The Muskoka Folk Art of Handwritten Recipes

Bagley Road off Graham Road – Town of Gravenhurst -  Edge of the Severn River -   In Severn Bridge - Fred Schulz Photo

THE FOLK ART OF HANDWRITTEN RECIPES

      It's a cookery related heirloom, most people these days, don't consider worth too much….and if they have handwritten recipes at home, they'll most likely be tightly folded and concealed in dozens of family cookbooks passed down through the years.

     Yet there is a curious, undeniable folk art, and social-cultural relevance to their existence. There is more to them than a few scribbled lines, thumb print stains, on torn pieces of paper. In a grouping, especially with family provenance, they represent a culinary lineage, and can be considered a sort of kitchen journal.

     It's what we found out, when we began looking at our own mass of handwritten recipes, initially accumulated by happenstance, as book dealers in the antique trade. We often found hundreds of these beautifully written recipes, tucked inside old texts, and not just cookbooks. Ever since, we've been looking for these charming bits and pieces of culinary heritage, more so than formal cookbooks….which we also collect.

     After attending a fundraising flea market, several years ago (2007), at a local branch of the Royal Canadian Legion, in Bracebridge, Ontario, and having purchased many boxes of old books, we came home and (with that sense of adventure for discovery) sat out on our verandah looking through the mix of hardcover and softcover texts. There was even a full box of old recipe booklets, our pride and joy, and we had soon made quite a substantial pile of handwritten recipes of all shapes and sizes, and on all kinds of varied surfaces.

    We came upon one completely hand done recipe binder, dating from the 1930's. Tucked into these pages were dozens of neatly folded-up recipes, and when we started to add them to the pile of others, Suzanne reminded me that we were, in this case, upsetting the provenance of the book. And that we should, as curators of this collection, keep the recipes together because this is how they were found. We didn’t hold the same reservation about recipes in published cookbooks, unless there was provenance attached...such as a name, address, and relevance to a region, such as with a church or community cookbook, often used as a fundraiser.

    As much as possible it was important to know something, however minor, about where these recipes had come from, and who had passed them down through the ages.

   One of our most interesting acquisitions, came long before we had even considered collecting handwritten recipes, for fun or profit. Suzanne and I purchased a large volume of cookbooks from a Windermere (Lake Rosseau) estate; a well known woman who loved to cook and asked for, and received, many recipes from others in the community over a half century or more. When we started to take a more thorough look through the amazing collection of recipes, it was a truly remarkable entry into a culinary time machine. Suzanne even recognized some of her own mother’s recipes that had been given to the woman, so she could quickly attest as to how good each one tasted. (My wife Suzanne was raised in Windermere, Ontario). Some from this collection came from the late 1800's, and we are confident the woman had acquired these from local church rummage sales over the years, as they seemed to go well beyond what we recognized as her family connections (roots) in the region. There were names penned onto the tops of about twenty of the oldest recipes that confirmed our suspicions. There was a lot to be garnered from these neatly folded recipes from another century.

     There were many recipes from this local collection that got us thinking about the social-cultural patina of homestead cookery. It was seeing fingerprints of smudged chocolate, residue of cocoa, icing sugar, cinnamon, cloves, sage, cranberry juice trails, the tell-tale droplets of chicken and turkey grease, touches of farm fresh butter, cream, and vegetable imprints from falling ingredients between stove, pan, pot, bowl and plate. In some cases, and despite years of being folded-up in old cookbooks, you could still smell the culinary heritage they represented. We thought this was absolutely marvelous. We could imagine so many wonderful occasions from open fireplace cookery.....Irish stew steaming in suspended iron pots, to simmering soups upon the great iron horses of the kitchen....the old cookstoves. It gave us reason to imagine the dire straits of the home cook, to make a meal of substance from a few ingredients, during the hard years of war and Depression. It allowed us to wander in thought back to the harvest canning that went on in so many houses in this country, in preparation for long winters and poor economy.

    What appeared to be worthless pieces of paper from another era, contained more than just good culinary advice and instruction. If the soul of any good home is the kitchen, we had a lot of soul survivors imprinted on these ragged old recipes pages. Written by the way, on just about everything that would hold a few lines of print. Backs of envelopes, on the reverse side of invoices, notices, legal and medical, and even on the backs of memorial cards, jotted down presumably at the wake following the funeral. This is just as fascinating as the recipes on the front. They did talk to us in that subtle way history repeats, in nostalgic rekindling, for those willing to pay them some attention. There is a lot to be learned from the study of these cookery journals, and we'll offer you our overview of what they really represent in our body of heritage, representative of regions throughout our nation.