Recipe Binders
Thankfully for cooks, eaters and lifestyle writers, recipes collect. We clip them from newspapers and magazines and print them off of websites. We buy collections of them from tag sales, collector's websites and mail order houses. Recipes come from the labels of cans and the backs of boxes. Our own heirlooms are written, in spidery script, on loose sheets of stationery, stained from usage and fading with time, or jumbled into an box of inheritance.
Each recipe you use has the opportunity to become an heirloom. As January is organization month and a long weekend is upon us, here is a simple, satisfying project to organize and protect your recipes: recipe binders.
I first started making recipe binders when I inherited two boxes of recipe cards from the 1960's and 1970's. Some were good and some were only good for a laugh, but at that time we had just started homekeeping, so it was a considerate gift. However, there were so many of them that using them was impractical. The box they came in would not work; there was too much information to make digging through the file cards an efficient way to get to it. I was used to cookbooks, and therefore pages, and so with a trip to the local office supply store, I was able to set up what were, essentially, cookbooks, organized by topic and always available, so I told myself, for editing down.
However, these one-off recipes have tended to propagate rather than be pruned. I am always on the lookout for good recipes, which I grab with a liberal hand and audition whenever the situation suits. In order to manage the volume of information, I have gotten into the habit of going through the prior year's recipes every January. I create three piles: SAVE, DISCARD and SHARE. The SHARE pile is for recipes that I think might pique a fellow cook's known interests. The DISCARD pile goes into the recycling. And the SAVE pile gets added to the collection.
As I'm doing the project, I recall a year's worth of cooking: last summer's Memorial Day barbeque and birthday cakes and canning week, last autumn's Thanksgiving, even the cookies I was baking a long month ago. I write right on the recipes to note what I might want to try or retry this upcoming year, or what I want to keep doing, no matter how many years I've been doing it. Because -- it bears repeating -- any recipe you use can become an heirloom.
Which brings me to an important note: if you do have any of those delicate handwritten recipes (or, for that matter, any delicate paper heirlooms), contact an archivist for help with preserving them. This should include scanning them to your computer and keeping a set of the scans on a flash drive you keep in a safe place. This is a good idea for important papers beyond heirlooms.
Once you make the initial investment of a small amount of money and some pleasurable time spent making these binders, you will realize they don't need to be limited to recipes. I have since built and still maintain several household binders. A binder for household operations contains warranties and proofs of purchase, user's manuals, and such pertinent notes as an undersink diagram and the layout of the fuse box. A decor binder contains photos of the finished room along with swatches, paint chips, and pieces of inspiration -- from pages and photos ripped from magazines to pretty buttons, old photographs, even a bit of poetry from a long-lost book whose faded paper helped inspire the color scheme for the home office. We even have one for our video library. I revisit these yearly, too, for in following January's prompt to get organized for the new year, I am also following January's prompt to review everything that led to this moment, that will in turn feed the moments yet to come.
RECIPE BINDERS
Most office supply stores sell binders and index tabs in multiples, along with an associated discount. If you prefer, there are binder kits specific to recipes.
For each binder:
1 three-ring binder, 1- to 2-inch spine
I first started making recipe binders when I inherited two boxes of recipe cards from the 1960's and 1970's. Some were good and some were only good for a laugh, but at that time we had just started homekeeping, so it was a considerate gift. However, there were so many of them that using them was impractical. The box they came in would not work; there was too much information to make digging through the file cards an efficient way to get to it. I was used to cookbooks, and therefore pages, and so with a trip to the local office supply store, I was able to set up what were, essentially, cookbooks, organized by topic and always available, so I told myself, for editing down.
However, these one-off recipes have tended to propagate rather than be pruned. I am always on the lookout for good recipes, which I grab with a liberal hand and audition whenever the situation suits. In order to manage the volume of information, I have gotten into the habit of going through the prior year's recipes every January. I create three piles: SAVE, DISCARD and SHARE. The SHARE pile is for recipes that I think might pique a fellow cook's known interests. The DISCARD pile goes into the recycling. And the SAVE pile gets added to the collection.
As I'm doing the project, I recall a year's worth of cooking: last summer's Memorial Day barbeque and birthday cakes and canning week, last autumn's Thanksgiving, even the cookies I was baking a long month ago. I write right on the recipes to note what I might want to try or retry this upcoming year, or what I want to keep doing, no matter how many years I've been doing it. Because -- it bears repeating -- any recipe you use can become an heirloom.
Which brings me to an important note: if you do have any of those delicate handwritten recipes (or, for that matter, any delicate paper heirlooms), contact an archivist for help with preserving them. This should include scanning them to your computer and keeping a set of the scans on a flash drive you keep in a safe place. This is a good idea for important papers beyond heirlooms.
Once you make the initial investment of a small amount of money and some pleasurable time spent making these binders, you will realize they don't need to be limited to recipes. I have since built and still maintain several household binders. A binder for household operations contains warranties and proofs of purchase, user's manuals, and such pertinent notes as an undersink diagram and the layout of the fuse box. A decor binder contains photos of the finished room along with swatches, paint chips, and pieces of inspiration -- from pages and photos ripped from magazines to pretty buttons, old photographs, even a bit of poetry from a long-lost book whose faded paper helped inspire the color scheme for the home office. We even have one for our video library. I revisit these yearly, too, for in following January's prompt to get organized for the new year, I am also following January's prompt to review everything that led to this moment, that will in turn feed the moments yet to come.
