[Sca-cooks] OOP layout and printing question

[Daniel Myers]

On the flip side, and from a geeky historian viewpoint, I think that a 
transcription that preserves as much as possible of the original 
(recipe order, lack of instructions, etc...) would be good, with a 
separate section of worked out recipes, notes, and the like.


On Aug 3, 2004, at 2:37 PM, ekoogler1 at comcast.net wrote:

> 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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