When the Southern Living editorial staff began sifting through decades of magazine archives— dating back to our first year of publication in 1966—for an exciting new project, everyone was assigned a few years-worth of issues to comb through. The task was simple enough: flip through old issues and extract the recipes.
As I dove into 1981 and 1992, it was a fun glimpse into the past of questionable savory foods suspended in gelatin molds and funny recipe names like “Graveyard Grumblings” and “Patio Blush”. At the time, many recipes were sourced from readers and homecooks which built the magazine into the iconic brand it is today.
After a while, the process became repetitive. Open the PDF, scroll past the countless cigarette ads, copy, paste, and repeat. After going through nearly 900 recipes from 1992, I was chugging through the December issue almost on autopilot when one name made me stop—my own last name…