Why are you reading this?

My grandmother, Germaine Bossi, was born in May 1913 in/around Saint-Malo, Quebec, Canada. The tall tale that I recall is that she was the oldest daughter of thirteen (or nineteen?) kids and had to leave school at a young age to care for her siblings after her mother passed away during childbirth and her father skedaddled. Somewhere along the line of being the default matriarch, she became an amazing cook and earned money as a private chef for other families. (Dear Other-Bossis, please feel free to correct this blurb of family history, there's a high probability I'm making this all up...)

The red flag marks Saint-Malo. Note that the population as of 2011 is 483.  

I came across two of her personal cookbooks in my parents' cupboards. I took them home with me with plans of typing the recipes up and giving everyone in the family copies as a surprise holiday gift.

The cover of one of Nana Bossi's cookbooks. Also, as I spend more time on this blog, 
I'll hopefully figure out how to crop images so you don't see that icky white space under the notebook.... 

The recipes, however, are scrawled in faded pencil, smeared with food stains, spills, rips, and in a vintage of cursive I have trouble deciphering. In addition, they are half in French and half in English (Franglish/Francais?) I tried to use google translate but that didn't get me far. I asked a friend to help, but her French skills were stumped by Nana's Québécois Franglish. Finally, I found a real-live Frenchman to help me, bribed him with scotch, and have been holding regular Wednesday night "book club" meetings to work on the translations.

One of these pages is from Nana Bossi's recipe book and the other is from the Dead Sea Scrolls, can you guess which is which?

We filled in as many blanks as we could with his French skills and his wife's and my own cooking knowledge, but there are still passages in various recipes we could not work out. I suspect that some of the remaining blanks can be filled in by those with greater familiarity with the generational-nature of many of the recipes. I believe a lot of the recipes are from the 1950s and 60s and involve ingredients, methods, or phrases in vogue then that the three of us 30-somethings working on the translations are simply unfamiliar with.

Ultimately, I decided to publish the translations as a blog to crowd-source my efforts at preserving Nana Bossi's recipes as accurately as possible. I will include a scan of the original recipe page/s in each post and gradually fill in this blog with photos of the items as I begin cooking them and any resources I use (i.e. other, similar recipes) to help fill in any gaps (many of the recipes are just ingredient lists). I welcome your comments & interpretations!