Larchmont Public Library

The family cookbook that finally exists

Three sisters, one mother, sixty years of cooking, and a shoebox of stained index cards, is how every family cookbook starts, and how almost none of them get finished. The version that actually got finished, ours, last Christmas, had the machine doing the parts that always killed the project. The typing. A recipe card takes a minute to cook from and twenty to type, and there were two hundred of them, and the handwriting ranged from elegant to emergency. We photographed every card, six at a session, whenever someone visited, and fed them to the program in batches with one standing instruction. Transcribe exactly, keep her phrasing, mark anything uncertain with a question, do not improve her. The do not improve her rule matters more than you think. The machine will happily modernize a 1962 cake recipe into something healthier, and your mother is not asking for that. Uncertain words came back flagged, and the sisters argued about them by phone, which was the best part of the whole project, the fights over whether that was oleo or oil. Then the organization, the machine grouping them by decade and by which sister's kitchen they came from, and the formatting into one document, printable at the library for the relatives who still read paper. Eleven copies, spiral bound, eleven dollars each. The machine typed two hundred recipes. The family supplied everything that mattered, the phrasing, the arguments, the stains. That is the correct division of labor for almost everything in this new world.

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