Do you remember steno pads?  I am not sure if they are as popular as they once were but steno pads used to be a staple in almost every house.  Even if there was no secretary office manager in the household you could almost always find a steno pad.

I can not even remember seeing one in a store recently but of course you can order them on Amazon and at Staples. They still come in all styles and colors but the basic design is the same.

But did you ever know that they were the perfect recipe books?  My Grandma Bonnie used steno pads religiously and they were her “go to” for jotting recipes down that she wanted to try or ones that were winners in her book.

I keep finding things that I have packed away during this move that bring memories flooding back.  I suspect it is because I am really trying to reduce what we have stored and I am trying to go through boxes that we have stored that need to be sorted through.  Never mind that I just stowed about 10 big totes of stuff under the eaves in my office of items from the boys’ childhoods.  I am not quite ready to tackle those yet.

But these steno pads were a favorite find.  Written in my grandma’s sometimes difficult to read handwriting I have poured over them and discovered a lot of recipes that I have incorporated into my own cooking regime over the years.

Knowing that I have a couple of her personal recipe books makes me happy.  I suspect my sister might have taken a few as well (Note to self: ask her) because it appears that I have a couple of the volumes of a series of at least 6.  Grandma had a system.  It actually worked pretty well.  She had a table of contents and then wrote recipes down in the order as she found them .

I think at some point she filled the books up and just started filling in on the fronts and backs of them with notes about what the tried and true recipes were.  That was typical Grandma.  She was a good cook and a lot of her recipes were ones that she used at her church for dinners and lunches.  She was probably one of the best cooks in the church and it always seemed like she was preparing something for an event there or to take to a neighbor.

I smiled when I saw a recipe with Maxine in the title.  Maxine was her best friend and neighbor and I remember trying that very recipe for fruit pizza myself.  One booklet even has Paula’s Turkey Tetrazzini—a recipe from my older sister. Above is Zylpha’s name—another family member whose recipe made Grandma’s notebook.

Obviously she did try this recipe eventually judging from the chocolate splat on the page.

So I am thinking that maybe I need to start a new series based on these recipe notebooks and feature some Grandma Bonnie recipes.  Maybe call it From Grandma Bonnie’s Notebooks?  But that would mean I would actually have to stay home and do some cooking, right? Here is her recipe for mush that I was looking for when I did that recent post regaling you of my love of  mush. 

Do you have a favorite cookbook that has been in your family for a period of time?  I would love to hear about it in the comments and remember that every comment counts for our January Comments for a Cause- NFED.