Backstube’s handwritten recipes – an introduction
In its recipe section backstube is presenting a collection of handwritten recipes originating from private 20th century cookbooks. Going through this collection, we would thus like to invite you to follow those old recipes and explore how cooking and baking used to be up to 100 years ago. In many cases the ingredients and their proportions reflect a different way of life and nutrition under different economic conditions, more frugal compared to recipes you would find for the same food today.
Furthermore we would also like to invite you to explore the handwritings themselves: their personal character, which could at the same time be characteristic for a specific historical period and geographical area. The kurrent constitutes the handwriting of a former generation. It was taught in German schools until 1941 and is thus for later generations not readable or only with difficulties. Backstube is therefore providing transcriptions for all published recipes.
Many of the recipes also represent interesting note taking structures. They are serving as mnemonic devices for their authors only. They are not intended for any audience or readership. Moreover the often inappropriate (since too small) sizes of the used paper are compelling the authors to a dynamic use of the limited space. Instead of progressing in the usual linear way of writing the notes are rather following the logic of the cooking process rationalizing the number of necessary explanatory words to a minimum.
Only with a basic knowledge of cooking or baking their content can again be decoded in order to re-enact their implicit guidelines.
Please contribute to our project to build up a handwritten recipe archive. Send your archival material to cyberjausn@gmail.com!
yours sincerely,
the backstube
pdf-download des Rezepts mit Transkription und Anleitung
