The object I have chosen to describe is the recipe book that belonged to my grandmother, who has passed away and so the book has fallen into the possession of my mother.
This recipe book is fairly small, measuring 6 ¾” tall, 5 ½” wide, and approximately ¾” thick. It is very light; I find it fascinating how an object I perceive as containing such a wealth of information manages to seem practically weightless. The cover of it is made of a thick cardboard material with a smooth, glossy look that has been dulled and yellowed over the years. On the cover, an image of a wide array of food set on a table is depicted, with the word “Recipes” in the top right corner. The spine is beginning to crease and crack in some places after being opened and closed many times by many different hands.
The inside of the cover is peeling away a bit from the edges, and there are some yellowing stains, either from age or perhaps recipe ingredients. Handwritten by my grandmother on the inside cover is: “1 stick – ½ cup” (referring to butter measurements). The book is divided into sections with tabs made of slightly thicker paper that designate each category of food, such as “Soups and Sauces,” “Meat, Poultry and Fish,” and “Cakes and Pastries.” Each section consists of small, yellow lined notebook pages. The inner binder holding the pages together is made of thin white plastic; now, the pages are a bit hard to turn and some are beginning to fall out. Upon further inspection, I realized that the pages are actually fixed within the book with a cardboard insert on the back cover and can be removed.
What is notable about this recipe book is that the main food categories (soup, meat, fish, and so forth) are completely empty. There are only recipes written in the “Candy,” “Desserts,” and “Cookies” sections, clearly implying that my grandmother was a huge fan of baking and not as interested with cooking (the “Cookies” and “Desserts” tabs are actually more wrinkled and seem more physically aged than the other tabs because they have been handled so much more). As a result of my grandmother’s inclination toward baking, there actually are not many recipes at all in this book, but my mother and I still regularly make some of the cookies and breads that my grandmother scrawled in cursive across the small pages.
Although my mother and I have had and used this recipe book for years, I actually felt a deeper connection with it after taking the time to carefully depict this item in great detail. Measuring it, running my fingers over the cracks in the spine, and feeling the slight texture of my grandmother’s handwriting on the pages made me appreciate that this object has held together so well for so long. That is not to say that it’s perfectly preserved – there are a couple of faint stains on the pages, certainly from minor spills of vanilla extract or batter, now commingled with the other ingredient smudges left by my grandmother when she used this book and mixed together the components of her pumpkin bread or gingerbread cookies years ago. Baking is something I have always loved, and I hope to be able to pass this book on to my own children one day.
The Materials of History, Thought, and Art 
I really appreciate this post. My grandmother also passed away but most of my fondest memories of her from when I was young include the times we stood in her kitchen for hours and baked together. A few years after she passed away I was on a mission to acquire some of her most coveted recipes. I got a large ziplock back from my aunt who had all of the recipes she knew existed. I now am in possession of them. While the recipes are not all bound together in a book feeling each individual page in my hands always brings me a mix of peace and sadness. Running my fingers over my grandmother’s handwriting makes me think about when she finally perfected her recipes enough to want to write them down. It also makes me think of how many times she and I sat at her kitchen table, me holding the recipes in front of me reading to her all of the ingredients we would need for whatever we were going to bake. Seeing your grandma’s script makes me reminiscent of my grandma’s. After getting my hands on my grandma’s recipes, I have taken on the role of baking her infamous chocolate marble sour cream cake. It sounds kind of gross, but it is far from it. My grandma used to bake this every Christmas Eve, so now I do in her place. These recipes are really special to me, more so having the originals that were handwritten by my grandma. It makes me happy to read that you feel the same way when really examining your grandmother’s recipe book. I too, hope someday I can pass them down to my own children.
This post strikes home for me. My grandmother passed away in 2006, leaving me with very few memories of her life. The vivid memories which I have retained all these years consist of baking cookies in the kitchen. Unfortunately, my grandmother, for the most part, did not write down her recipes, so once she passed away, it became difficult to replicate her baked goods. Within the last year, however, I stumbled across a small box that contained a few of her signature recipes. I cannot tell you how excited I was to find a small fraction of her classic recipes. It brought my family this past Christmas season an immense amount of happiness when we successfully baked well over two hundred of my grandmother’s classic cookies. While the recipes I found were not housed in a neatly preserved book like the one you own, I can understand your feeling of happiness when you are reading through the original recipes your grandmother wrote by hand. Baking cookies with my grandmother is an activity I will never forget, and I hope by passing down these recipes to my future children, they’ll be able to recall such fond memories of baking cookies when they are older.