Part One The Culture of Handwritten Recipes

PART ONE

Kitchen Folklore, The Cooks, The Food, The Nostalgia, and Those Who Know It As A Healing Place - The Culture of Handwritten Recipes


     I've collected some strange things in my life. Broken hockey sticks found at local arenas. Old hockey sweaters and general sporting goods that someone had thrown out. As a kid I collected the traditional fare; hockey, baseball and novelty cards, like the ones made of the Munsters television program. I collected Cracker Jack and Lucky Elephant prizes, garnered from deep in the boxes, and gads, then there were the Hot Wheels toy cars when they came out in the late 1960's. I have gone on, in the professional sense, to collect old chairs, quilts, books, ephemera (old paper), stamps, oil lamps and railroad memorabilia. Now, gosh darn, I've reverted to my old stand-by, of loving anything and everything to do with kitchen and cookery lore. But I'll tell you what! It's at no great disadvantage, or do I feel it's a lesser collecting passion than it was when I was deep in stacks of hockey and baseball cards, of nearly suffocating amidst my piles of sports jerseys stuffed into a small room. I can store a couple-hundred handwritten recipes in a binder, and that is pretty darn space efficient. But how did I decided cookery heritage was cool to collect? Well, it comes down to a joint effort, because Suzanne has pretty much the same affections, and has always enjoyed the company of her passed-down collection of cookbooks,  with of course, the resident, folded-up, handwritten recipes, kept in their interiors.
     I was inspired by a number of collectors in the United States, who were running businesses solely on the demand for vintage cookbooks and books about wine and alcohol generally. I wondered whether Suzanne and I, who have for long and long, been book and old paper collectors, could specialize quickly enough, to turn part of our business into a kind of cookery heritage place; an archives and retail enterprise joined at the hip so to speak. Suzanne was just about to retire from her teaching job at Gravenhurst High School, and we had already moved our antique shop into the rear quarters of our sons' vintage music business, on Muskoka Road. As generalist dealers for most of our years in the trade, specializing can be good and bad at the same time. It requires a diversion of funds from one side of the business to the other, and it can create an imbalance of inventory; the general stock being reduced while the specialty interest increases in stature and investment. Making a mistake in this transition has a lot of risks. Fortunately, we've been doing this antique thing long enough now, to know where the pitfalls are likely to occur, and in a seasonal economy, that means being totally prepared by Easter, and going into building-mode, after Thanksgiving. This is exactly what we did, and it worked. We have a solid template from which to build upon, to increase the size and dynamic of our cookbook and cooking archives, and resources of international texts, to meet our customers demands. It took us five years from when we began, and although we're still only a quarter of the way to what we want it to be, eventually, we will be able to jump ahead quicker now, because of this established foundation that took most of our time and resources.
     But for me, and I was afterall, the fellow who seeded the idea for a cookery archives, and getting Suzanne's support for such an ambitious and costly project, it all began as a wide-eyed-kid visiting my grandmother's kitchen, at her Toronto house, and watching her culinary magic unfold for us hungry onlookers. I had many other times in my life where and when I was influenced positively about culinary folklore, but it was Blanche Jackson, my grandmother, who set me straight early in life, about the importance of the kitchen, and all it represents, in a family's social / cultural chronicle over the generations. So welcome to her country kitchen.
   
     My grandmother Blanche Jackson, was by all family accounts, and kin folklore, a talented cook, who prepared wholesome, abundant meals for her large family of five daughters, Marjorie, Phyllis, Doris, Jean and Merle, and one son, Carmen. But it was during the years of the Great Depression, in Toronto, that my mother, Merle, felt she really showed off her skills, by making soups and stews on very limited provisions that not only fed the family, and visitors, but also a substantial volume of hobos, and other poor travellers down on their luck.
     My mother couldn't say for sure, what the mark was on the Jackson property, whether a notch on the fence post, or a missing spindle, that identified their house as a safe place for homeless, hungry men (there were few women riding the rails in those days) to ask for food and water. It was customary for a Hobo especially, to mark a "friendly" house, for other travellers in the same need of food and water, passing through city neighborhoods. Blanche didn't care about the fact her house was a known sanctuary, and I rather think she enjoyed helping these unfortunate souls, who were travelling by rail looking for work wherever in the country jobs existed. She saw a lot of tragedy unfolding, but she didn't judge those who arrived at her back door looking for something to eat to tide them over. According to Merle, she always had what was called an "everything stew" on the stove, made up from scraps from all the other family meals of the week. It was thick and full of protein and I dare say, fat was stirred into it, to make it as hardy as it could be, to sustain these travellers on their way.
