A STRANGE TRANSITION FROM HOCKEY CARDS, OLD BOOKS, CANADIAN ART, TO COOKERY HERITAGE
THE WIDE AND WHACKY RANGE OF COLLECTING INTEREST LED ME TO THIS!
A number of my dealer / collector friends, have admittedly, and understandably, given up trying to figure me out. In the buy-sell-or-keep habits, of the average old-stuff hustler, there are defining characteristics, peculiarities, friends and rivals find worthwhile knowing about. In our region of Ontario, in the well known District of Muskoka, dealer / collectors are always bumping into one another, especially in the off-season. This time of year, particularly, there are only so many second hand and antique venues to visit. As soon as the snow leaves, the yard sale season officially begins. Then we can spread out a bit across the landscape. Most of us consider ourselves "generalist" dealers, looking for anything vintage we can buy cheaply and flip for a wee profit. Adding collectors to the mix, who also snap up roughly the same antique items, that interest us, turns the confluence into a rapids. It doesn't mean we can't be mates but first and foremost, we're competitors. Make no mistake, it can get pretty aggressive out there on the antique and collectible hustings. Of course you already know this. For those people reading this, who are not avid collectors, and who have never been in an antique shop, it must be funny reading about our shopping fervor….our antics, stumbling over each other, trying to get the good stuff before the others. And you thought a "flying tackle" and "straight-arming," were football references. Out on the antique hustings, believe me, I've seen all kinds of wild pursuits of perceived holy grails.
My point is, each of us knows the importance of judging those folks who are competing for roughly the same collectible articles. If you were to think of it in sports terms, each of us would be an individual hockey club. The plan is to win. When skill doesn't do the job entirely, that's where wisdom and tricks of the trade enter the competition. Over the years of doing this antique hustling thing, you learn about your competitor's battle preparations. How hungry are they for a good find? Will they be able to get access to a shop's secret stash ahead of the rest of us? Weaknesses? What can we exploit? In a rush of dealers, how competent are they, getting to the best, "money" pieces first? It happens. Three of us will arrive in the parking-lot of a second hand shop, or estate sale, at roughly the same time.
You see, we just can't turn off the knowledge of "potential," and the hunch we have, that thousands of dollars could be won or lost at that particular sale……by even the slightest mistake, miscalculation or over-sight. I won't kid you. It's just about as rigorous as a hockey game, at times, trying to dance through the crowd, ahead of associate dealers. It's kind of thrilling, but honestly, I don't like getting mad about perceived and actual losses of finds, I believe, with my experience, I should have made. Touchdown passes I should have caught. Goal I should have scored. I don't mind the heated competition, and it's been a way of life for much of the past 35 years in the profession. I must admit however, I'm getting more complacent and gentle these days, with aching joints and the battle wounds of industry. Like injuries sustained, carting away huge Victorian oak sideboards, and flat-to-the-wall cupboards, and trying to fasten them to vehicles that always seem so strangely undersized. "Why do you insist on killing yourself like this," my wife asks, almost every time in a parallel circumstance. Out of breath, bleeding from some loading incident, limping from a mis-step in someone's yard, I can stand there, looking at that beautiful wood cabinet, and say…."cause it feels so darn good to make a find like this." It feels really crappy to watch a competitor drive-off, with an even nicer piece on the roof racks. Yup, it's like fishing without the river and not having a rod, in hand, buy by golly, the rush of a good find is like landing the biggest trout ever caught. Trophy material. This is what re-generates the collector in me, every time I swear off running ever again, to a succession of regional yard and estate sales. Adrenalin just shuts down the pain of old joints, and a wonky hip. I could leap over tall buildings, if there was a pine pie-safe for sale on the other side. This is my antique hunting characteristic. I'm nuts for a good find. My colleagues. They go to spring training camp, like the Blue Jays in Florida, to get ready for the yard and garage sale season. I do my training right here in the bosom of Muskoka. In fact, I never stop training. I'm even trying to get an upper-hand in the profession, by writing these regular blogs……about them. My rivals. My never-say-die competitors. Gezz, sooner or later, one of them is going start their own blog, so we can battle-it-out online.
Cookery heritage. How did I get here from over there? Any ideas? Well folks, like a lot other things in life…..it just happened as a result of everything else. Call it a comfortable "fall-out" from year's in the antique trade, and the habit I've had for years, of buying job-lots at auction sales. Not one book. A thousand books, in many, many boxes. It was while sorting through all those boxes, book by book, that a routine find, we'd make, had slowly begun to interest me, initially, Suzanne later, as both active regional historians, and as career collectors.
