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Ethel Jiles. Private recipe collection in Swisher cigar box. 
Family Heirloom
Manhattan, Kansas

“Fame is a fickle food/Upon a shifting plate…” 
Emily Dickinson

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     Emily Dickinson is famous for her patchwork of poems; littles snips of paper that she found during times of inspiration before jotting down the lines swirling in her mind. Dickinson would sew the odd pieces together into a jumble of pages resembling a book. In fact, her creative scraps made her a literary matriarch of American poetry. Like Dickinson, many women kept their own wild conglomerates of information and inspiration, which usually did not make it into history.

These ephemeral scraps are hidden treasure troves of undiscovered female worlds. Recipes, jotted down on envelopes, receipts, or margins, hold the largest yet paradoxically smallest portion of recorded women’s histories: they were ubiquitous but hardly ever survived or entered the archive. My family kept such a recipe box of unorganized bits and bobs.  Battered, bruised, and dirty, the cigar box protected my great-grandmother’s recipe transcripts and trinkets for decades—even if the once sturdy walls have long collapsed and cannot withstand my wandering curiosity. A woman born in the “Indian Territories” (now Oklahoma), Ethel Jiles Ross is lost to time but can be recovered through her recipe box and the scraps she left behind. Sixty-eight recipe notes in total some of them are handwritten linger amongst clips from newspapers taped together into little bundles. Her saved non-recipe items are even more bizarre: needles, matches, pennies, baseball cards, alongside a photo of a man in military uniform. Why were these trinkets saved and important? “Granny Ross” and her box of “junk” speak to the insatiable curiosity of this single independent woman and mother and her rich unsung life.

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Megan Eppler

To see what Megan Eppler found out about the recipe collection

Click on the link below:

 

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