     The men could come and sit at their long kitchen table if they wanted, my mother told me, but they had to wash-up first of all, in a basin outside, and manners were a big deal in the Jackson house. My grandfather Stanley, was a large framed man, a well known house builder in their area of Toronto, so the men were often met by him at the back door, giving a sense of law and order just in case a visitor thought that because Blanche was slight and small, the household was vulnerable. Blanche may have been small but I'm told she could wield a long wooden spoon with considerable force and sting. Point is, she never turned anyone away, who needed sustenance, and some returned each month for a hand-out, and became well known to the Jackson family. A majority were good citizens who were disadvantaged by the collapse of businesses and industry, losing their jobs and being forced to travel in order to find new employment. Many had to leave their young families behind while they did this, and Blanche saw the tragedy in this way; it wasn't their fault they had been forced into this lifestyle.
     My mother always claimed that in the Jackson house, the kitchen was the most important room of the house, despite its plain decoration, and utility purpose. It was a comfortable place to discuss the work of the day, before it commenced, and after all had been completed. What was kind of strange about this, as a family historian, is that Blanche of a farmstead background, coming from United Empire Loyalist stock, in the Trenton, Bay of Quinte area of Upper Canada, absolutely detested farm existence. According to my mother, it was her driving force than inspired her husband, Stan, also with a farming pedigree, in the same region, to move the family to Toronto, and build a suitable dwelling for them. As a matter of some irony, Stan built her a house that would have looked wonderful on a large acreage, with a nice country-style kitchen, yet on a small city lot. Blanche obviously wanted to have country reminders but a non-rural life. And this is the kitchen I used to have lunch and dinner in, whenever my parents were visiting from Burlington. Blanche until her health began to decline, loved working in her kitchen and preparing some amazing meals and baked goods, always with a pot of hardy soup or stew simmering on the stove top. Just as she had done so many years earlier, keeping her family feed, and homeless men nourished, on provisions that were meagre at best. But there was always ample home-made bred to sop it all up.
     The reason I have begun this series of columns on Kitchen Folklore, is that I credit Blanche, and my intimate exposure to her country kitchen, for my own passion today for all things "vintage cookery." It all reminds me of those warm, delicious hours spent at Blanche's city home, watching steam rising from the soup pot, and being safely intoxicated by the smell of fresh baked goods. It gave me the reason, for the next half century, to investigate more thoroughly what "cookery" heritage was all about, and whether or not, by interjecting "folklore" into the mix, I could write about it with the proficiency, my own culinary capabilities disallowed. I can burn water. I found that it was possible to write about this folklore, and even collect examples of this history, without first having to be a master chef, or a cook at all. I married a Family Studies teacher who loves to cook and bake, as she garnered from her own family experiences, at her homestead in Windermere; where her own kin folk were exceptional home cooks, and we have a lot of evidence of this culinary mastery dating back to the pioneer homesteads, the Shea family carved out of the Ufford-Three Mile Lake forest. Suzanne not only taught culinary arts, for a period, but took her high school students on catering jobs around the region, for wedding receptions and banquets. In her capacity as a Family Studies teacher, she taught students how to manage a kitchen, large or small, and learn the basics of home-cooking for survival, and even for the sheer pleasure of food preparation.
