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Cleaning out my grandma's attic and found a notebook full of old recipes

I was up there last weekend, moving boxes, and I pulled this small green notebook from a trunk. It's my great-grandma's, from the 1940s. The pages are full of her handwriting, listing things like 'war cake' and 'depression soup,' with little notes next to them. Next to a recipe for apple butter, she wrote, 'Made this when the baby was sick, he ate a whole bowl.' It's not just a cookbook, it's a story of how they got by. Holding it made me feel really connected to a time I never knew. It's wild how a simple list of ingredients can tell you so much about a person's life. Has anyone else found something like this, where the notes in the margins were the best part?

3 comments

3 Comments

seanc622mo ago

Yeah, it's like @karen405 said, the notes are the real story. I see this all the time with old letters or even notes in used books. People leave bits of their lives in the margins without even trying, and that's what makes things last. Those personal marks are what we actually hold onto.

thompson.tyler14d ago

Wait, you mean you used to think old family stuff was just junk too? I was the SAME way until I found a shoebox of my dad's old letters from high school. It completely changed how I see that kind of thing. Those notes in the margins are what make it feel real, not just old paper.

karen4052mo ago

Did you find any recipes that used ingredients you've never even heard of? My great aunt had one that called for "oleo" and I had to look it up, it was just margarine. Those little notes are the real treasure though, they turn a list into a family story.