The enduring magic of the recipe box

With love and ink, Cynthia Nims revives tradition

In a world of viral Tik Tok recipes, online recipe sites and AI-assisted cooking, Cynthia Nims is sharing a more tangible source of kitchen inspiration.

Her muse is the recipe box — the metal or wood boxes that used to sit on kitchen counters everywhere, filled with handwritten index cards gathering family favorites.

Nims knows there’s more to the boxes than empirical instructions for a favorite cookie or stew. A recipe box is tactile, nostalgic — filled with memories and love as much as instructions.

In her classes and related newsletter, “Long Live the Recipe Box,” Nims helps people recover and update their family recipes – and sometimes create new traditions. She’ll teach an upcoming PCC recipe box class, timed perfectly for family gatherings around the holiday season.

Recipes vs. algorithms

“It’s not that we’re going to stem the tide of our digital recipe life,” Nims said recently in her West Seattle kitchen, surrounded by faded cards detailing classic family dishes.

“It’s really just, this is the contrast to it, for the times when it’s something more personal or more meaningful and more long-lasting…

“Food and memory are part of everybody’s life, even if you’re not necessarily a big home cook.”

Digital natives might not realize how ubiquitous recipe card collections used to be. As early as the 1920s a Betty Crocker version provided regular seasonal cards to add to a branded wooden box. The cards were widely popularized by women’s magazines from the 1930s to 1990s, according to a Slate history. Ask a friend or relative to share the recipe for a fantastic dish in those decades, and it might well come handwritten on a decorative card proclaiming “From the Kitchen of…” and color coded by category.

Nims, a graduate of France’s La Varenne cooking school and author of several cookbooks, grew up in Edmonds cooking with her mother and sister. After her mother’s death in 2001, she inherited the battered, taped organizer that held family recipes. Nims thought of it as a memento and stored it on a shelf.

Many years later, clearing out cupboards, she started to look through the folder and realized “My childhood is in there.”

There was her mother’s handwriting, the names of neighbors or friends who had shared favorite dishes, the personalities evoked even by an inked margin note or abbreviation.

Keepsake to kitchen table

Paging through the folder, Nims pulled out a folded paper with the “Green Rice” recipe she remembered from childhood. If she made it today she might update the ingredients — fresh ingredients instead of canned soup baked into rice — but seeing the original reminds her that her mom wrote it down in 1961. A few scribbled notes referenced a dinner party her mother must have been working on at the time — “TV trays, coffee maker, make clam dip, have the tablecloth ironed.”

When Nims works with individuals on managing their own recipes or their inherited collections, she finds some common themes.

First, she often reminds people that a recipe box might represent just one facet of their collection, just as her mother’s box doesn’t include the vast archives Nims has gathered through her own cooking life. A single wooden box or overstuffed folder — a slice of recipe life — is much less overwhelming when considered from that perspective.

She reminds people that old-school recipes often have gaps. Assuming a higher level of cooking proficiency, they might say “Make the dough” rather than specifying that butter and sugar should be creamed together first, with flour and eggs added later. Directions to “bake until done” may not give a time estimate or visual cues. Part of Nims’s work is helping cooks fill those gaps.

Another slightly painful possibility is when recipes don’t appeal to modern palates. But they can be updated.

Nims uses her mom’s recipe for savory cheese cookies, or cheese straws, as an example. The card calls for flour, oleo (margarine), spices and a spreadable processed cheese. Instead of looking at it and saying “I’m not going to make this,” Nims said, she can substitute butter and grated Cheddar for the processed ingredients that were preferred in its day. “You can honor the recipe and the memory and just update it a little bit.”

She urges people to collect recipes and stories before it’s too late. Even with her own cherished recipes, for instance, she wishes she had sat down with her mother and asked questions — like, who was the Helen that “Helen’s banana bread” was named for?

“Avoiding regret is, sadly, part of the story.”

Still, when she makes that banana bread, “it’s like my mother is in the kitchen with me.”

Digital recipes have a permanent place in the culture now, she knows. There are plenty of times when it makes sense to search for, say, how to eat down your fridge, or 10 ways to use Thanksgiving leftovers.

But Nims is energized to see a corresponding return to the recipe box, with brides and grooms receiving recipe collections from wedding guests as a throwback tradition, or book clubs assembling communal favorites. Even her own Tai Chi teacher, after learning about her focus, organized a potluck where students brought recipes that had meaning to them.

“I think if you start the habit again for people — give them a box with 10 recipes and 30 blank cards and encourage them to add to it, or a book .. it’s giving them a starting point.”