Last night I looked through my mother’s old recipe box to find her beef stew recipe.
I’ve had the box for ten years now, but haven’t made many dishes from it. I haven’t even read all of the index cards. I save them for when I want to get a big whiff of her personality. Her folded dinner party and brunch notes, tucked in back, get to me every time with their post-party reminders, which are often cryptic—“Too much of everything! Do not let anyone tell you what is needed!”—and sometimes grim: “A flop! Made the [raw vegetable platter] the night before – it turned dark – everyone avoided it.”
Sometimes practical: “Moravian sugar cakes not so popular here.”
I love reading her jaunty, familiar script; I can almost hear her voice and the way she hummed when she cooked. She rarely wrote down measurements and frequently made introductory remarks: “There are many different ways of preparing spaghetti sauce, just as there are so many ways of doing potatoes…” or “even the least interesting fish done this way comes out like deviled crab. Delicious!”
From the many notes my mother jotted down about her parties and food, I gather she had a dream of writing a cookbook or maybe a book about entertaining, but she lacked the confidence to undertake such a project. Which leads me to women who write about food and three new books about the wisdom that can be found in the kitchen. (more…)
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