A Gift of History

Yesterday, I received one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given me. My mother had mentioned last week that she had a box in her workroom that she needed to give me; yesterday, when I was at her house, she reminded me to go upstairs and get the box out of her craft room. I did, and found this:


My present

Pretty, right? I was wildly curious. Knowing my mother, it could have been literally anything. Unable to help myself, I opened it immediately, peeled back the layers of tissue paper, and found...

... my grandmother’s recipes.

Not copies, mind you, or a compilation. These are the actual recipes that she had scribbled down on whatever was handy, or clipped from magazines or old cookbooks. This was bits of my childhood, the origins of my passion for cooking, wrapped up in a box. My love of cooking began in my grandmother’s kitchen. It was there that I made my first solo dish, French toast. It was there that I learned to make biscuits, spaghetti, fried chicken, all of the basics. It was there that I learned to equate food with love and family, as cooking brought me closer to my grandmother, and as the food we served brought the whole family together.

Doing my best not to get too emotional since we had guests, I closed up the box, pushed back the tears that were threatening, and closed up my treasure to have a closer look at home, in private.

At home, I found a lot of great recipes that brought back wonderful memories. But my favorites were those I recognized as being in my grandmother’s own handwriting.

My grandmother’s jam cake recipe

Jam cake has always been a holiday recipe for my family. Growing up, my mother’s family had very little; she and her four brothers and sisters might get one gift at Christmas. But my grandmother always made up for that by making the holidays special with food — more cookies, candies, cakes, and pies than you could imagine. I lost my grandmother over twenty years ago, but we still have jam cake for Thanksgiving or Christmas nearly every year.

Even more than the history, though, this recipe was special to me for another reason. One of the things I remember most about cooking with my grandmother is how frustrated I would get when I would ask her a question and get a vague answer. “How much milk?” “Oh, enough.” “How long do I cook it?” “Till it looks right.” It drove me nuts back then, but now I get it. And it makes me smile to read the instructions for the jam cake, which after a brief description of how to mix the ingredients reads simply “Bake — 350 — until done.”


My grandmother’s pickle recipe

With very few exceptions, I spent my summer days with my grandmother until I started high school. My grandmother had the most amazing green thumb, and her tiny yard produced an amazing array of flowers, four fruit trees, and a prolific garden. Every day we would pick vegetables from the garden, and when the cucumbers were ready, it was time to make pickles.

Pickle-making is still one of my strongest memories of summer. I remember the smell of the pickles before they were canned. I remember jumping up and down on the dining room floor to make the pressure cooker whistle in the kitchen. And most of all, I remember stealing the freshly cut cucumber slices out of the ice-cold brine, as often as I could without getting caught and risking my grandmother’s wrath. (She never once spanked me, but I truly believed it was an option.) I’ve never been good with plants like she was — I’ve actually killed cacti and aloe plants — so I don’t have a garden. But I plan on hitting the Farmer’s Market next weekend so I can try out her pickle recipe.


My grandmother’s macaroni salad recipe

I have to confess, macaroni salad was never one of my favorite things to eat. I’m not sure why, given my lifelong affair with mayonnaise, and considering that I make a somewhat similar recipe now. But I do remember helping to make it for all sorts of occasions. Mostly I remember taking it to our annual family reunion — always a loud raucous, fun time as we reconnected with my grandmother’s seven siblings, their children, and their grandchildren.

But that’s not why this recipe is my favorite of the bunch. I love it best not for the recipe itself, but for everything else about it. First, true to my grandmother’s style, there are no real directions, just a line separating the salad ingredients from the dressing ingredients. Even better, it contains one of my grandmother’s intricate, swirly doodles. Plus, the added bonus of what looks like the scores from a game of rummy between her, my mother, and my aunt. All scribbled on the back of an insert that came out of my grandmother’s Scrabble set, which brings back a whole other set of memories.

I need to thank my mother again. This little box was more than just recipes. It’s a piece of my family, and my history, that I can carry with me. It’s a piece of myself, very much connected to the experiences that made me the woman I am today. And more than that, it will be a part of my future, as I begin to use these recipes to cook for the people I love.