Grandma's Recipes

I was browsing the local thrift store yesterday and came across this bread cookbook. The book in itself is not that remarkable - it's from 1978, and I don't think that despite its variety of creative recipes that it will make me a baking guru - but just inside it I found a handful of hand written bread recipes. Most of them seemed to be zeroing in on the perfect honey wheat bread loaf. Some are carefully snipped from newspapers and magazines; others are handwritten, in one case by "Grammy (Carolyn)", in a very elegant longhand that reminds me of my own grandmother. They were probably contemporaneous, and learned to write by the same method in elementary school. I say "were" because what grandma tosses her cooking books, complete with recipe collection?

I could have just pocketed the recipes and no one would have been the wiser, but I suspected that the recipe collection would be better understood in context. If nothing else, reading it today is giving me insight into mainstream baking norms in 1978. (Plus, the thrift store sells books by the pound - it and another book cost me less than $2.)