Cookaholics Bulletin Board

My aunt (also my godmother) loves cookbooks, I think I got my love of them from her. She lived in NY but a couple of years ago went into a retirement home in CA to have cataract surgery and be near her daughter. She wound up staying there so doesn't get to cook anymore and the house was left vacant. Recentlthy my cousins decided to clean out the house and divvy up/donate the contents. They called my uncle and he went over and took all the cookbooks for me. He brought one box with him on a visit this week but apparently the rest are boxed and waiting for someone to come visit. I'll likely get them when my parents go down at Thanksgiving.
Can I tell you how excited I am to be getting her books? She wrote in a lot of them, so the personilization will be great.

Jean, I love things like that. I have a great aunt's cook book (somewhere) that was given to her by her bridesmaids. They wrote all kinds of hints in it - some cooking related and some not. My favorite was "Always iron his shorts. Nobody else will know but He will." I always wondered if "He" was the bridegroom or God.

fitzie

Jean, How cool! @ Fitzie

You will have so much fun going through those boxes. Having here notes in them is priceless even if the hints are not really "doable". I am sure Fitzie is very happy to know her great uncle wore boxers.

I just inherited a similar treasure. My cousin got my Grandmother's handwritten cookbooks after she passed. We lovingly referred to them as the "crown jewels" of the family as we all developed a love of food and cooking mostly through Grandma's efforts. My cousin recently passed them on to me and I sat and grinned through an afternoon looking at them. Many of our all-time favorite family recipes are handwritten in there along with her notes. There are even old newspaper clippings with her recipes. Priceless! Deb

My grandmothers didn't use cookbooks. They had recipe boxes and unfortunately, I didn't inherit either one. I do have a couple of recipes of theirs that I make quite often, but that's it. You guys are very lucky to have this piece of family history.

Like Todd my Grammie had a recipe box as did her sister. I have both of them. All the family favoite holiday recipes are in there. I pull them out at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Now if I could just make potato salad like Grammie's I'd be a happy girl.

In March we got 2 new puppies, these precious little tykes chewed the binding and or dust jackets off several of my cookbooks before I was on to them......I am sick about how badly damaged a few of them are. They are now relocated to a high spot out of reach. They also took the zipper out of my camera bag rendering it useless....sigh. Thank goodness they are not puppies forever!

MiGirl - there has to be a bookbinder nearby; they can do miracles!!

- says the ex-librarian (who knew?)

I know exactly what you mean by those viscious little puppies. We have floor to ceiling bookcases in several rooms and they've eaten quite a few books over the years. I hate to admit this, but they've also peed on more than a few. Have to keep the doors to those rooms closed at all times and had to put up a gate to the kitchen and this is a pia as far as I'm concerned.

fitzie

I was sent a box of cookbooks which were my grandmother's before she went into a hospice. I was excited before I opened them. But: a mound of cheap, bad 60's and 70's baking books. No annotations from her either. I suspect that she never actually used these, and my other relatives actually grabbed the good ones.