Mom's daydreams

I found out this afternoon that this acorn didn't fall too far from the proverbial tree. I was going through yet another box of stuff from my parents' house and found a notebook that I think was in my mom's "recipe drawer" at the house I grew up in. The recipe drawer as I remember it was a kitchen drawer full of clipped recipes, product recipe booklets (like 100 Ways With Jello), etc. I didn't usually go through the drawer when I was growing up because Mom rarely actually used the recipes in it. She cooked from memory, or referred to recipes in one of her hundreds (no, I'm not kidding) of cookbooks she had elsewhere in the house.

This particular notebook was literally falling apart...it had no front cover, and was a three-ring binder that was just marginally holding together. At first I thought it was just some recipes she had written down from friends or relatives, but the more I looked through it, I realized that it was her version of what I called my "idea file" and I had actually THROWN OUT my own idea file just an hour earlier. (Remember campers...I'm trying to get rid of stuff in this house!). Anyway...Mom started this notebook while she and Dad were newlyweds and continued to use it well into their early marriage once he returned from overseas. There are handwritten recipes, clipped recipes from magazines like Ladies Home Journal, McCalls, Good Housekeeping, etc.; and there are floorplans. Mom had drawn out floor plans for what I presume was her dream house. She had attached clips of pages from magazines of specific rooms and decorating ideas she liked. There were also recipes for making things from scratch that you couldn't buy during WWII because of rationing.

The thing that struck me most about the notebook was how many different types of things Mom kept in it. It wasn't just a way to organize her recipes or household work, it had poems, and drawings, and daydreams in it. Needless to say her "dream house" never looked like the one she sketched out, but one of the clippings she had kept had a built-in glass cabinet wall separating the kitchen from the living room, that looked somewhat like the china cabinet in our home between our dining room and living room.

I have clipped recipes from magazines for years now, and tried to keep them in a folder where I could use them when I wanted...now with the internet I can much more quickly look up recipe ideas and have them in front of me in moments, rather than looking through a notebook full of clippings, so that's why I threw out my recipe book earlier today. But I'm keeping Mom's notebook. Even though some of the recipes in there are SO disgusting, in a Leave-It-To-Beaver-sort of way (Beet and Lima Bean Salad, anyone?) the things that she kept, that were important to her for some reason, are worth my reviewing from time to time.