I can add various items to them and each time they come out differently but with the reliability of what keeps them classics. More than cooking, however, these recipe cards or scraps of paper torn from magazines, birth thoughts of a different time. In the days of stay-at-home mothers or fathers, there was time to plan and use ingredients that bore searching for. There were shops that sold the best vanillas or the most pungent fresh ginger, the Chinese store with the wonderful fruits, the little farmer's market with crisp greens still infused with dew from a morning's collection. You knew what dairy had the sweetest farm milk that was completely milk and not with ingredients to keep it fresh for two weeks. It was so delicious, it didn't last that long. There was time to visit others who served their tall cakes with icing that took a long time to make and tasted it. There were sandwiches with ingredients that didn't come from plastic sacs imprinted with two inches of additives. Butter was pure and sweet and everyone ate it with gusto. I don't recall obesity as a problem even with the carbohydrates and animal fats. Lard still makes the best pastry and butter lent its tender flavour without excuses. Bacon was crisp and steak was full of fat flavour that bespoke of green fields and summer hay. Those days have disappeared into huge corporation farmers and ingredients that are free from modern "help" are almost all gone. To find natural foods, mysteriously, you must shop at the high-end fashionable stores and pay their hefty prices that the richer folk don't mind shelling out to talk about over their well-appointed tables. Or if you have the time now, you may drive out to the farm areas and go to road-side stands here and there, or farmer's markets or shop for farm eggs on the farms that haven't been conscripted into big business. The recipe files on line amuse me. It seems that a simple, good recipe is ruined by adding exotic ingredients that may be braggable but what are they and why? Why do you need to throw nuts and odd off shore grains into something as stand-alone as brussel sprouts, for example? Sure, grate on some real cheese but forget the dried fruits and seeds and nuts and hot spices. That green, with a bit of good salt and butter can fend for itself. What happened to plain fresh cauliflower and carrots and potatoes? Their flavour stands alone in its earthiness and subtle hints of what its made of. I looked at a recipe on a box of pre-cooked rice and saw that it recommended frozen mixed vegetables that you "simmered" and then threw in the rice and boiled it all. Now where is the nutrition in that? Ah, give me the meat and potatoes of the past, the greens, the real apple pie and none of it, out of labelled boxes or plastic bags or fancy shops in fancy malls. Give me those that are grown and made by human hands from fields and animals that are clean and free, the true farms and farming.