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When I recently thumbed through my mom’s file of loose recipes, written on their various vintage papers and recipe cards in all of the different handwriting of the recipe-giver, I was struck by the number of recipes that came from neighbors. Neighbors of her own mother back in Ohio, neighbors on Wagon Wheel Lane, and on Main Street.
I started to get real anxious about my own loose recipe file. That file is a collection largely of recipes I was lucky enough to inherit from Sitto’s kitchen, and recipes I collect. Or used to collect.
Correction: it’s not that I don’t collect recipes! We all collect tons of recipes all of the time. But the lion’s share of them live online, on Pinterest or among the unnatural number of tabs I keep open in my browser at any given time, in an effort to hold the page until I can get back to it.
When I taste a glorious dish at the house of a neighbor and ask could I have the recipe, it’s more likely that they’ll text over a much-appreciated link the next day than they will write out the recipe on a recipe card. Best thing to happen to me in recent years was my mother-in-law asking for the recipe for a chicken dish I had made for her, for which there was no real recipe written down. I took to a recipe card and wrote one for her, which was perfectly natural to her. And to me felt delightfully old-fashioned.
My sister found her way to this strawberry jam bar recipe, given to her by my mom’s neighbor Fran, who’s been my mom’s neighbor her entire adult life (who among us gets to have that kind of experience anymore? Few, very few). Peg didn’t snap a photo of the recipe like I probably would have, for ease. No. She wrote it out on any piece of paper she could find at that moment, and folded it up for safekeeping.
Fran got the recipe from her neighbor up north on Main Street, who in turn was our neighbor too, across the street. Rosie Rosenthal owned the dry goods store just a couple of blocks down Main Street from her own house. I knew how to make strawberry jam but she knew how to make a very good jam bar. And the bar is just so old-fashioned-good (as in, my Pumpkin Bars Recipe!).
I imagine Rosie made these bars for a lot of years, took them to picnics, and passed them around out front during the parades for Memorial Day and Fourth of July there on Main Street. I like to imagine that Fran ate one out on the lawn, and when she asked Rosie for the recipe, she found a neatly written card in her mailbox the next day.
The fact of a food blogger longing for the lost art of the recipe card is, I know, kind of funny. I love sharing recipes the way we do here. But I do love a good worn card in the hand, and the deliciousness the recipe promises for having been written down to share.
And I do love to tinker, so admittedly, I’ve tinkered with Rosie’s original recipe, which does not call for the quick homemade jam (it’s just so fresh and flavorful and so perfectly tart!). Also, Rosie’s bar has a little more crumb topping than mine. Oh, and I don’t really bake with red berries EVER without adding a whisper of rose water, which is further called for here because, well, Rosie Rosenthal!
