Found my great-grandma's old recipe box and realized it's basically a family history book

I was helping my mom clean out her attic in Phoenix last month and we pulled down this old tin box. Inside were maybe 200 handwritten recipe cards from my great-grandma, all from the 1930s and 40s. Each one has notes in the margins about who she got it from or what church supper she made it for. It's wild how a simple thing like a meatloaf recipe can tell you who her friends were and what her life was like. Does anyone else have an heirloom that turned out to be a mini-archive?

3 comments

3 Comments

wendy_murphy162mo ago

Oh man, my grandpa's toolbox was like that!

angela19118d ago

Right, I used to think recipe boxes were just collections of stuff people made all the time. But your grandpa's toolbox really puts it in a new light. Those handwritten cards with little notes about who taught him that dish or what church supper it was for sound way more personal than any cookbook. It's like a little time capsule of his life through food. Makes me wish I had asked my own grandparents more about their recipes before they passed. Does that box have any really old recipes in it, like from the 60s?

leo6032mo ago

Wait, 200 handwritten cards? That's insane. My grandma had like, ten recipes total and they were all for jello salad. The fact yours has notes about church suppers and friends is next level. That's not a recipe box, that's a whole diary made of food.