There was a great piece in Slate last week about recipe cards — “an accidental charter of [family] traditions, rendered in 3-by-5-inch index cards” — and how digital collections have since replaced them.
I’m certainly guilty of maintaining a digital recipe collection: blog posts that I’ve bookmarked, emailed recipes that I’ve filed away in a dedicated folder. But I also add my favorites to a binder I’ve owned since college, which has, like the index cards of yore, become “spattered with grease stains and marked with thumbprints.” It’s a haphazard bunch of dishes that I’ve printed from my computer, cut from the Sunday paper, or written out by hand, and it’s always fun to flip through and be reminded of something I added when I was living in Germany, say, or looking for new ways to cook the green beans from my garden.
Do you keep a recipe box?
