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#Archive30 #ACollection As we're locked down and work is inaccessible right now, here's an archivist's archive... (Thread)
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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/
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We'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.
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We'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.)
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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...
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...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'm still at it and onto the 6th volume now.
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That first ledger led to another and having started filling them on 10th Feb 1996, I'm still at it and onto the 6th volume now.
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So, 18th century women, don't worry: the recipe book genre is alive and well (though I don't record cures for gout or the flux in mine!).
And you know what? Now we're locked down, I am going to do A BIG INDEX across all volumes. On a SPREADSHEET. Hurrah!
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And you know what? Now we're locked down, I am going to do A BIG INDEX across all volumes. On a SPREADSHEET. Hurrah!
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Update: the spreadsheet is under way and the initial impressions are 1) a lot of recipes it's great to rediscover; 2) it'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.
