WHERE DO YOU FILE COCK-A-LEEKIE OF MACEDOINE

I suppose there are homemakers who keep their recipes neatly filed and can put their hands, instantly, on the particular one they want. Not me.

I started out well enough, years and years ago. I bought a dime store notebook about a half-inch thick, which I thought would hold all the recipes I would ever want to keep. It was not my goal to be a gourmet cook. The notebook filled quickly. This was started when Betty Crocker was young and the pudgy Pillsbury doughboy wasn't even born.

The recipes all sounded as if they would result in super delicious things to eat. So they went into my little notebook, which by-the-way says on the cover there are 80 sheets of narrow ruled, eye-ease paper. Eye ease because the lines were green, I suppose. They've all been covered up, though, with pasted in things, greasy spots and stains of all colors. It doesn't ease the eyes anymore.

The Family Weekly, an insert of the Sunday paper, then and now, always had a "Neighbors' Recipe Exchange," which sounded so down home I had to paste those into my 80-sheet notebook.

Then came Spry. Remember Spry? It was after lard, before Crisco. They circulated and advertised recipes with colored pictures of the finished product, all using Spry, of course. They, too, took up room in my dime store book.

The Globe-Democrat was fortunate enough, some time after mid-century, to have Marion O'Brien as food editor. Who could miss Marion's column! It was folksy, comfortable reading and contained great recipes. I had to have them whether I ever got around to making the product or not. These recipes were a lot of St. Louis specialities such as Schafer's Delight, Mrs. Hulling's orange ambrosia pie and Forum's waffles.

I went to more parties then and, always, there would be some delicious dessert for which I just had to have the recipe. I understand it is not good taste ask southern cooks for their recipes, but we are just far enough north that we can do that without being blacklisted ou~t of society. So, written in on the eye-ease green lines are such goodies as Mary Carroll's apricot squares, Easy Elrod's orange cake, Ellen O'Neal's salad dressing, etc.

It didn't take long to fill the 80 sheets. There was no category or classification in the manner with which I included the recipes other than just as they came. The book grew fat, enlarging a half inch when new to three inches. That's just the nature of combining any relationship of food to aging.

Then Land O'Lakes Butter came out with a tin recipe box, a replica of their pound package of butter. Here were divisions for cookies, breads, salads, etc. etc. Goodie! Now I would get organized. Don't ask me how Quiche Lorraine got mixed in with Turkey Espanadas and Crown Meringues with Eggs Tetrazzini.

If you should ask me, my reply would be, "It is the work of my household gremlins." I hear them every night. They giggle quietly, thinking that I think something has become unbalanced in the cabinets and the pie pans have rattled against each other or the roasting pan has adjusted its lid, due to some tremor of an aging house. But I know gremlins when I hear them.Suddenly all the clubs and churches and communities began putting out recipe books. I got them. They take up an improvised shelf between the refrigerator and the chimney~~~ where~~ it is also handy to keep the laundry soaps and stuff. Occasionally I pick out of the washing machine a water-logged, tattered three by four piece of thin cardboard that maybe says, "Butte nila haf up sugar."

I cleaned out a kitchen drawer and devoted it to the overflow. Here go the recipe tops of Cool-Whip containers, torn pieces from sugar sacks, magazine snippets of this, that and the other.

Somewhere along the line I bought Rombauer's "Joy of Cooking," thinking it was so all inclusive I could dispense with a lot of the other books. By "dispense" I mean take them upstairs to place on already running over book shelves.

Remember Hitchcock's movie, "Birds?" There is some connection here with me and my recipes. I haven't defined it yet. But it is there, lurking.

What I need is one of those computers I see on TV which answers your questions orally. It being my time to furnish cookies for a club, I pretended I had such a computer and I asked of the microwave oven door which has little blue lights and a glass screen, "~Where is my recipe for those little Flourentines?"

After a long silence, the computer, rummaging around through its software said, "Upstairs between Wuthering Heights and Tanglewood Tales."

"And where will I find my recipe for the red raspberry bar cookies?"

Another silence, then, "It's under that old wooden buttermold in the far back corner on the right lower kitchen cabinet shelf."

"Where's the Tortelettes?"

"Try pulling out the lower drawer of your stove and see if it is on the floor?"

"And, please, where will I find Molasses Crisp Cockaigne?"

"Virus attack. Closed."

Oh well, I have Grandma's sugar cookie recipe in my head. Sorry, fellow club members.

REJOICE!