SOLD: Vintage Recipe Cards Fetch $27k at Sothebys - Why?
Dena Kennedy
READERS OF SYLVIA PLATH’S DIARIES and letters will find her whipping up homemade mayonnaise, baking Toll House-style chocolate chip cookies, searing steak, and stewing rabbit. Rarely, though, did the famed poet and writer share her recipes. But this week, 33 of Plath’s typed and hand-annotated recipe cards surfaced at a London auction, sold together with her embossed wooden rolling pin. Plath fans pounced, bidding them up to $27,500.
If the well-thumbed cards are any indication, Plath’s staples included delicacies such as chicken fricassee, cherry & cottage-cheese cobbler, and broiled Cape scallops. They also include family favorites, such as “Ted’s mother’s Scots porridge oats biscuits” and her own mother’s apple crisp. In April 1958, she records in her journal that she is rereading Moby Dick and fixing a “huge fish soup” with “chunks of soaked fish & potatoes,” served with “buttery crackers foundering in it.” Is it one and the same as her recipe for “Grammy’s Fish Chowder”?
