A Shredded Wheat ad or a treasure chest? It's both!

I finally hit the jackpot! In the 10(!) years I've been working on this blog, I've been on the lookout for a recipe box with actual handwritten recipes in it. I find recipe boxes all the time, but they're usually either empty or full of blank cards. Well, early this summer my significant other and I hit an antique mall we rarely get to visit, and I spotted this obviously well-loved recipe box. (It looks like it should be ancient, but the box is actually dated 1973.)

When I picked it up, it felt full... and it was! Okay, fine, about 2/3 of the cards were still blanks, but that meant that a third of them had actual recipes. I had to pick it up.

So what can we figure out about whoever put this box together? I'm pretty sure it was Paula Schroeder. (Not that it was too hard to figure that out. Most of the cards had her name on them, so it was probably her recipe box.)

Ms. Schroeder was also just as careful recording her recipes as many of the people who put together community cookbooks. You might notice a key ingredient missing from Paula's Banana Cake.

At least it has instructions, though. Paula's Turkey Chili was not so lucky.

And yes, you may notice that this turkey chili doesn't have turkey, but it does have a can of mushrooms for some reason.

Paula was not overly organized, though, so I think maybe I found the full ingredient list on a sheet of loose-leaf paper at the end of the collection.

It's missing the chili powder, but otherwise the list of ingredients through canned mushrooms is the same. There's no label and no instructions-- this is all I've got!-- but it's a close enough match that I'm guessing it's Paula's Turkey Chili (minus the chili powder this time-- apparently it's important to leave out an ingredient mentioned in the recipe title).

Paula also had a taste for labor-intensive recipes, or at least I assume she did based on the inclusion of this recipe for Thirty-Day Fruit Cake.

This one involves LOTS of canned fruits (peaches, pineapple, "marachino" cherries) and a month's worth of stirring the starter daily. Considering this makes a juice "starter" to give away, I also suspect Paula had very patient friends... or maybe ones who pretended they weren't home when they saw her coming to the door with an armful of starter. The fact that the recipe calls for a package of Duncan Hines Deluxe II yellow cake mix and a box of instant butter pecan pudding make me suspect this recipe collection is roughly the same age as the box it came in.

And did I mention that this box collection is not really organized? I wasn't sure whether to include the Deviled Peas recipe, not knowing whether my revulsion at the idea of canned peas swimming in a sea of "tomatoe" soup, pimentos, celery, green pepper, hard-cooked eggs, canned mushrooms, chili sauce, cheese, and Worcestershire would seem reasonable to other readers who maybe don't hate condiments and musty canned peas as much as I do...

...but then I realized that this recipe was in the box twice! It's attributed to Darlene (rather than Paula) Schroeder the second time around.

This time "tomato" is spelled correctly, but not "chili."

It might seem like I'm making fun of this box for being so disorganized, but part of the reason I love it is for its needless repetition and mishmash of incomplete recipes. As someone who occasionally wakes up in the middle of the night after hearing a weird noise, worries that someone has broken into the house, then quickly realizes that I've just heard a small "bookslide" because gravity has overcome a poorly-constructed stack of reading materials, I'm glad to know that other people out there have just as much trouble with keeping things together as I do! Thank goodness that I can check into a corner of Paula Schroeder's world to see that it was chaotic too....