The Power of the Recipe Box

I’ve known celebrated Seattle chef Tom Douglas for many years, both as a journalist writing about Seattle’s food scene while food editor of Seattle Magazine, and as a fan of his restaurants. But it wasn’t until recently that I learned how much importance he places on the recipe box, how kindred a spirit he is in this mission I’m now on. When I dropped an email to the producer of the radio show he hosts, the Hot Stove Society Radio Show, about maybe coming on to chat about cherished family recipes, she responded right away saying that Tom would love it. And he did. So much so, that after we talked for ten or twelve minutes the day I visited this fall, he asked me to come back the following week to continue the conversation. Which was great. (If you’d like to hear the shows, look for Hot Stove Society Radio Show where you usually listen to podcasts. The episodes I was on originally aired Oct 18 [my part begins at 1:06] and Oct 25 [my part begins at 45:30].)

Among highlights of our conversation, for me, was his reflection that “one of the most exhilarating and saddest things is getting a recipe box for $5 on Ebay.” He talked about the fact that we may find some interesting recipes and notes in there, but that “the family lost out on such a rich heritage of recipes and thoughts and notes,” by not keeping that box themselves.

And thanks to his mention of buying recipe boxes online, I’ve now made my first, and surely not my last, purchase of an old recipe box on Ebay. I’m not a big shopper, so probably won’t go overboard on purchases…and expect I’ll be a bit selective, opting only for boxes that look good and hold the promise of interesting recipes inside versus just empty boxes.

Tom’s such a proponent of the value of these recipe boxes that in the foyer outside Hot Stove Society (which is a cooking school when not serving as radio studio for the show), he has a shelf featuring recipe boxes he’s collected over time. And this quote above: “Don’t let the recipe box die with you…pass it down”