Today, it seems like everyone has an iPad, or a smart phone, or at the very least a laptop. If you want the answer to something you simply Google it, and in a matter of millionths of a second, you have pages (electronically speaking, of course) of answers. It’s instant gratification.

The same holds true for recipes. You want to bake a pie, or fry up some chicken, make a pot of spaghetti sauce, or sear a pork loin, and you turn to your computer to see how other people around the world have accomplished that task. (Some of you might also go to your bookshelf, and thumb through the pages of a cookbook to find a recipe, and as a cookbook author– I thank you!) Me, I do a little bit of it all: I use my computer, I scan through my cookbooks, and sometimes I just wing it. But I have to say, that I do love a handwritten recipe.

I have always been a culinary bibliophile, and in the past few years it has become a bit of a sickness. I haven’t quite reached hoarder proportions, but I love an old cookbook. The spiral-bound notebooks, the community association compendiums, and the books sponsored by women’s auxiliaries, all have a place on my bookshelf. And every once in a while I get a bonus feature in an old cookbook bought at a used bookstore– a book that has been lovingly used by another cook before me. Out will fall a crumpled, folded slip of paper, another recipe. I call these delights recipes within a recipe.

Rarely have I actually cooked from one of these (often times they don’t appeal), but they are like riding in a time machine, and peeking into another person’s kitchen. Like in this mimeographed (remember those?!) copy of LAZYMAN’S (beef) STWE, with all of its odd punctuation, and typographical errors, this recipe utilizes a variety of convenience foods. I think about the woman who cooked this dish in Osterville, Massachusetts. Why this stew? Was she working, and this dish, with its canned sliced mushrooms, was a time saver? Who was she cooking it for? Was this even a she? (Looking at the note scrawled at the bottom of the page, the cursive looks very feminine, though.)

There is something about a handwritten note tumbling from the spine of a book that makes me take a moment and reflect.

I love to go for walks in the evening. It can be very voyeuristic. As the hour goes from twilight to night fall, I watch people shuffle home. It is before they have drawn their curtains. As I walk along, I see my neighbors in their kitchens, beginning to prepare the evening’s dinner. I wonder what they are cooking, who they are are cooking for, and how their day was. To me, these handwritten recipes give me a similar feeling. Glimpses of a different time and place. A surprise in the ordinary. A mini history lesson. An exercise for my imagination.

I don’t find these recipes within a recipes everyday, or even all that often. But when I do they are a like a special gift. I read them. (Sometimes photograph them.) And then I fold them back up, and slip them back into the same book. When this book is no longer needed by me, I want others to find them, to have the same experience that I have. And I don’t mind that they may think that I stirred up a pot of Lazyman’s Stwe.