2023, books, Family, Food, home, Media, Uncategorized

The Curator

39 Comments

We find recipes from numerous internet sources, and are rarely purchasing cookbooks these days. I subscribe to the The New York Times Food app, and that has tons of great recipes as well. We like to have paper copies of the recipes, however, and a week doesn’t go by that we aren’t running recipes off on the printer.

Husband loves putting the recipes in plastic slip covers and filing them in their respective three ring binders. He has the binders labeled. There is one large binder devoted solely to rye breads and sourdoughs. I am not allowed to rearrange the binders. That is his role.

When a sufficient number of new recipes have accumulated on the buffet, Husband puts them in their binders, culling older recipes we either didn’t like or never made in the first place. There are fewer and fewer of those. His devotion to the recipes does not extend to our bank and tax papers, however, and it is my thankless task to organize those.

How do you store your recipes? What is your filing system for important papers? What kind of a librarian or museum curator would you have been?

39 thoughts on “The Curator”

  1. I prefer cookbooks to getting recipes online. Enough said on that.

    I’d be a poor curator because I would throw away too much in the service of “optimizing for storage space”. If forced to “keep everything”, I’d resort to scanning and saving electronic files, the “off to the dumpster” with the original. That would be poor curation, I admit.

    As a librarian, I would strive first to put the collection into some sort of order that made sense, even if that left new incoming stuff un-incorporated into the collection for a season. Then new items would be clearly labeled and added where they fit. The shelves might be disorderly, but the items would be where the catalog said they could be found. Browsers who eschew the catalog for the joy of just looking at what was on the shelf would be frustrated, though.

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  2. In addition to a couple of shelves of published cookbooks, we also employ a set of loose-leaf binders with downloaded and handwritten recipes in sleeves, making those a combination of some of our oldest and newest recipes. Robin originally compiled the binders with an organization I sometimes find perplexing but I don’t presume to change it. We each add new recipes to the binders.

    If I were to be a librarian, my preference would be in an archive somewhere and not just in a public library. During the pandemic, one of the things I most enjoyed was an online course I took through Harvard that was essentially a course in museum curation. It involved analyzing a series of objects, some of which were presented to us and some of which were of our own choosing and then writing about our observations. At the end we had to write a more extensive paper about a subject of our choosing. Regrettably, the course did not entail direct communication with instructors. All of our observations were evaluated by sets of peers—other persons taking the course—and those evaluations, I found, were uninspired. I was making an effort to be thoughtful and challenging in my analyses and the response would be something like, “very interesting!”

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    1. Your experience and YAs experience with her MBA course are what has kept me from looking into advanced education now that I’m retired. I don’t want to do group projects, I don’t want to share my stuff online, I don’t want peer reviews. I want to just soak in knowledge from sources, including professors, who know more about the topic than I do.

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      1. I wanted to, and did challenge some of the assumptions I detected in the presentations and the conclusions they seemed to be leading toward. Many of the other students just accepted those assumptions without question. I wanted conversation and maybe controversy with professors.

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    2. I think I took that same course, through the Radcliffe library, wasn’t it? Like you, I was fascinated by the objects and the teachers. Like you, I was underwhelmed by classmates’ observations.

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      1. The class I took was through an online site called EdX and this particular course, called “Tangible Things: Discovering History Through Artworks, Artifacts, Scientific Specimens, and the Stuff Around You” originated at Harvard.
        I have a feeling that any peer evaluated course would be as unsatisfying.

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        1. Maybe we weren’t in the same course, but much the same thing. Radcliffe is the women’s college that used to be located next door the men’s college that was Harvard. The course I took had an approach similar to the one you took, but was on Women’s history. Again, good stuff. Again, poor format when it was about participant interaction. Still, I am occasionally persuaded to take something from EdX.

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        2. EdX and another online course site, Coursera, from which I also took courses, seem to have narrowed their course offerings to emphasize computer coding languages and related subjects. I keep getting emails from them both assuring me that their courses will enhance my employment desirability.

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  3. I have a large, pink, cloth-bound, three-ring binder filled with recipes that I’ve found and liked. I organize it alphabetically. The “B” section begins with recipes from Baboons that I copied from Kitchen Congress. (Thanks!) I like to think my binder is artfully arranged to be appealing to the eye, but I’m not known for my artistic ability. I have some well-worn cookbooks including the Vegetarian Epicure, Moosewood, and others. I’m not a great cook and it’s only me around here, so it’s not a big priority.

    I have an antique wooden cheese box which holds many old handwritten recipes on old recipe cards. Most are in either my grandmother’s or my mother’s hand. Some have been taped into my book where I think I might use them more. I don’t put any of them into sheet protectors. They’re only valuable to me and I don’t mind the aging cards or the occasional drips on them.

    I don’t think I have the skills to be a museum curator. I’m afraid I’m just not that good at organizing things. When I took the Myers-Briggs personality test (twice), it told me that good career choices might include museum curator or editor. I do think I might have been a decent editor but I didn’t follow the results of the tests, and I became a practical nurse instead.

    Margaret update: We’ve messaged back and forth a little bit. She said she feels like she’s turning a corner. She said maybe in a day or two when she’s up to it, she’ll post an update for all of us. I told her she’s been missed. I still don’t know what happened or what hospital she’s in. Hopefully she’ll let us know when she’s ready.

