Our current president just dropped out of the race for reelection. The Secret Service failed to protect our former president, and I’m worried about our country’s revenue. Here’s why.
My mother kept her recipes on index cards in a large wooden recipe box with artistic fruit paintings on it. Tabbed cards separated the Pie section from the Salad section. If you needed the recipe for Chocolate Zucchini Cake, you opened the lid, found the Cakes tab, and fingered the cards until you got to that recipe, then removed it and set it on the windowsill so you could see it as you followed the instructions. Some cards had pictures of fruit and were handwritten by a neighbor or were carefully typed on a card. Others were recipes cut out of newspaper and carefully pasted on a card. If the recipe she wanted wasn’t on a card, my mother could find it in the Madison Centennial Cookbook, which contained the best recipes from the Madison area over the past 100 years, or in the church’s centennial cookbook she helped write. Finally, it could be found in the tried-and-true Betty Crocker Cookbook.
Over the years, I’ve accumulated my own recipes, which I store in three-ring binders under clear plastic. My own Betty Crocker cookbook has been a staple for 40 years for angel food cake and chicken pot pie.
I then started using the internet to find recipes, which seemed much easier. I would simply search online for angel food cake and find a recipe that was even better than the one Betty recommended. I even started copying my favorite recipes into an online recipe vault where I could easily access them by simply entering my unique username and password.
And then disaster struck. The online vault went into oblivion, taking with it the recipes I had stored. Luckily, I had printed some of them, but I hadn’t saved them all. Our family favorite, New York cheesecake, was gone forever. I searched for it online, and it was nowhere to be found. Someone must have decided that this special recipe belonged on the dark web.
What will happen to the world’s best recipes if no one writes them down, if we don’t use paper cookbooks, and if we don’t print online the recipes we use and love? Even my Betty Crocker cookbook is losing its cover and my church cookbook is losing pages left and right.
It’s time to revolt against online cooking—well, not completely, because I still have to look up the recipe for red velvet cookies I found online. But once we’ve made and loved a recipe, we need to print it out and preserve it for our future generations, or who knows what slow cooker recipes our descendants will be reduced to using? I suspect a conspiracy to reduce our cooking to cake mix brownies and three-ingredient pancakes. Let’s unite, we must, in the quest to save our American recipes.