RECIPE BINDERS
Most office supply stores sell binders and index tabs in multiples, along with an associated discount. If you prefer, there are binder kits specific to recipes.
For each binder:
1 three-ring binder, 1- to 2-inch spine
1 set of index tabs, either five or eight tabs
Sheet protectors for full-page recipes
Photo- or card-pages for recipe cards (4" x 6" works well)
Index cards, 3" x 5" and 4" x 6"
Glue stick
Label or a label-maker for the spine
Scissors
A pen
To get a sense of how many binders you will need, collect the recipes you are organizing. Take three index cards and write SAVE on one, DISCARD on the second, and SHARE on the third. Set the three cards on your work surface, leaving plenty of room for the piles that will correspond to each. Then go through your stack of recipes, considering how each one should be deposed. The recipes you want to SAVE should be simplest; you will know those as you encounter them. If you have trouble DISCARDing or SHARing any of the recipes, give yourself ground rules. For example, I don't SAVE any recipe I haven't cooked in a year or that I don't think I will cook in a year, but I SHARE it if I think someone I know might want to try it.
Immediately put the DISCARD pile into the recycling and set the SHARE pile aside to be distributed. Quickly count through the SAVE pile. A good rule of thumb is 50 recipes for a one-inch binder and 100 recipes for a two-inch binder.
For heirloom recipes that you have scanned but want to include in your binder, either print the scan or type it out and print that. For off-size recipes -- for example, those that come from grocery labels or boxes -- either type it out and print that, or cut the original to size and glue the original to an index card.
Decide how you want to organize the recipes. A good basic organization is Meat, Poultry, Pasta and Rice, Vegetables, Desserts and Miscelleaneous. You could also do a binder for each category, or one each for various cuisines. You could also do a binder specfic to family recipes.
Once you have decided on how you will organize your recipes and have obtained your supplies, open the index tabs. A printable cover sheet should be included. Use either this or a nice sheet of stationery to create a table of contents. You can handwrite the table of contents or print it from your computer using a pretty font. If you do use the table of contents that came with the tabs, there should be directions for using a template either available online or already included in your word-processing program.
Slip the full-page recipes into sheet protectors and the smaller recipes into photo sheets. Organize the slipsheeted recipes to correspond to your table of contents. Top each pile with the corresponding tab, and place in order into the opened rings of the binder. Place the table of contents on top; snap the binder shut.
Place a label on the spine and store with your cookbooks.
To get a sense of how many binders you will need, collect the recipes you are organizing. Take three index cards and write SAVE on one, DISCARD on the second, and SHARE on the third. Set the three cards on your work surface, leaving plenty of room for the piles that will correspond to each. Then go through your stack of recipes, considering how each one should be deposed. The recipes you want to SAVE should be simplest; you will know those as you encounter them. If you have trouble DISCARDing or SHARing any of the recipes, give yourself ground rules. For example, I don't SAVE any recipe I haven't cooked in a year or that I don't think I will cook in a year, but I SHARE it if I think someone I know might want to try it.
Immediately put the DISCARD pile into the recycling and set the SHARE pile aside to be distributed. Quickly count through the SAVE pile. A good rule of thumb is 50 recipes for a one-inch binder and 100 recipes for a two-inch binder.
For heirloom recipes that you have scanned but want to include in your binder, either print the scan or type it out and print that. For off-size recipes -- for example, those that come from grocery labels or boxes -- either type it out and print that, or cut the original to size and glue the original to an index card.
Decide how you want to organize the recipes. A good basic organization is Meat, Poultry, Pasta and Rice, Vegetables, Desserts and Miscelleaneous. You could also do a binder for each category, or one each for various cuisines. You could also do a binder specfic to family recipes.
Once you have decided on how you will organize your recipes and have obtained your supplies, open the index tabs. A printable cover sheet should be included. Use either this or a nice sheet of stationery to create a table of contents. You can handwrite the table of contents or print it from your computer using a pretty font. If you do use the table of contents that came with the tabs, there should be directions for using a template either available online or already included in your word-processing program.
Slip the full-page recipes into sheet protectors and the smaller recipes into photo sheets. Organize the slipsheeted recipes to correspond to your table of contents. Top each pile with the corresponding tab, and place in order into the opened rings of the binder. Place the table of contents on top; snap the binder shut.
Place a label on the spine and store with your cookbooks.
This is a great idea! If you don't mind my sharing, I'll tell you about my favorite Christmas present. My mother spent a year gathering recipes from both sides of the family and hand-wrote each one onto four cards (I have 3 siblings), noting the person who contributed the recipe. The recipes were organized by type into food-themed cloth-covered binders. The shortbread recipe even included a cookie mold. I still get tears in my eyes thinking of my mother sitting at the kitchen table night after night writing and rewriting those recipes to hand down to us. It is truly an heirloom recipe book.
ReplyDeleteI recognize one of those binders! I hope it's useful. I really need to organize my collection.
ReplyDelete