My Grandmother kept her recipes in a recipe binder fitted out with envelopes for the various categories. She had never used the blank pages for each section, instead relying on the envelopes to hold all her scraps of paper. She had recipes written on old envelopes, on drug advertisement notepads, clipped out of newspapers and magazines, and sent to her in letters by friends. I was lucky enough to get a hold of this binder and had the fabulous idea to scan them all and make a kind of recipe zine for easy navigability. I’m not sure why I thought that a bulging binder would fit easily into a zine sized book. Even squishing as many recipes as I could onto each half sheet page, I ended up with 333 pages.
This isn’t the first time I played around with sewing sections of papers together to make a fat book, but it is the first where the pages were already printed up. I shoot from the hip when it comes to book making. I’ve read some articles, handled a lot of books, but I haven’t studied technique, so I made a lot of mistakes. But, the final product is exactly what I wanted: an easy to flip through, organized, collection of my Grandmother’s recipe clipping collection.
Scanning the recipes also gave the the opportunity to tweak the coloration on some of the oldest handwritten notes so they were just the tiniest bit easier to read. I already know the recipes I want to try out first based on the splatters, finger prints, and wear alone. And, though I included the recipes in this book, I will be avoiding all the molded jello salads. I just can’t.