With only two adults left in this old cape cod of ours, I have spent the last year trying out new recipes, searching for them on cooking blogs and Pinterest. Some are vegetarian, some meant just for two, others are low-carb, low-fat, and sometimes low-taste. Bookmarked on my phone, I can shop for the ingredients at the grocery store after work and then come home and start dinner. Cooking via cell phone, though, is frustrating for me due to the constant need to refresh the screen when time management of sizzling ingredients and the need to know the next step is critical. But if a digital recipe is deemed a success after a few tries it gets printed and stood up in file folders next to the microwave marked Main Dishes, Appetizers, Sides, Vegetables, Desserts.
And if I forget to print it? Then I go down the rabbit hole of my Pinterest account for the thousandth time trying to find the breakfast casserole that was kind of spicy and had sausage. Or was it bacon?
A couple of weeks ago I made corned beef and cabbage, and from the cabinet over the stove I pulled out my recipe box – plain, black, plastic. A relic from Office Depot of a time before computers when 3×5 cards were what everybody used to keep track of the important things in their life. From the first section of main courses, I pulled out the hot pink piece of paper with my mom’s recipe. This one was written by me as I sat at her dining room table and asked her to word-for-word dictate to me every step of the process in cooking her corned beef. It has never come out less than perfect so I know she didn’t miss a step, and my writing it on a hot pink piece of paper was deliberate. I always wanted to see it when I opened up my recipe box.
There is another recipe from my first adult job in Chicago where I worked with a guy named Frank Chico. One day when we were talking about tacos, he said I needed to know how to make tacos from a real Mexican, and so he wrote down his recipe and included hot sauce and beans. I’ve kept that recipe since 1982 because Frank Chico was one of the finest men I’ve ever known.
I have a recipe for Hawaiian Glazed Ribs from the mom of my best friend in grade school. She included it in her shower gift to me for my wedding 35 years ago. Years later, after having a stroke in her 40s, she wrote down the recipe for her Zucchini Bread – one of the things she could still make with her good hand.
I have my mother-in-law’s Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe which Mark will bake a couple of times a year because he doesn’t think anyone else’s can compare. Someone I used to work with wrote down her Coffee Cake recipe, another her Cherry Cobbler.
Around the holidays I always make my sister’s Toffee Apple Pie recipe. The other day I made my other sister’s Enchilada recipe – a 3×5 card so faded I have to hold it up to the window to read all the ingredients.
I have often thought of starting a recipe box for my own kids. Sitting down and writing out the recipes for the things I make that they love. By now I have made some of these things so often I don’t even need a recipe. It is muscle memory to pull out the ingredients, brown the meat on one burner, make the sauce on another. I can remember my kids as little ones, standing by the stove when the smell of dinner drifted through the house. “Spaghetti? You’re making us spaghetti tonight?” Yes, I would say and and off they’d run to be the town crier announcing the good news.
Many of my recipes are fragile – used so often that they are on the verge of disintegrating. Some have never even been made, but they were handwritten on an index card by someone I loved and so they will always have a place in my recipe box.
While thankful for many of the things a digital world offers, it is fitting that the written recipes that have been passed down to me are in a box that can’t be closed. Butter, aprons, flour on Grandma’s wrinkled hands from making her famous sticky buns, the smell of a roast, Thanksgiving dinner, Easter brunch, the written documentation on an index card of a conversation about a favorite dish.
Memories, my own and those of many others are in that box, and with a flip of the lid I can spend time with them again. In my empty house making dinner for two I am not alone.
