A slide show of holiday dessert recipe cards

Slate Readers Share Images of Their Ancestors’ Cherished Holiday Dessert Recipe Cards

Slate Readers Share Images of Their Ancestors’ Cherished Holiday Dessert Recipe Cards

What women really think.
Dec. 21 2011 7:18 AM

Your Grandma’s Sugar Cookies

Slate readers share images of cherished holiday dessert recipe cards, passed down through the generations.

In her essay about the rise and fall of the recipe card, Katie Arnold-Ratliff asked Slate readers to submit holiday dessert recipe cards, ones that had been handed down for at least two generations and had the loving traces of a grandmother’s hand—beautiful cursive, thumbprints of grease, smatterings of powdered sugar.

We received dozens of lovely, touching submissions, with recipes for traditional Scandanavian cookies from Norwegian ancestors, apple sauce cake from a long lost luncheonette run by a great-grandmother in the 1930s, and whole wheat challah from an uncle, the card still taped to his pantry.