Gratitude Monday: the gift of recipes

You know how you can tell the best recipes? They’re the ones on yellowing paper with the tattered edges, stained and sticky from reuse. And today I’m grateful for all the ones in my collection, for the ones shared by and with friends.

Recipes are powerful things. They invoke much more than lists of ingredients and preparation instructions. They tie you to memories—not only of the actual food, but to who gave it to you and whom you’ve shared it with. Maybe to meals or occasions shared with them.

They are so evocative that women in the Terezín ghetto during World War II reconstructed menus and recipes for meals in their past, meals that they would have no hope of actually preparing in their present circumstances. But remembering and recording those recipes sustained them in different ways than actual food would have done.

A few years ago I went through my recipe box and got rid of maybe a couple hundred cards; the ones I have left definitely fall into that yellowed-and-stained category.

I have a recipe for fresh strawberry pie that came from our family friend, Mrs. Dyo. You can substitute ripe peaches for the strawberries, but only if the peaches are really, really ripe and flavorful. Then it’s about the best summer dessert ever.

My carrot cake recipe came from a colleague of mine at Fort Lee, Virginia (you know—where I learned to drink coffee next to the Chemical Capital of the South). The only reason my copy of this is readable is that some years after I got it, I shared with colleagues at Hughes Aircraft Company, and one of them typed up and distributed new copies of it. That puppy’s been sent out across two continents; it’s that good and that easy.

I got the recipe for red beans and rice from Mary Pyke in grad school. The first time I tried making it I kept having to move it to larger pots because it just wouldn’t stop expanding. When I yelped to Mary about my predicament, she replied, “Oh, yeah. I should have specified that ‘Serves six’ means ‘Serves six Viking warriors.”

I’ve had my recipe for French apple pie since I first discovered that pie didn’t have to taste like the God-awful frozen things my mother passed off as dessert. It came from my friend Leilah, and has recently been amended to include variations that she and her husband John use to make regular two-crust pie. (Major up: use tapioca instead of flour to keep the juices from making the bottom crust all soggy.)

Then I adjusted the crumb topping based on input from a couple of friends who responded when I put out a Facebook cry for help. Now the topping is loose and crunchy, not hard and resembling something Xena Warrior Princess might wear.

Maybe one of my newest acquisitions is a lovely salad of grilled steak and asparagus on cress with mango slices and a ginger-hoisin dressing. That came from my friend Danger Girl, via Twitter. It’s wonderful. You’ll know that even before you stick a fork in the salad because the recipe—not six months old—is already stained from splashes of the dressing.

I don’t know where I got the recipe for English toffee. The card is not only sticky and yellowed (even though by now I can make it from memory), it’s got a scorch mark from me leaving it on a burner I didn’t realize I’d turned on. I also don’t know how many times I’ve shared that recipe—people love it, and it’s easy as pie to make.

(Although, actually, pie isn’t all that easy. At least not pie crust. You need a “touch” with pastry to get it right. But I have a great recipe and I’m happy to share.)

Cornish pasties (oh, lord—the pastry has both lard and suet; I swear the filling is just my socially-acceptable rationale for making and eating that tender, tasty crust) from my grandmother, bread dressing from my great grandmother (marjoram instead of sage), cottage pie (lamb is expensive, so no shepherd’s pie) from Hugh Featheringill-Whittlestonefordly (whatever his name is), shortbread from my friend Bridget Navarro in Korea, fresh cranberry relish (mash-up from several sources)—I’ve shared them all with friends, who now have them in their collective memory.

Going digital—putting recipes on computer—is good, because I have a tendency to scribble things on paper, clip stuff out of newspapers, etc., which I often lose. But the recipe you look at on your device is never going to be an indicator of how good it is—you wipe the floury fingerprints off the screen after making it, and move on. It looks the same whether you’ve made it once or once a month. The ingredients and instructions are always neutral; no scribbled annotations of variations you’ve tried or outcomes. No memos about which occasions you served them on—they’re just there, like any other domestic tool. So I’m always going to have printouts to carry around with me when gathering the ingredients.

So, really grateful for recipes that nourish me and connect me in so many tangible ways with my friends and family. As an aside—if you know anything that smells better than apple pie baking, I want you to tell me what it is and give me your recipe for it.