bluecastle | Between the meatloaf and the muffins lie mousses/puddings (Reply)

OK, so it’s not like I didn’t already see myself as an obsessive person. The phrase “addictive personality” might have been invented to describe me. So far anyway I have dodged any of those obsessions that leads to jail time… but addicted to food, occasionally to people, to tv shows… not exactly positive but not particularly life threatening either.

Well I got the evidence tonight that this is far more hardwired into myself than I had imagined. I’m going through all kinds of crap that I’ve been hanging on for way too long –- either from procrastination (another of my stellar personality traits) -- or in tonight’s case stuff that had gotten stuck in a box in the corner of the garage and was left forgotten and abandoned.

I had remembered I used to collect recipes (there are a lot more around here to go through). My grandmother did too, and I think I picked it up in part from her. Plus I saw myself going to restaurant school when I was in high school. And I think it’s pretty clear from my bathroom scale that I’ve always been interested in food.

But.

Apparently it’s no wonder I now work for a University Library.

I found a bag of old recipes that I was determined to throw out. Musty paper is no fun. But I wanted to go through it, at least cursorily to make sure there were no handwritten family recipes squirreled away amongst the mass of paper. When I started going through the bag I realized pretty quickly the state of my obsession. I must have collected every recipe published in any woman’s magazine that came into our house in the mid-1980s. Some were still tucked into piles, wrapped inside the cover of the magazine so I would know when and where they were published.

The ones that had been clipped and pasted onto paper (or in some cases… in a unlikely foreboding of my future foray into altered books, they had been pasted onto the pages of other magazines)… and INDEXED!!!

There are notations on many of the clipping which magazine they came from, and the date of publication. Key cataloging phrases are underlined. There are “see also: asparagus” entries…

All of which are alphabetized and categorized.

I saved the typed (and amended) list of “Recipe Catagories” (sic).

Beef is subdivided into: Beef Dishes; Beef Stew; Corned Beef; Ground Beef; Meatballs; Meatloaf; and Beef Roasts.

The Vegetables are alphabetized.

It did make me smile when I realized that the green marker I’d used to write the “Catagories” on the pages where I pasted the recipes was from my calligraphy marker set that I was SO into back then.

I didn’t find any major family recipe treasures. A handout from Middle School home-ec class, and a mimeograph of the hard candy recipe, in my mothers handwriting, that we used to make every Christmas for gifts.

I’m not sure if I’m comforted that I apparently haven’t changed much in the last 25 years… or if I should be horrified by same.

Some of both I think.

Meanwhile… anyone need a Date-Apricot Steamed Pudding recipe from the November 18, 1980 issue of Family Circle?

And how WEIRD is it that the recipe page I plucked out a random includes a recipe that was published exactly 28 years ago today????????