Mother’s Recipe Box

My mom was 74 years old when she died in 2009. That wasn’t that long ago, but it’s light years ago in a technological sense. While some folks had iPhones, the iPad had not yet been introduced. Facebook was just starting its trajectory and other social media sites were mere glimmers in developers’ eyes.

I often think how my mother would have loved Pinterest, and in general would have embraced other social media.

Although my mother never had a Pinterest board, she did have recipe boxes. And books. And binders. And notebooks. In her garage, she had two six-foot utility shelves full of cookbooks, each with her trademark torn strips of paper bookmarking a recipe she perhaps had or wanted to try. In some books, the tattered bookmarks were between nearly every page.

When I first moved away from home to California, which didn’t please her, she would write me letters telling me of her latest news or complaining that I wasn’t there. These letters always included a recipe or two—something that she had recently tried and loved, or a childhood favorite that she thought I might like to make for myself. Cooking was always a connection between us even when there seemed to be no other.

She would come to visit, and I would prepare a dish that she thought was the best thing she’d ever eaten (she was a good mom like that!). She would ask for the recipe, and if I had one, she would sit at the table and neatly handwrite it on a 3×5 index card. She’d always find two or three more she needed, and again, she would handwrite each one, even though we had a photocopier in the house!

So, you see, I simply must dedicate this blog to her, and how she brought and kept people together with her amazing talent of preparing a meal that was so much more than the food in it. She would love doing this with me, and in a way she is—I have her recipe box.