The More Stained and Spattered the Better

Beloved gems are found on those messy pages and tattered recipe cards

It seems like such an odd thing to complain about. I mean, usually when we buy used books we seek out copies that are in great condition, or at least not too scruffy and dog-eared and worn.

But when it comes to old cookbooks, there’s a unique draw to books that show something of the life they led before landing in your hands: what pages the previous owner(s) turned to the most; what are the most beloved (i.e. dog-eared, stained, sticky) pages; what notes/thoughts/judgments may have been added to the margins; the hits, the misses, the adjustments made. It gives us a chance to cook in others’ footsteps by taking inspiration from those pages and recipes that clearly got the most use.

That’s why I found myself having this odd reaction when I unboxed a 1942 copy of the Searchlight Recipe Book that I bought online last fall: I was bummed to find it to be in such pristine condition. There’s little evidence of this book being used.

No hints of jam-making spattered in the canning and preserving chapter. No buttery smudges among the cookies, no speckles of oil or dried-long-ago splotches of cake batter, hints of the “tomato gravy” served with the meatballs.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still thrilled to have a copy of this old cookbook, one I’d not heard of before last summer. And in some ways, yes, it’s nice to have a book that doesn’t have pages stuck together and all that.

But what I’d hoped to find when I first paged through the book were some clues about the previous owner’s favorite recipes, the tell-tale sign being those mucked-up pages.

By contrast, here below are those same two pages I show above, but from a copy of the book that my friend Viola has. She hosted that cherished-recipes potluck I wrote about recently and had her grandmother’s copy out on display that afternoon. It so perfectly expresses that idea that those stained, spattered, torn pages in a cookbook are where the gems are, the personal favorites, the dishes made for countless birthdays and holidays and picnics and dinner parties.

The cherished recipes that have been turned to again and again and again.

The same two pages of cake recipes as in the photo above—this cookbook of Viola’s grandmother’s clearly got a lot of loving use over the years. Imagine all the stories and memories and occasions that are represented!!

There’s something about cakes. Below is another great example from a book my mom passed along to me decades back. I had never heard of her aunt Ruth before this, know nothing of her life. But I know one thing: she definitely turned to these cookbook pages often.

I think used booksellers would be wise to understand how much value some of us find in just that kind of well-loved cookbook and come up with some special descriptors that help guide us to them. Books that are generally in pretty good shape but offer some tangible nudges from previous owners that send us to their most-cooked favorites, with the slightest of insights about the cooks who held that book in their hands before we became its latest caretaker.

And it’s not just a cookbook thing. Recipe cards, clipped recipes, notebooks—wherever there’s a collection of recipes, look for the most messy and bedraggled among them. There’s surely a good reason for that wear and tear.

The legacy and value of these spattered-and-stained cookbook pages is at the core of Dirty Pages. Established by food-writer friends in Nashville, the project includes some recipe exhibits they have curated in recent years, from which they include some exerpts on their website. (And I think there might be an exhibit of theirs still up at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans.) Such a joy it is to look through those collections of personal stories behind the beloved, tattered-and-stained recipes shared there—especially as a reflection of how universal the rich personal connection between recipes and stories is. You can also keep up with Dirty Pages on Instagram.

Before I sign off for this week, a quick calendar note for next month. I was thrilled when Barbara from Projectkin reached out to me about joining her for a program on July 10 from 10:00 to 11:00 PDT. Our topic will be Using a Potluck to Spark Family Storytelling and it will be live on Zoom. It’s free to attend, but registration is required, see details here.