Recipe for Success or Disaster

A few years ago, I found an old tin recipe box at the antique store full of recipes.  They recipe cards were yellowed with age, oil stained and worn.  There were hand written cards, like "Aunt Cassy's Plum Cake" and torn swatches of paper from magazines with recipes for scones and casseroles.

Some recipes were scribbled on the back of old gas bills.  Some recipes seemed ancient and others taken from the back of onion soup mix boxes.  There was even an old thank you card tucked in there.  Clearly, this box had seen some times.

I just read an article about an old cookbook that was clearly a wedding gift.  It was inscribed neatly in black ink, and it was clearly, the cooking bible of its day.

It's hard to imagine a world where you had access to recipes through one book.  I have shelves and shelves of cookbooks, yet, I would never call myself a cook.  No one wants to eat what I can make, I am better off in the deli section at our local fancy, corner grocery store than I am turned loose in the kitchen.

Wouldn't it be interesting if the Bible was your only reading source?  What if Aunt Better Crocker was your only way to put dinner on the table?  I feel like we are flooded by books, music, art, and more.  You name it, our American culture overflows with it.  There is so much and so much information, how do you even begin to pare it down to a bite sized nuggets of information?

In this land of plenty, it is hard to separate the meaningful from the poppycock.  Think of how interesting it would be if you lived in a time when you could invent without a zillion other people out there inventing the same thing, too.

It just seems like we are a land of lost opportunity, due to our own tidal wave of information that we have created.  Well, and it's not like it could go any other way.  What did John Steinbeck say?   "We now face the danger, which in the past has been the most destructive to the humans:  Success, plenty, comfort and ever increasing leisure.  No dynamic people has ever survived these dangers."