I absolutely love old cookbooks and recipe cards!  The recipes on paper or recipe cards are my very favorite.  I love the handwriting.  The handwriting is so personal.  I love knowing someone took the time to write down their family favorites.  It is especially meaningful if you know the person or they are family.

My mom, my sister, Sydney and I had the chance to go through my grandmother and my great aunt’s recipes and cookbooks.  I can’t describe how amazing it was to see their handwriting and read through old recipes that they used to make.  It was a wonderful afternoon we spent going through them and hanging out together.  Love family time!

Bentley (our standard poodle) even got in on a little family time!

One of the first things we noticed, when going through the two boxes of recipes, was that these sisters (my grandmother and my great aunt) wrote numerous recipes on the back of public auction notifications.  🙂  So not only did we get to read the recipe but we also could read about past auctions from the area.  Some of these real estate auction notifications were dated as far back as 40 years ago!  So neat!

Many of the recipes were categorized into these small notebooks.  Some of the notebooks had pie recipes, cake recipes, cookie recipes, frosting recipes, and many more.  Each notebook was for a particular category of baking and cooking.

Some of the recipes were on index cards and small sheets of paper torn out of tablets.  There were many, many loose recipes that were cut out of magazines.  Some were on the back of calendar pages.  This was really neat because we knew the month and year that they wrote down the recipes.

Obviously, my personal favorites were the handwritten ones.  It was like a little piece of the sisters were still here with us through their handwriting.

Another really neat thing was the number of recipes they had from their friends and relatives.  They had names and dates on the recipes.  Many of these were dated more than 60 years ago!

One of my favorite recipes is Cherry Fluff.  It is a dessert I remember my great aunt making.  It has a graham cracker crust, cherry pie filling on the inside, and is topped with whipped topping.  The dessert is refrigerated and especially amazing in the summer.  I can remember having this dessert when I was a little girl.

My grandmother always made Milky Way Frosting to put on chocolate cakes.  It was so good!  It is made with brown sugar, flour, milk, vanilla, and a Milky Way candy bar.  It was a family favorite that we really enjoyed!

I am really looking forward to trying several of my grandmother’s and my great aunt’s recipes.

The other thing I am really looking forward to is collecting more recipes and cookbooks.  Especially ones from family members and friends.

I have a few recipes written down, but this has really taught me the importance of having all of my recipes written down and dates put on them.  I love recipe cards and this is the perfect excuse to go on the hunt for some really cute ones!

Vintage cookbooks are something else I have fallen in love with.  My favorites are the ones with notes in the margins!  Someone took the time to tweak the recipes and write the changes down.  These cookbooks have their handwriting in them and this makes it seem like the person is still here telling a little bit of their life story.  It is so much fun discovering things about other people.  Especially, when it comes to cooking!

Have a great day, and do some amazing cooking today!