Confessions of a recipe hoarder

I'm a fairly organized person.

My closet's arranged by color. My spices are alphabetized. The tiny cupboard that passes for a pantry in my house is (usually) in remarkable order.

Don't roll your eyes just yet. Were I a true Martha, I'd have devised some brilliant strategy for organizing my ever-growing trove of recipes.

Handwritten index cards from friends and family. Yellowed newspaper clippings. Scribbles on envelopes or shopping lists. Bookmarked cookbooks and dog-eared magazines. Photocopies and Web printouts with scribbles in the margins. Files on three computers in two zip codes. E-mails and texts. And the many gems I've never written down.

All that collected wisdom, some of it hard-won or deeply personal. Stored in many different formats, none of them obsolete. Parsing and consolidating it is almost too daunting to think about.

Where to even begin? I suspect this is the kind of paralysis true hoarders must feel.

Comparisons to music are inevitable. Phonographs, vinyl records, 8-tracks, cassette tapes and CDs can all be digitized and loaded into mp3 players that can go with you wherever and be backed up forever online. Yes, there's an app for that.

But something feels invariably lost when a tangible thing goes digital, especially when that tangible thing is a recipe card in your grandma's looping script, or a newspaper clipping stained with decades-old-but-still-fragrant vanilla.

That's why I have bulging binders with plastic sleeves that hold index cards and folded printouts and clippings. Why I have shelf upon shelf of cookbooks. Why I keep stacks of Gourmet, Food & Wine, Cooking Light and Bon Appetit magazines.

I always meant to type or write up the best of my recipes on color-coordinated cards and tuck them in the sleeves behind their appropriate tabs in binders. I actually did that for a short while after I got married. At some point, though, just stashing the recipe in the front of the folder — to be filed later — was good enough. On to the next great dish!

Eventually, those stashed-in-front recipes and dinner menus required folders of their own: Thanksgiving, Chocolate, Cocktails, Seriously Awesome Desserts, Soups, Someday.

Someday indeed. When our home computer printer died, we replaced it with one that has a flatbed scanner. I told myself I would scan all those tattered and spattered printouts and cookbook favorites. Turns out that's rather tedious — scanning front and back, making sure it's legible and that you didn't cut anything off. And what you end up with is not a text file but an image, as digitally unrecognizable as the flowers in a garden passed at 60 miles per hour.

Recipe software programs are tempting: MasterCook, Cook'n and Lincoln-based eChef are a few of the dozen or more available. All seem pretty slick. Most make recipes searchable, sortable and sendable and boast handy shortcuts for things like utilizing the four ingredients in your picked-over fridge, adjusting recipe yields, finding nutritional information, generating shopping lists, even sorting recipes into chapters and printing your own cookbook.

But for those programs to work, you still have to type or cut and paste all your existing recipes. No matter the software, there's really no such thing as a personal cookbook that writes and edits itself.

And, as much as I love digital searches, I hate working from a recipe that's still on the laptop or a mobile device. I do it only when the printer's out of ink. Who wants to scroll and click with flour-covered fingers — or hold a $400 piece of technology so close to an open flame?

Users of recipe software can, of course, just print recipes. But what happens to the living recipe? The one you amended with a substitution that turned out better than you hoped, a note about when you served it and with what, a postscript about who liked it or, more importantly, who didn't. I like the scribbles in the margins in three colors of ink that show refinements over the years, that ongoing, still-being-written history. Software I've perused doesn't seem to allow that kind of versioning.

Perhaps it's irrational, but I also fear falling in love with some system that will be obsolete in 10 years. Recipes (at least the really good ones) are timeless.

Last but not least of my obstacles (and excuses) is the matter of finding the time.

I was going to sort things out over a quiet Christmas vacation.

I got as far as buying a new binder at the Bookworm bookstore in Countryside Village — one with fun colors, a cool retro cookbook look and plastic sleeves especially intended for recipe cards but equally suited to clippings. I set it out on the kitchen counter, so bright and cheery, with one of my stacks of unorganized recipes. It moved to the living room so I could cook and bake and then back to the kitchen when I got around to cleaning the living room. Three weeks later, it's still waiting to be filled and edited. And I've added another dozen or so recipes to my unwieldy stack.

For now, I'll just have to remember which cookbook, binder, website, computer, archive, phone, e-mail account or portion of my memory houses the recipe I'm after. If I'm lucky, I'll get organized before that imperfect-but-good-so-far filing system — the one between my ears — goes entirely to pot.

Contact the writer:

402-444-1069, nichole.aksamit@owh.com

« Living

Share