Overjoyed

Posted by parker 9 months ago

My copy of The Joy of Cooking is a little aged. The most recent copyright year inside the cover is in the 1960s.

When I got it from my aunt, upon my departure for my first post-college apartment and job, it was held together with a rubber band, but that failed within a few years, and now it's mostly held together by wishful thinking.

It has a lot of bookmarks. Some of them mark important things (meatloaf is marked with a recipe card from Mrs. T's pierogis) and others, not so much. There's a galley proof of a column from Runner's World about soup, and a page of notes scrawled on a leaf of a day-planner: Tuesday, April 20, 1976. Amid the notes about tomatoes, peas, garlic and ginger, in both pencil and ink, I recognize my parents' phone number.

The problem with this Joy is that sometimes I'm too worried about its structural integrity (it might fall apart) to actually look up a recipe in it.