"The most treasured things passed down from generation to generation are the family recipes." - Robert St. John
Decluttering is the first step in preparing the contents of your home for a move.
In the kitchen, accumulated recipes can present something of a challenge. Yet, there's a lot you can do to pare down the collection and focus on the meaningful. Here are some tips on how to reduce the volume and maximize the value of your recipe collection.
Magazine Clippings
Unless you want to go through them one by one, which takes A LOT of time, these kinds of recipes can be discarded, since the can all be found online, either by searching for the name of a particular recipe, or searching the archives of the original publishers. Alternatively, you could scan them onto your computer and organize them there.
(photo courtesy of Mountain Mama Cooks)
Handwritten recipes
Recipe cards are personal recipes. I consider these heirlooms, even the typewritten ones. They are clearly family favorites which someone took the time to note and keep for their own use. These should be kept either in a book or a box, or better still, scanned to your computer, if only to preserve the precious handwriting! They are charged with memories - I challenge you to try following one of those recipes and see if your senses don't take you right back to your childhood at the first hint of the aroma in your kitchen!
Cook Books
Keep the favorites, give the rest away. As with magazine recipes, most of the recipes in cookbooks can be found online. Some older cookbooks may have notes written in the
margins - those I think you might want to keep - just for the notes. Cook books can be passed along to friends, family members, or community centers.
Community/Church Cook Books
A community or church cook book is a collection of recipes compiled by a particular community or church family. If you belong to such a community or church family, you should keep the book. You probably know a good many people who have contributed to its contents, and that's what makes the recipes meaningful.
Happy rightsizing!
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