Inevitably, from estate and auction sales, we would find books, we purchased, had insert cards, letters, invoices, documents of all sorts, and even old hockey cards. I was able to get a half dozen "tall boy" edition hockey cards, from the original six era of the National Hockey League, of the 1960's, tucked tightly and safely into a rough looking cookbook. We also got a lot of folded-up handwritten recipes, and not just from the old cookbooks, included in our bulk purchases. Suzanne has a large collection of vintage cookbooks from her family, and friends from the Village of Windermere, on Lake Rosseau, and her family's farmstead in Ufford, a short hike to the shore of Three Mile Lake, in the Township of Muskoka Lakes. As we have a lot of cookbooks anyway, and Suzanne loves to cook…..and I love to eat (although I'm presently on a diet), we have always looked for hard-to-find recipe books on our travels, going back to our newlywed days of the early 1980's. For quite a few years, we'd remove the handwritten recipes from the old books and binders, and conserve them in a nice dry environs….actually, in several hoosier cupboard drawers and a steamer trunk, where we could find a little extra space. There isn't much space here at Birch Hollow, but I'm not a hoarder. I just collect too much stuff.
As an historian, who loves to get a hold of original journals, for research purposes, two acquisitions, especially, started to make me re-think these relics of cookery heritage. At an auction in Bracebridge, about ten years ago, I purchased a number of farm journals….written very personally, about day to day living, from the 1930's into the 1950's, (I believe), on a rural property near Barrie, Ontario. I did a lot of conservation work on the journals, to safeguard them for the future, and read them twice over because they were so incredibly interesting. First person accounts of farmstead hardships, good weeks and bad, high yields and low, crop failures and animal illnesses, strong harvests, and poor. There were stories about family members, milestone events, social encounters, guests at the house, news of accidents, local deaths, serious illnesses in the family, and accounts of bad storms and heavy snow. There were lots of kitchen-related stories, about making-do with what was available, especially during the Depression years. It was a social/ cultural historian's dream collection. I was however, suspicious, whether the owner of these books, had really thought about the content, before putting everything up for auction that day. I had many buyers interested in the collection of journals, but to clear my conscience, I felt it necessary to contact the sale host, just to make sure she hadn't changed her mind……and wanted this family history returned. Well sir, she was ecstatic to hear that the books had been found. A helper at the auction had mixed-up boxes from her mother's estate, and the box with the family keepsakes, had been put up for sale. It wasn't until a few week's later, when she was sorting through the left-over boxes, in storage, that she realized some of the remaining items had been intended for auction……and the ones that weren't supposed to be sold were missing. By her own admission, she was devastated about the loss of family records. I got them back to her, and this was a nice feeling, because they were far more important to her family, and grandchildren, than to some social historian out there. I was privileged of course, to have enjoyed the content…..although I did feel like a voyeur the whole time.
The second journal, was from the Belleville area of the province, and had belonged to a well known family, and a landmark farmstead. The details in this journal collection, which we purchased from a second hand shop, in the Village of Sutton, were not as personal as the first farm diaries, but were far more detailed in the terms of farm business, and the accounting of purchases and sales of farm goods, from around the turn of the century. What it lacked in personal diary-material, it made up for it, with a thoroughly detailed glimpse of how the farm economy fared at this time in Ontario and Canadian history. One could read into it, the successes and failures, prosperous harvests and ones that, due to weather, fell short of expectations. There was also a considerable amount of cookery heritage included, with actual recipes being attached to certain pages of the journal.
As a regular contributor of historical feature stories, to local publications here in Muskoka, I began looking at the rather large inventory of handwritten recipes with somewhat more enthusiasm. As with the farm journals, where recipes were often tucked, or folded between the pages, one could read between the lines…..and turn what seemed like only cookery directions, into social / cultural research material. There were a lot of personal and situation histories recorded in those few lines, written on the backs of store invoices, advertisements, ripped-out sections from magazines, backs of cards, letters and messages…..and on just about everything and anything that would accommodate a home-maker, writing down a passed-along recipe. This became very much the intrigue of the hunt for handwritten recipes. Not just the notes themselves, but what people wrote them on, in haste, and when there was a shortage of anything else to write on. These may have been the result of inconvenient meetings, on the street, the bus, or at the market, where one person offered another a special family recipe, and there was no supply of notepaper. These are always fun to find, and review. We've found recipes on the back of "In Memoriam" cards, death notices from funeral homes, on the backs of family photographs, on telephone message paper, grocery store sales receipts, on the backs of soup can labels, (peanut butter and pickle labels as well), on the reverse sides of automotive repair bills, phone and hydro bills, in the backs of books, and not just cookbooks. It's fascinating what was used, in a pinch, to double as notepaper, when someone else was willing to spill the beans, on a good recipe.
