The continuous thread

Some time in the first months of my mother's married life her Uncle Tom gave her an old 1940 Commercial diary. My mother married in 1947 so the diary had probably been gathering dust in Uncle Tom's cupboard. My mother used this diary to collect recipes. The first dated recipe is from The Australian Home Beautiful, April, 1948 and it was an article on how to make stuffed capsicums by Susan Moffat. The book is very old and fragile now but I still use it, albeit carefully, as the pages are beginning to break where there is a crease. The edges, dusted with tiny marks from butter, sugar, eggs and flour for nearly sixty years, are beginning to disintegrate. The book contains the handwriting of my grandmother's, my aunts, my late sister and myself. One day it will be added to by my daughter, it has become a legacy and a record of the journey of domestically prepared food in post war Australia.