Handed-Downs
I have a recipe drawer in my kitchen though I don’t open it very often. In it are six or eight cookbooks-- several small-town plastic-spined put-togethers (fundraiser projects from the “county extension” way back in the day), one hardback from the Pioneer Woman, another titled “Desserts” that I think I received as a wedding gift, and one professionally published paperback from the Women’s Auxiliary at Oklahoma Christian College that I wrote the forward for. The greater contents of the drawer are handwritten loose-leaf recipes separated into categorical bundles secured by sturdy metal clips.
These are the things handed down.
The cuisine instructions from my mother-in-law are easy to spot. They’re on matching cards with a black and white cow in the upper right-hand corner. Her beautifully legible prescriptions are detailed in ink in such a way that anyone anywhere could read and follow (provided, that is, the reader is old enough to have been taught cursive writing in school!) There are directions for French pastry puffs, lemon squares, broccoli salad, marinade for kabobs… as well as a bunch of other dishes that call for ingredients it might take me hours to find at the store. Other directions, for things like chow chow and wilted lettuce salad, are on fragments torn from an address book in my Grandma Buben’s German scrawl. One for homemade bread and another for beans and chili sauce are printed in my dad’s signature all caps on perfectly folded paper pulled from a legal pad. But most of the recipes in the drawer belonged to Granny.
They aren’t mine that she made for me, they’re hers that she fed us by. Hers that are scarred with such loving over-use that they bring her back for a second when I hold them in my hand.
Granny’s tried-and-trues are scratched on random scraps that were whatever happened to be within arm’s reach at the time. Some are on the backs of envelopes. Others are sprawled across lined index cards. Some she scribbled on pieces of paper pulled from an Eck Drug notebook. All are smeared and soiled. Most have a corner folded or an edge that’s slightly torn. These guides to a practice I never picked up are worth a fortune to me.
After Granny passed, people I had never met—some with last names I recognized, other with ones I didn’t—sent recipes. Some of them were in Granny’s penmanship, paperclipped to a note explaining the familial significance of the particular dish she had once shared with them. A dish so delicious that they asked her for the recipe once the food was gone so they could make it for themselves. Some were in someone else’s loved one’s handwriting—family favorites titled “Bill Claxton’s Fruitcake” or “Bill’s Peanut Brittle.” (“Bill” was what everyone called my mother’s mother before Granny became her name.) Making food was how she said, “I’m sorry,” “Congratulations,” “I hope you feel better soon.”
Handwritten recipes were Granny’s love language. Her culinary investment in others boomeranged back to me.
One package that came in the mail shortly after Granny passed came with a note that read:
“I hope this reaches you personally—I’ve kept this recipe for years thinking I’d mail it to you…I grew up in Healdton, Oklahoma on Magnolia about one block from your Claxton grandparents’ store. I remember Shorty and Bill with such fondness. It’s sad that small-town-love-your-neighbor attitude seems a thing of the past. It was such a wonderful childhood. This recipe was a favorite of my mom’s (it’s in her handwriting) and now in MY 71st year it dawned on me that if I intended to pass it on, I’d better get with the program…”
The recipe this woman included, transcribed in her mother’s penmanship in 1964, is how the kindness baton gets passed. So much more was on that piece of paper than directions for making a cake.
Unfortunately, handwritten cooking instructions are pretty much a habit of the past. We don’t write much of anything with a pen on a piece of paper anymore. There are easier, more efficient ways of keeping track of things.
Easier, but not necessarily better.
My drawer of chaos has a heartbeat. A personality. A “watch-this” spunk that you can’t get from a link that’s cut-and-pasted or a set of instructions floating on the cloud. My random recipes, stiff from aged splatter and the oily fingerprints of busy hands doing too many things at once, reflect the people who wrote them down. They left the souls of themselves on the page. We keep them with us when we pass them on.