Case Study of Margaret

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70 year old Margaret* lives with her husband in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California, in the house where they raised four children. Margaret began to cook seriously for her family in her 20s and this continued as a hobby and passion through her life. Frequently during her middle age, Margaret hosted lively dinner parties that feature themed meals of several courses, as example, a "Summer Thai Dinner." These events would take several days of planning and preparations, yet were a great outlet for Margaret's considerable creativity and energy. She has also offered informal but elegant cooking programs to groups of women socialites. These occurred in a host's home and during the demonstrations, a meal is served. A remarkable feature of Margaret's home is that every nook and cranny is filled with cooking paraphernalia. Even her bedroom is filled with cooking materials!

The living room of Margaret's house is flanked by a wall filled with hundreds of cookbooks. This is only one of several stashes of cooking information in the household. The books are grouped by subjects such as chocolate, bread, or French cuisine. Most of the books are placed vertically, and some are horizontal. The horizontal books contain summaries of the books below. Domestic objects such as decorative plates and a stereo keep company with the cookbooks.

In her garage, Margaret keeps an extra refrigerator and freezer (left). Sometimes she buys meats on sale and stores them there. She will also make large batches of food and freeze portions for leftovers. In order to ensure that these products are fresh, she keeps a detailed list of what goes in and out of the freezer, and its date (right).

For nearly 50 years, Margaret has subscribed to cooking magazines such as Sunset, Gourmet, and Bon Appetit. Current issues are kept on a coffeetable in the living room. Back issues are stored in chronological order in the garage (right). Amidst this huge collection of serials, Margaret asserts that she knows the location of specific recipes. The soap detergent boxes are a clever and economical storage device.

Since her earliest days of cooking, Margaret has kept this recipe card file in her kitchen (left). It contains some of her favorite recipes, such as for Lemon Jello Cake (bottom, right). The classification system is her own invention.

Though Margaret is over 70 years of age, she is computer and Internet savvy (left). She regularly sweeps dozens of cooking-theme websites and also keeps extensive digital files of recipes. She has several types of culinary software (right) and also receives mail from culinary mailing lists.

* The name Margaret is an alias.

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