Although I didn’t know it at the time, Phil’s Favorite Food began many years ago, in the early 80’s, when my close friend, Fred, became an early casualty of AIDS, before there was any medication that might have saved his life. The administrator of Fred’s estate asked several of Fred’s close friends to come by Fred’s house and take whatever we wanted of Fred’s possessions, objects that might remind us of our long friendship with him. Among the few things I selected was Fred’s recipe box, about six inches wide, ten inches long and deep enough to hold the usual recipe file cards. To the few recipes already there – although Fred enjoyed cooking, he was hesitant about it and not known for his dishes – filed under Fred’s categories of soup, meat, fish, dessert, I added some new ones (pasta, eggs, hors d’oeuvres) and filed my own growing collection of recipes. In the following years, as I begged recipes from friends and family, cut them out of magazines and papers and tried new dishes I thought worked, I added all that paper to the box until it was so full it wouldn’t hold any more and I still had trouble finding the recipe for something I remembered and wanted to make. I had to go through a lot of paper to find that recipe for curried apple soup. So I decided I’d transcribe maybe just one category onto my word processor. Of course that ultimately led to transcribing all the categories and printing out the recipes so they fit into small binders. When I was finished, I had 15 binders-full, each labeled with more refined categories than in the box, and more than a thousand recipes. Of course, I still had trouble finding the specific recipe I wanted. So I decided to make from the total quantity an abstract of those recipes I used most often. This smaller collection, in two binders, became the aptly named Phil’s Favorite Food. When I was finished, I made four copies, one for each of the four friends with whom I exchanged Christmas gifts and then some years later, when more of my friends learned of the books, I made four more copies.
When I decided to
create this blog, it seemed only natural to post from this collection. First I
posted those recipes I used the most, or those that were appropriate to the
season. But finally I posted them all, rounding out the transfer of Phil’s
Favorite Food from two binders confined to eight friends to the larger world of
cyber space, with followers in many faraway places in the world. The statistics
blogspot provides revealed readers in countries like Chile, Peru, Australia, Brazil,
Poland, Spain, China, Britain, Germany. Who would have guessed that someone in
Latvia wanted to make my curried apple soup? Of course a more furtive interpretation
of all that interest is that like the NSA, this demand only represents the
sweeping up of cyber information. Still, I’ve continued and have most recently
added new recipes, not from the original Phil’s Favorite Food collection, but beyond,
to those I’ve found and followed and considered worthy of sharing. However, my
filing system – recipes indexed by categories and time posted – doesn’t lend
itself to recipes in two different years. Was that recipe for curried apple
soup from February of 2013, or 2014?
So after more than a year (and a few months) of
posting here, I’ve decided to retire from the project. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed
sharing my recipes. I hope my readers have enjoyed the blog. Just last night,
in a prominent Baltimore restaurant, one of my readers commented on my recent
postings for Mac and Cheese. That expressed appreciation for my efforts made
Phil’s Favorite Food more than worthwhile. I think Fred would be pleased.
