Read on Twitter
#Archive30 #ACollection As we& #39;re locked down and work is inaccessible right now, here& #39;s an archivist& #39;s archive... (Thread)
1/7
1/7
Back in the 1990s I was @WellcomeLibrary and working with a lot of C18 recipe books: collections that typically would pass down a family, mother to daughter, bringing together useful household recipes: https://wellcomelibrary.org/collections/digital-collections/recipe-books/
2/7">https://wellcomelibrary.org/collectio...
2/7">https://wellcomelibrary.org/collectio...
We& #39;d just bought our flat and so to keep it tidy (and in homage to those C18 books) I started converting my file of tatty bits of paper with recipes on them, copying them into a ledger of my own.
3/7
3/7
We& #39;d picked up an old blank staff ledger in County Hall during the clearout, so it had an alphabetical index at the start. (Because it was for people, it even had a Mc page - I only ever used that for macaroni recipes, it turned out.)
4/7
4/7
Just as the C18 books used to have marginalia about how the recipes had worked ("probatum est" etc.) I could record things about mine: how one recipe came from a vegetarian magazine bought in Jackson, Wyoming, in 1996...
5/7
5/7
...or another was first done incredibly late at night because our then-six-week-old son needed bathing and feeding first.
That first ledger led to another and having started filling them on 10th Feb 1996, I& #39;m still at it and onto the 6th volume now.
6/7
That first ledger led to another and having started filling them on 10th Feb 1996, I& #39;m still at it and onto the 6th volume now.
6/7
So, 18th century women, don& #39;t worry: the recipe book genre is alive and well (though I don& #39;t record cures for gout or the flux in mine!).
And you know what? Now we& #39;re locked down, I am going to do A BIG INDEX across all volumes. On a SPREADSHEET. Hurrah!
7/7
And you know what? Now we& #39;re locked down, I am going to do A BIG INDEX across all volumes. On a SPREADSHEET. Hurrah!
7/7
Update: the spreadsheet is under way and the initial impressions are 1) a lot of recipes it& #39;s great to rediscover; 2) it& #39;ll be great to be able to search and categorise these things (find a vegetarian dish involving gluten-free pasta, eg); but 3) this will take a LOOONG time...
Further update to this thread started in early lockdown, back in mid-April: the grand index to my handwritten recipes is now finished, featuring 1200 recipes and lots of Yes/No fields so that I can e.g. bring together all gluten-free salads.
I am quite unreasonably proud of this.
I am quite unreasonably proud of this.
