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."

Retro Kitchen Artifacts: the Antique Kavoorkaa

If you remember back to the Seinfeld days, you might remember an episode about Kramer and the "kavoorkaa," a Latvian word for "the lure of the animal." Like many things in pop culture, I've modified the definition, and apply it liberally to my own life.

Seriously, I've taken Seinfeld-isms to the next level. I've bought the complete series dvd set and make my children watch them (when appropriate) so that they can understand why I would ever use a word like "kavoorkaa."

Now, when I am shopping, especially at antique stores, I think about the kavoorkaa. When I touch an item, and linger over it, I know better than to think that it will be there when I return. By holding it and giving it my longing energy, I've kavorkaa'd it.

The next person that comes upon said item, might feel my energy. It will lure them to the purchase, because the positive, longing energy exists.

OK, I am crazy, but I also feel that there is negative kavoorkaa. Sometimes I touch an antique and drop it on the spot. The energy is negative. Creepy. Evil.

All to say, after many visits to one of my favorite antique spots, I finally purchased this thingy as pictured above. A 1950's spoon rack in the shape of a ceramic flower pot. Oh boy. Lucy, this needs some explaining.

I am a woman who has grandma plates. If my grandma ever comes down from heaven, she will find me based on the grandma plates that she purchased with me on a shopping trip in the last months of her life.

I love the old life. The fact that there can be individual salt cellars. The fact that there are so many kinds of forks and spoons and plates. I want the old life. The complicated, but simple. The importance of a beautiful dinner. The slower, more complicated, yet a firm set of rules that establish the next move.