By Ellen Barth

The recipes from aunts, the paper, and friends,

that have been collected over years without end,

often lie in a box out of view,

lost to the clutter and daily rush, too.

But that should not happen, not anymore—

we’re hoping to make it less of a chore.

This little folder here is just the right book,

filled with good recipes ready to cook.

The above poem, loosely translated from the original German, appears in a recipe booklet by the food seasoning company Maggi, published sometime in the 1950s. The poem positions traditional handwritten recipe cards as disorganized, ephemeral, and—at least implicitly—old-fashioned. The booklet, on the other hand, is printed and conveniently punched with holes so that it could be included in a binder, perhaps one full of such branded, promotional recipes.

Around the same time that food companies like Maggi were nudging cooks to rely less on manuscript recipes handed down through generations and more on their printed output, women’s magazines in West Germany (1949-1990) were also turning the collection of magazine recipes into a marketing tool by encouraging readers to collect and bind printed recipes in new ways.    

A striking example of how women’s magazines tied recipes to the practice of collecting appears in Petra: Die moderne Frau, first published in 1964 and, at that time, one of only two monthly women’s magazines in West Germany. As well as giving advice on fashion, home decoration, and beauty products, cooking was a common element of Petra. However, in the early issues, few recipes were included in the magazine’s pages. Instead, during the 1960s, Petra readers received a separate recipe supplement with each issue. These supplements, numbered and with changing themes, could be collected and bound in a Petra binder—an advertisement for which can be found on the back cover of the June 1967 supplement.

Magazines have often inspired collecting behavior, being a lesser acknowledged branch on the book collecting tree. In Germany as well as other countries, magazines on various topics have sold branded binders that could hold multiple periodical issues together, a practice that dates back at least to the nineteenth century and the “strap file and binder” format. Examples of this from German magazines include Auto Motor und Sport, Funkschau, and the pornographic Frivol, all of which have sold branded Sammelmappe (collection binders) for collecting their issues, with affordances listed as keeping issues neatly together, attractiveness, and, in the case of Frivol, a neutral spine that did not reveal the contents.

Petra’s binders for collecting recipe supplements offered their readers a new twist on this old collector’s classic. Writing about the purpose of printed supplements, Yanick Rice Lamb states that these “were often intended to infuse spice […] and provide added value[.]” In German, this metaphor is especially apt, considering that the word for supplement (Beilage) is the same as the word for an edible side dish. As well as adding “spice” through additional content in the form of cooking advice, the supplements were used by Petra’s publishers to turn readers into collectors and offered an alternative way to engage with the magazine.

Into the 1970s, Petra’s recipe supplements disappeared but the collection of recipes nevertheless remained. Collectible Sammelrezepte were printed in the magazine’s pages with pictures of the dishes on one side and recipes on the other, often with four recipes on a single page. The recipes were meant to be cut out—helpfully marked with an icon of an open pair of scissors and dashed lines—and then gathered and bound in a Petra-branded binder. In this reader-to-collector strategy, Petra was not alone. In the 1970s and 80s, the magazine Brigitte also published Sammelrezepte and sold its own branded recipe binder—the Brigitte Rezeptbuch—with the added benefit of organizational dividers based on food type.

Vintage binders filled with cut-out magazine recipes are somewhat rare to find (they themselves are not yet viewed as valuable collector’s items), but surviving examples attest to how these collections incentivized regular magazine purchases, extending and deepening engagement in a kind of brand-oriented practice of reading, curating, and collecting. The examples from my own private collection—one purchased online and one found at a free little bookshelf—demonstrate media loyalty, with each only including recipes from their respective magazines. The organization of those recipes is, however, a more personal and creative matter. Although the Brigitte binder suggests a specific organizational structure through the inclusion of dividers, how the individual reader interprets—or perhaps ignores—those categories is up to them: for example, the collector who chose to put the recipe for pizza in the baked goods section next to sweet Quarkstollen, presumably because it is cooked in the oven.

Although this kind of collecting and organizing of recipes may have little in common with the rhetorical remix prominent in recipe notecards and scrapbooks, it nonetheless reflects an active engagement with and remixing of mass media. Through magazine supplements, printed recipes, and branded binders, West German women participated as readers, cooks, and collectors to create unique recipe books that blended mass culture with personal taste.

Ellen Barth works at the Chair of Book Studies, University of Münster. Her monograph Contradictory Cookbooks: Print, Protest, and Feminism in Women’s Community Cookbooks will be published by the University of Georgia Press in late 2026, and she has also published research on the topics of feminist craftivism, menstrual activism, and political cookbooks. Originally from the United States, she now resides in Germany.