Three Generations of Handwritten Recipes

If you’ve spent any time on this site, you know that every one of my 88 recipes started the same way: written by hand in my spiral kitchen notebook. People ask me why I don’t just keep them on my phone. The honest answer is that I’m old school — I love having all of my recipes handwritten and in the same place. I don’t want to go hunting through an app while my hands are covered in flour.

But the real answer is older than my notebook. It starts with my Grandmother’s.

Grandmother’s collection

My Grandmother gave me my very first recipe — her pound cake — and when she passed her collection down, it wasn’t a tidy recipe box. It was this: a Better Homes & Gardens cookbook from the 1940s, absolutely stuffed with hand-written recipes on whatever paper she could find.

Grandmother's 1940s Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, stuffed with decades of clippings and handwritten recipes

And I mean whatever she could find. Scrap paper. Newspaper and magazine clippings. Old grocery store receipts. And my favorite — blank checks from The Bank of Greenwood, Mississippi. When inspiration struck, she grabbed the nearest piece of paper and wrote.

A blank check from The Bank of Greenwood, Greenwood, Miss. — Grandmother's scratch paper of choice

The filling for her German chocolate cake — coconut, pecans, and Carnation milk — written right across a bank check

That’s her German chocolate cake filling on the back of a check — coconut, pecans, Carnation milk, “stir constantly til thick like custard.” The cake itself lives on a green scrap nearby:

Grandmother's German chocolate cake, written on a green scrap of paper

Her caramel icing — 'cook soft ball' is the whole instruction. She assumed you knew.

Notice what her recipes don’t say. “Cook soft ball.” “Bake 350.” No times, barely any directions — because she didn’t need them, and she figured whoever was reading didn’t either. These were notes from one cook to another who both knew their way around a stove.

Spice cake in fountain pen — two cups sugar, 'one white, one brown,' and a boiled raisin-pecan filling

Fudge cake on paper so worn it's gone soft — complete with a sketch of the pan (11¼ by 7½) in the corner

The recipe that started my notebook

And then there’s this one. The pound cake — the first recipe she ever gave me, and the reason I keep a handwritten notebook at all.

The original pound cake recipe — with the note that 'she uses homemade cow butter & homemade eggs, which makes a difference in taste & color'

Look at the note in the parentheses: “She uses homemade cow butter and homemade eggs, which makes a difference in taste and color.” Somebody wrote that down about my Grandmother while copying her recipe — a recipe about a recipe. That’s how these things traveled before the internet: hand to hand, kitchen to kitchen, with little notes about the cook herself riding along.

You can bake it yourself — it’s on this site as Grandmother’s Pound Cake, typed up neatly with a photo and step-by-step directions. But now you know what the original looks like.

A 'Here's what's cookin’' card with a wood-stove illustration — sheet cake, in two different hands

Three generations, one table

So that’s the chain: Grandmother’s recipes on checks and clippings, my spiral notebook that grew out of her pound cake, and now our kids — who learned to help by cutting up ingredients for the Thanksgiving dressing and are starting to have favorites of their own. One day the notebook passes down again, smudges and all.

If your family has a recipe box, a stuffed cookbook, or a stack of index cards in someone’s handwriting — hold onto it. Photograph it. Cook from it. The food is only half of what’s written there.

Every recipe on this site comes from my handwritten notebook — you can see the original page on almost every recipe. As always: be kind, be careful, be considerate, and have a great day.