The Elusive Nancy Carter

It's a wonder I get any work done at all. The following is a good example of my purpose for creating this blog in the first place--a depository for some of my unplanned meanderings.

I had several recipe leaflets that I was ready to enter into my database. A simple 10-minute task. They were published weekly during the late 1950's for the shoppers at Colonial Stores. The leaflets all list Nancy Carter as the Director of Home Economics for that grocery store chain. Some of the recipes use the CS, Colonial and Triangle brand ingredients.

(Apologies for the less-than-optimum photo--my scanner has died, and now, apparently, so have my camera batteries.)

At the last minute, I decided to find out how many different folders there were in the series and what years they encompassed.

I quickly found one brief online reference to a book, Nancy Carter's Cook Book of Tested Recipes that was published in 1955, but that was all.

I couldn't find any more leads on the recipe leaflets, but I did find out more about the Colonial Stores chain at Groceteria, an interesting site about supermarket history and architecture. A place I probably never would have encountered out there in cyberspace if I weren't trying to track down the elusive Nancy.

I put her aside for the moment and spent quite a while perusing that site which has some great historical information and photos. I know, I know--I'm supposed to be focusing on the products inside the stores, not the architecture of the buildings. But I rationalized to myself that the store histories are not too far off my topic and actually quite necessary in my pursuit of the facts.

Then my brain wandered back to the Weingarten's chain in Houston that we shopped at when I was a kid. I wondered if the developers had plowed down all of their old buildings yet in the name of progress. So I had to go check that out over at the Houston Architecture Forum.

That led to thinking about a blog entry and that I had better dash off a quick draft before I lost THAT thought.

So here I am.

I still don't know anything more about the leaflets and I'm embarrassed to admit how much time has passed. A lot more than 10 minutes.