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        1. Pasta dishes in go in one binder, but what if there is protein like chicken or fish in the pasta? Do those recipes go with the chicken or fish recipes?

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        2. These are the questions which would make me a lousy curator. I’ve never been good at deciding how to organize things. If it’s decided for me, I can do a tolerable job.

          I organized my binder kind of according to food types, then alphabetically within a type. For example, there is a section for “Cake”, followed by “Chicken”, followed by “Cookies”. There is a section called “Baboons” which contains recipes that I liked and printed off. They are in no particular order, but that entire section comes before “Bars.” The “A” section contains recipes containing apples, artichokes, asparagus, etc.

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  4. I too seem to have to print out the recipes I find online, so I too have a series of binders. I need to cull them again, there are so many I have cut out of magazines, etc. that have never been tried. I still use cookbooks too…

    Curating might be a bit steep, take too much training. I think I would have been a good librarian till online stuff was required.

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  5. Margaret update #2: She’s in Regions Hospital in an acute trauma surgery ward. I still don’t know what put her there. She’s clearly much better today than yesterday. She does NOT want phone calls. Her husband is the only visitor allowed. She’s still weak and easily exhausted. Phone calls would be too much at this point. Hopefully in the next day or two she will let us all know what happened.

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      1. At this point, baboon friends, I’m trying to catch up reading the blog, but as you know, I can’t just “like” something to indicate I have seen your comment, and I’m too pooped to keep signing in to comment. I’ll post more when I have a chunk of energy and time happening at the same time to fill in some details. Not trying to hide anything from you.

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  6. Rise and Get Those Recipes Together,

    I am a really good curator of collections other than my own. In the 90’s when I was still attending Family Reunions, and it was my family’s turn to host, I did a family cookbook, collecting all of Grandma’s heirloom recipes, then those of the Aunts, such as Aunt Letha’s Pie Crust (the best). At that point it was in a binder but now it is all stored digitally because I scanned it into a file. The whole project was really fun. I especially enjoyed the post it notes which I included in the book:

    “Emma loves this cake.”
    “Alan’s Birthday Eggs” (a fried egg with a birthday candle stuck in the yolk)
    “Grandma made this for Leo every birthday.”
    “Too Sweet”

    Then there was the pickle recipe written out in Grandma’s handwriting on the back of Bob’s homework sheet. Classic. That is the stuff that makes it charming.

    My own stuff–chaos. Sigh.

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  7. I occasionally find a recipe online that I print out but I have discovered that if I don’t cook that recipe before it goes into the binder, then it will probably never see the light of day. I do have quite a few recipes in the binder that I use over and over and over again but the rest seem to languish. Binder is just a three ring notebook and it’s divided into types of recipes (sweets, salads, soups, entrées, breads, seasonal). The recipes that I use repeatedly are all in the front their respective sections. Every few years I go through the binder and dump most of it.

    I’m not big on my binder because I enjoy my cookbook collection so much. I really love pulling several cookbooks off of the bookcase and going through them to find recipes with an ingredient that I have on hand or that I’m in the mood for. In fact, I’ll be looking through cookbooks soon for various tomato recipes because I’m starting to be overwhelmed.

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  8. Phone conversation with lawyer this morning question being doing I need a will. Same question as do I have anything to curate. Nope on both.
    Have bunch of cookbooks . Have a few I should mention here in case somebody wants them. Nah. Bet not. I will curate them into recycling.
    Did half price books survive Covid?
    Clyde

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  9. I don’t think I would be a great curator or librarian, for the same reason that I feel bad every time I go to the attic and see my stuffed animals up there. Guinevere, not her fault, can’t distinguish between her stuffy toys and my stuffy toys which is why they live in the attic right now. But I’d feel the same way about having to put a book into storage or any other item whenever things needed to be updated. I would feel bad and I’d have to go back into therapy.

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  10. I have few recipes. I do have a few starred ones now saved on Messages. One for zucchini bread and another for mashed cauliflower.
    My important papers are “filed in a pile.”
    I volunteered to be curator of XXXpresident Donny’s library. I love coloring books.

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  11. HI-
    I try to save interesting recipients on my phone. Sometimes I print them out… but they go in a pile on the counter… it’s not ideal.
    Once I get receipts in the computer, I have a pretty good filing system…it just takes me a long time to get things entered. And I’’m getting better at knowing what to save. So much stuff is online these days, why save the phone bill??

    And even important papers… it’s hard to go back to 1995 and sift out receipts. It’s not high on my priority list.

    At the college, I do real well; I’ve created excel sheets for all my stuff and I enter things right away. Course the business office gets fussy if we don’t do it soon enough.

    Krista – how’d your colonoscopy go?

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  12. I have a lot of recipe cards – I have a file box that takes 3 by 5 cards, and another that takes 4 by 6 cards. I also have a drawer with a scrapbook and a lot of loose recipes. It’s all pretty unorganized, so I also try to find the recipes online so I can search them on the computer in case I can’t find the old cards. I like the look of an old handwritten recipe card, though. If someone took the trouble, it’s probably a good recipe.

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  13. i am a recipe by google these days where i read a few and use this as references and then adding my version
    cooksbooks inspire but usually i know what i’m looking for and just browse a few online

    curator of ….. hats lps dylan memerobelia

    probably not

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