Overview

This wiki is a project to take my grandmother Shirley Williams's recipe book and put it in a digital format so to preserve the recipes that I grew up with from about 1986 to 2006. My grandmother was not a chef, but like many women of her generation collected simple recipes from various sources to make for her family and friends. Dessert recipes were her favorite.

The recipe book being a large disorganized volume with loose sheets of old paper, the material makes finding a recipe difficult. On top of that, many of the handwritten recipes are difficult to read due to the fine cursive script and/or are badly preserved. Digitization will help with make these recipes simple to read and locate.

Her collection is a combination handwritten recipes, clipped newspaper and magazine recipes, and some snippets of helpful tips. Where possible, I give credit to the source of the recipe. Some of the recipes had a source written on them and/or a date. Where that was available, I included that in the digitized form.

Many recipes contain a remark about my grandmother's evaluation of the recipe. I have included that as well with each.

I've included along with each digitized recipe a scan of the original recipe from her collection so that readers can verify I'm faithful to the original.

Edits

I have made some edits to the recipes, mostly for grammar, missing or misspelled words, and applying a standard organization. I have also split or combined steps in some instances where it makes more sense. However, most of the recipes are in my grandmother's words.

I've generally not attempted to change these recipes to add more detail. Some of the recipes assume familiarity with kitchen techniques that an unskilled reader may not have. Some recipes leave out information that could be inferred by a more experienced cook. Some just list essentials of the recipe. I am not a cook. I dabble here and there, but in some instances, I have not been able to work out how to reproduce some of these recipes based on the limited details they provide.

Where I have more detail to contribute, for instance from my memory, from the original source, logically inferred, or from talking with my grandmother or other relatives about the recipe, I have added the detail in Editor's Notes below the recipe.