     When Suzanne and I began attending auctions, even before we were married, we had a penchant for buying book lots, which usually included a box or two of old cookbooks. This initiated one aspect of our culinary heritage project, which was initiated without any plan to turn a profit, and the second component, came quite by accident. We started to find lots of handwritten recipes folded into these old books, some even stuffed into old novels from the turn of the century, magazines, and even in journals. It wasn't long before we had amassed an interesting array of these folkishly interesting relics of culinary heritage, handwritten onto all kinds of paper relics, including old invoices, backs of personal letters, advertisements, hastily ripped-out pieces of paper, backs of vintage photographs, magazine covers, even on the back of memorial cards; obviously someone got a recipe given to them, likely at the wake for the deceased named on the front of the card. Without really intending to, we came up with a large, diverse collection of these handwritten, food stained recipes, found mostly in these boxes of old books we were buying in bulk. For years we just kept stacking in bundles in our small archives, until we hatched a more aggressive plan, to specialize our antique business in cookery nostalgia, including vintage, rare and out of print cookbooks for our customers. We now had a substantial plan for presenting and utilizing our love for the kitchen, and all things "cookery," from food preparation collectibles, to print heritage, including a service buried within our antique business, offering recipe research services. This is where the accumulation of handwritten recipes provide an outstanding archives potential, helping customers find long lost recipes they remember their mothers and grandmothers preparing decades ago; that were thought impossible to find again.
     Five years ago, shortly after opening our Muskoka Road antique shop, here in Gravenhurst (Opposite the Opera House in the former Muskoka Theatre building), we set about the task of building one of the largest vintage and out of print cookbook and recipe archives in the district of Muskoka, and beyond. Our "foodie" customers tell us this is true, from their travels around this part of Ontario, and it makes us pleased to have earned this distinction. But truthfully, we began in earnest, collecting cookery heritage for some undetermined final purpose, back in 1983, even before we were married that year. Cookery heritage appealed to both of us, and the kitchen has always been our favorite part of Birch Hollow, our humble abode here, tucked in the beautiful Muskoka woodlands. Over the past five years I've written a lot of editorial pieces highlighting our mission to build this culinary arts collection, and highlight kitchen and cookery folklore. They have become the archives backbone of our present business, and we are busy upgrading and improving the collection every week of the rolling year, to be more thorough and informed about what we have come, by passion, to represent in our modern enterprise dealing with old realities. In fact, Suzanne's business name in this regard, is "Suzanne Currie's Cookery Nookery," and it is doing quite well.
      Suzanne and I have run a museum, a sports hall of fame, many community events, and of all the projects we think we've done successfully well, tackling this latest project has by far, been the most difficult, because of scarcity of the oldest cookbooks, finding cookbooks to fit our customers' interests, and to read and read, and read some more, so that Suzanne, for one, can find a much desired single recipe in our bulky archives, without a long delay. We're not cookbook experts yet, but we're getting there acquisition by acquisition. But no matter how much work it is, to build this kind of collection, it has been a lot more fun than an endurance exercise. It is the result of our roots in the kitchen and culinary heritage, dating back to our grandparents, and in some cases beyond this, so it has been pretty much a life-long ambition realized in our elder years. I don't recommend collecting this antiquated material without that inherent passion, because it takes a huge commitment of time, and a lot of investment capital, because rare and vintage cookbooks can be very expensive, and the travel to find them, rather steep if you can't offset mileage and acquisition costs, with the other antiques we buy and sell to make ends meet. The cookbook thing is still far more a hobby interest than paying part of the business, but our reputation in this field is growing, so hopefully, the best of time, with a whisper of profit is yet to come.
     We want to show you why these handwritten recipes, in particular, are considered folk art, and part of our cultural heritage. To most, they're just considered, well, exactly what they are in appearance. Folded up, finger-print stained bits and pieces of paper, written upon, hastily-so in most cases, with pen or pencil, and stored in a book, usually a cookbook, for later posterity. You'd be surprised at all the interesting reasons why these loose recipes were hung onto, by cooks and their offspring, sometimes for centuries, folded-up tightly and buried in another text, the way they're most often found. It's a fascinating study and we want to prove this to you, possibly a keeper yourself, of your family's passed-down cookery heritage. We hope it will evoke delicious memories you've acquired from your own wonderful moments spent with kith and kin in "The Kitchen".
     In this short series of stories, regarding cookery heritage, and specifically the folk art, cultural legacy, of handwritten recipes, I've turned to my own cluttered archives collection, dating back a decade or so, to offer some insight about how something as congenial and soft as kitchen-lore, can become a hardcore obsession for the collector of such. All in good fun of course. And usually discussed and enjoyed at the harvest table in that wonderfully aromatic, nostalgic part of the house, where peace is made and gravy applied  - otherwise, the kitchen.
     Please join Suzanne and I for a pre-Christmas look back, at what tempted us to become kitchen historians, in the folk-sense of course. Part two  tomorrow.