A Brief History of the Family Recipe Box
Index cards as an unintentional archive.
Nobody meant for the recipe box to become a historical document. It became one anyway, the way most real archives do - by accident, and by being kept.
The box holds recipes in four different hands across three generations, and reading through it in order is, more than anyone intended, a history of what was affordable, available, or fashionable in a given decade.
The Depression-era cards stretch a single chicken across a week. The postwar cards discover canned soup as a base for everything. The most recent cards, in a hand I recognize as my mother's, are mostly things she never actually made, clipped from magazines and kept out of hope rather than habit.
I have started adding my own cards to the back of the box, aware for the first time that I am not just cooking from an archive but contributing to one, whether or not anyone after me will read it the same way I have.
