Recipe Notebook from the Past

~ Becky Ross Michael
Laurium House
Vintage photo of unknown neighbors and what years later would become my home. The border is formed from wallpaper recovered within the kitchen walls!

Decades ago, my former husband and I bought a fixer-upper home that had been built around 1900 in a small town of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The house needed tons of work, and we basically lived upstairs while we began remodeling the first floor. When I say “we,” I mean mainly that he did the carpentry, and I cleaned up during and after the work was completed.

Since the kitchen was on the first floor and needed to be functional as soon as possible, that room was one of the priorities. While taking out the drawers in the kitchen for painting and new hardware, a small notebook was found jammed into the deep, dark depths of a cabinet. The booklet’s pages were somewhat discolored, and the brown, waxed cover bore the words “Memorandum Book.”

Within those lined pages, I discovered a delightful collection of handwritten recipes and helpful household hints. Some of them were even affixed with what must have been the names of the owner’s friends who had shared, as I recognized several of the last names of families living in that and the neighboring town. The penmanship style was similar to that of my mother or aunts who reliably sent letters to keep up on family news. I felt like I had struck gold.

Many of the recipes were desserts, although some were of casseroles or various types of vegetable and meat dishes. Two different versions of the Cornish meat pie regional specialty called the “pasty” were offered. Household hints ranged from a mixture that could be used to soften a hardened paintbrush to a home remedy for cough syrup.

When we said “goodbye” to that house some years later, the notebook found a new home in my paternal grandmother’s wooden recipe box and left with me.

I was recently encouraged to see that an online author acquaintance, Karen Musser Nortman, had put out a call for camping and/or Upper Peninsula recipes to accompany her current Frannie Shoemaker Campground Mystery, which is set in the area. I’m happy to say that the directions I submitted for pasties, “cry baby” cookies, and pasta sauce, all copied from that old notebook, now appear in the fiction book, Real Actors, Not People. What a fun way to recycle a few of those rescued recipes!

~Becky~

36 thoughts on “Recipe Notebook from the Past”

  4. Hi Becky, what a lovely post. How wonderful to find such a treasure, I love it when houses give you a gift like that. I will definitely have to check out “cry baby” cookies – I’m so intrigued by their name.

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    1. Thanks so much, Julie! Yes, houses can be almost like living beings in that way. Hope that you like the cookies. I found some references on the internet that say they’re called by that name because “kids will cry for more.”

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  13. A wonderful find Becky… we have bought a couple of older homes and in the last one I found a large box full of needlework samplers in a box on top of a built in shelving unit in a bedroom.. Lots of silks and patterns too.. I passed it on to a friend who was a keen needlewoman and I know she treasures it.. Lovely post thank you Sally

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  14. Pingback: Smorgasbord Blogger Daily – Thursday 19th July 2018 – Jan Sikes, Becky Ross Michael and Julie de Rohan. | Smorgasbord – Variety is the spice of life

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