Wednesday

When I was a child in the early 70′s, my favorite day of the week was Wednesday. It was my Grandmother’s day off from work and Wednesday was the day she would pull out a big bag of Robin Hood flour, Tenderflake lard, sugar, slabs of real butter, stacks of loaf pans, cookie sheets, pie plates and do the baking for the week.

Batches of dough rising all morning in huge bowls, rows of pans covered in tea towels and linens sitting on the counter waiting their turn to go in the hot oven. The kitchen table covered in flour, wooden spoons and rolling pins and thick glass measuring cups.

Fresh buns, loaves of bread, cinnamon buns, apple pies — those are the items that I remember most. If there was any pie dough left, she’d cut it into strips and sprinkle with brown sugar and cinnamon that my younger brother and I wouldn’t let cool long once they came from the oven. Nothing better than my granny’s pie dough scraps!

That’s what brought most sparkle to my Grandmother. Cooking and baking and taking care of her family, she loved it all. She never collected a lot of recipes or wrote down many of her own, they were all in her head. She just ‘knew’ from her lifetime of cooking and baking — like so many women of her day.

RecipeCurio.com is simply a place to document and archive my collection of recipes that I’ve gathered over the years. They come in all shapes and sizes — clippings, old booklets, company promotions, loose cookbook pages, index cards. Some commercially printed, some newsprint and many handwritten on slips of paper, backs of envelopes and coupons.

Many of the recipes are worn, stained and dog eared. A few were my Grandmother’s, some are from other loved ones also now passed, and some I’ve accumulated through estate sales and an auction or two. The dates range from the early years of the 1900s til the end of the 20th century. They’re each special to me whether I’ve tried the recipe or not.

It’s my way of taking a few minutes connecting to a time that seems to me less complicated, more wholesome and gives a hat tip to the women of yesterday. As well as preserving and archiving these wonderful recipes that would otherwise be lost.

To this day – Wednesday is still my favorite weekday.