Traditional Dutch Oliebollen

Recipes and Reminiscing

A few years ago my mother handed me a thick manila envelope full of recipes that she had inherited from my Grandma Henrietta and asked me to transcribe them. “You like this kind of thing.” She said, “And if anyone can decipher these it’s you.”

Her original plan was for me to re-write the recipes to make them legible, then perhaps she, my sister and I could put it together in a sort of family history book. This was before I had a blog and had discovered the magic of vintage and historic food. What I found in that envelope was a major catalyst that led me to where I am now.

Not only were there worn newspaper clippings from the 1960s and 1970s, but also a thick stack of handwritten recipe cards and scraps of paper. Recipes my grandmother had probably started collecting in the 1940’s!…