[Sca-cooks] OOP layout and printing question

[ekoogler1 at comcast.net]

What a wonderful thing to have handed to you...and what a labor of love you have ahead of you.  I know your relatives will be delighted...I almost wish i were one of them!  

I suspect that the end product would be more useful if you were to put like recipes together...maybe even organize it the way a cookbook is, with sections for things like appetizers, bread, cakes, cookies, etc.  Then you can annotate with each specifically where each came from (book#, page#, etc.).

Good luck!!

Kiri


> Yes, this is actually food related, but there's a bit of a
> lengthy explanation required.
> 
> My grandfather was a professional baker--for a long time it was the family
> business. Mom and my uncle both worked in the bakery, and my uncle went on
> to run his own for a while. All the bakery recipes were kept, handwritten,
> in a black leather notebook. When my uncle started his bakery, my
> grandmother gave him a notebook (which he still has, somewhere, in a
> box) of bakery recipes, which we thought was the only one that was still
> around. (A cleaning woman had apparently made off with *the* notebook, but
> looking back on it I think what she stole was one of the really good cake
> decorating books, because I *know* that one went missing, and it was
> around the right time. Anyway.)
> 
> My grandfather passed away 16 years ago. My grandmother moved into a
> senior residence a couple of years ago, and everything she didn't take
> with her went into storage. Neither my father nor I had anything to do
> with any of the packing. Recently I was down visiting my father to get
> some of said grandmother's stuff that I'd claimed, and to this end we were
> moving boxes and looking through them so we had a vague idea of what's
> there (since, of course, neither of us had anything to do with the packing
> or the moving). In one of the boxes was a paper bag labeled "Bakery
> recipes for Selma/Frank/Lois". Printed, so I have no idea who wrote it. In
> this bag are five of the aforementioned black leather notebooks, full of
> recipes in my grandfather's handwriting.
> 
> I've been through them all, and although some of the same recipes show up
> in more than one place, they aren't duplicates of each other, not at all.
> So my plan is to transcribe all of them, and print them up as a bound book
> with copies for each of my grandfather's surviving children and the five
> of us grandchildren. With an image of the original next to the
> transcription, so one can see where it came from.
> 
> Now my quandaries: Do I arrange them in order, i.e., book 1, book 2, etc.,
> or do I put all the similar recipes together (there are at least seven
> different recipes for chocolate icing, for instance)?
> 
> The other quandary is this: Very few of these recipes have instructions.
> They're mostly just lists of quantities, usually in weights. Do I try to
> recreate the procedures from memory and from similar recipes, or should I
> just transcribe what's there and let the various family members do their
> own legwork if they want to actually make something?
> 
> [Incidentally, I now have my grandfather's recipe for pecan tarts, and
> more importantly, for the tart shells. Which is slightly different from
> most tart shell recipes, and now I know why mine never tasted quite the
> same as his did. Grandpa put almond flour in his tart shells, and the
> quantity of butter is different.]
> 
> And so I come to you, because you will understand what it is that I have
> and what I want to do, and why it's important.
> 
> Many thanks,
> 
> Margaret
> 
> 
> "Please. I have had too much of the stupid today. Please wait until
> tomorrow to say these things so my tolerance has refreshed."
> 
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