Can a Valentine’s Day Trip from Seattle to Poulsbo, WA unearth something as esoteric as how Julia child stored her recipes?
Yes, it can. And, indeed, it did.
Yesterday my husband and I took the ferry across the majestic Puget Sound to Poulsbo, WA. A scenic small town with Scandinavian fishing roots, it’s one of our favorite daytrips.
After a lovely breakfast at the Green Light Diner, we walked the dogs along the water and when the shops opened we did the usual stroll…past Sluy’s Poulsbo Bakery, into Details and company, into Nordiska and then into one of our favorite antique shops.
Chris didn’t find anything, but I took a stroll to the distant back…I saw a quirky narrow closet that had a few books. I poked my head in and alas found a stack of some of the earliest Martha Stewart Living Magazines. They looked lonely. They were pining for a new home. I was thrilled to adopt them.
The stack set me back a mere $10.
All cozy at home last night, I started perusing them. The Gardening issue. A Holiday issue. Then the October 1995 issue which on the front page revealed: Organizing Recipes.
Well, of course I beelined to page 62, because my massive collection, which spans forty years, needs to be…well organized! I have saved recipes electronically, in hard copy, in recipe boxes, in folders and in large storage containers for decades.
Could the article offer some solutions?
Well, yes and no. The author Ingrid Abramovitch did an excellent job of presenting many options: High Tech versus Low Tech. Recipe Boxes versus Computer versus Scrapbooks and more.
She interviewed my former Wall Street Journal Editor, Raymond Sokolov who sat firmly on “Team Computer.” Ray felt it was nuts to keep recipe cards when they could be kept on a computer. He reasoned the recipe cards get tattered and splattered so why not keep the recipes in the computer and print when needed.
Martha herself chimed in and explained she liked to paste recipes into scrapbooks. She explained she’d like to type her recipes into the computer but that was too time consuming.
Then the author interviewed a Seattle based caterer, Pat Dunbar, who touted she had 32 years of Gourmet in her collection and organized those issues by month, not year. She explained that all the December issues sat together so she could easily scour those for ideas during the holidays.
Then came Julia Child. Right out of the gate Julia explained that she was still living with a filing system she set up in 1950. She set up the filing system to toss any article or item of interest into those folders so it would be an efficient retrieval method. She created the folder names by following the chapters in her books—Poultry-Chicken/Poultry-Duck.
Julia also revealed that her filing system had ballooned into six three drawer file cabinets. (That’s a massive Recipe Box!)
Julia also alluded to the fact that she would have loved to transfer her recipes to a computer, but the task was too daunting and, put quite simply and in her pure no-nonsense style, she explained she wouldn’t trust anyone else to do it!
In the end, the article gave solutions and solace.
Of course, I know what my options are but frankly, it’s all too daunting!
It’s a nice sunny day in Seattle today, so perhaps I’ll just head out to the garden….
What’s your favorite method of storing your recipes?