We also have quite a few books that were hand-made, to hold these written recipes, some dating back to the mid 1800's, originating from the so called "old country." As the District of Muskoka was settled in the late 1850's onward, with the Free Land Grants, following Canadian Confederation, in 1867, many settlers arrived in the district from Scotland, England, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Germany. They brought their recipe collections with them…..some having been handed-down from generations before this. We have recipes that were written in the "old country," and transplanted, and adjusted to life and provisions on the Canadian frontier. A lot of substitutions were necessary, to make up for what was in short supply…..particularly herbs and spices. Muskoka was generally a poor agricultural area, as far as crop production was concerned, but it was well suited to raising sheep and cattle. There is a very thin arable soil here, upon the Canadien Shiled (rock), so crops had to be adjusted constantly to the prevailing inadequacies, and short growing season. There are examples on these recipes, where substitutions have been written onto previously composed recipe sheets, tucked into folders.
I'm just glad the "historian" in me, commanded that these found recipes, discovered in the lots of books and old paper from auction and estate sales, were to be kept for some future use. It wasn't until I spent time going through the above-mentioned pioneer journals, that I took another look, at what these handwritten recipes were all about. It became so important to us, that we actually converted to cookery heritage as our number one interest…..and for once, it didn't have a thing to do with capital investment, and annual profit. We did decide to share information about our finds, in an attempt, more than anything else, to convince folks to hang onto these heritage items……when otherwise, they might have just decided to throw-out those ripped and stained pieces of paper, folded between the pages of old books. Around here, I could finally say I'd blown away the competition, because I couldn't find another soul, a dealer, collector, or any of my heritage cronies, interested in foraging old books etc., to harvest bits and pieces of old paper….for posterity's sake. Actually, I don't want them following me on this, just yet, so I'm not sharing news of our cookery-enhanced collecting interests locally……for fear, they just might find it necessary to get in my way again. You know, I'd gladly let a nice landscape painting go to a competitor now, rather than risking the loss of a book harboring handwritten recipes….., if, that is, I had to chose one direction to run at a sale, versus the other. I guarantee that the painting would be worth more than the recipes we find…..unless there are some old baseball or hockey cards tucked into the same books. In fact, these old pieces of paper don't even have an established market value, by the page, or by the pound…..at least for now. I've purchased a few bagged-up lots from local antique shops, and church fundraisers but I've never paid more than five bucks, and that included some beat-up cookbooks as well.
I have a few more insights I'd like to share with readers, about the significance of these handwritten gems of cookery heritage……over the next few blog submissions. Although we haven't had time to update the site, we do have a separate blog, to highlight our latest and best recipe finds. You can check it our by clicking on……http://muskokavintagerecipes.blogspot.com/
If you're interested in the paranormal, and the antique domain, feel free to archive-back to early January, of this year, to read some ghostly experiences we've had, as collector /dealers, with so-called, "haunted pieces" we've acquired over the decades. Have you ever wondered who owned a piece of furniture, fine china, a toy, a cradle, a rug before it came into your possession? Might it have been a tragic circumstance, or some other intense event that just happened to involve a piece or pieces from an estate…..that you now own? What about a cradle that rocks itself? A Victorian portrait that refuses to hang straight on the wall…..and stay on its picture hook? I've got a plethora of stories from over 35 years in the antique profession, that most definitely stray into the domain of the unexplained….the weird, and yes, possibly the paranormal. You can check these left of centre antique blogs, posted in early 2012, on this Hometown Advantage site. If you like ghost and related stories, you can also visit my Muskoka and Algonquin Ghost blogsite, by clicking onto………http://hauntedmuskoka.blogspot.com/
Thanks so much for joining me for this blog about handwritten recipes.
You are most certainly welcome to join me again. From Birch Hollow, in Gravenhurst, Ontario, I bid you adieu.
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