Missing Ingredients and Other Sneaky Things

One of my favorite treasures is a collection of hand written recipes which my mother sent to me the first winter I moved away from home. They are written in her familiar handwriting on note cards now stained from 31 years of use. It must have taken Mama quite a while to locate all those recipes and then to write them down. To this day, I can't look at them without picturing her at the kitchen table before a stack of open cookbooks, pen in hand.

Shocking, but true...

I have several friends who tell me that when their mothers gave them their family's recipes, key ingredients were deliberately left out! Naturally, the recipes never tasted quite right. My sister Jeanie says there must be a simple explanation for such a thing. Maybe the cat jumped on the table whilst chasing a mouse, distracting the woman as she lovingly recorded her recipe for squash casserole. Or one of the children entered the house in need of stitches so that she lost her place upon returning to Grandma's Goulash. Or the ink pen ran dry just as she got to the secret ingredient in Auntie's lamb kabobs.

Jeanie refuses to believe that any woman could do such a thing deliberately. To her own child, especially. (Then again, Jeanie still leaves pebbles under her pillow, hoping the Tooth Fairy will bring her money...but that's a story for another day.)

Not everyone is so nice, my friend.

For Christmas, daughter Sydney wanted me to make a book for her with family recipes written in my hand. It was a lovely idea.

I found the perfect book, too; a handmade one with a brown leather binding and a sash which wrapped about the book securely. The kind of book that said "heirloom" without so much as a word upon the outside. Sydney excitedly anticipated those special entries from dear old mom. But there was one little problem. Mom.

First and most shallow, I don't always fancy my own handwriting. I know enough about handwriting analysis to know not to write when I'm in a bad mood, depressed, sassy, sarcastic or tired. That leaves about five minutes a week for me to write in the cookbook, but it takes about 15 minutes to write down a recipe. I also realized that when I cook, I seldom measure, adding a dash of this and that which varies from one session to the next...What if I accidentally leave something out? I'll go down in posterity as One of Those Mothers.

Last Christmas, though I was distracted with a serious matter, I did manage to write one recipe in Syd's book. My famous Spaghetti. After that, I realized that I would need to organize the book before I write another, like Grandma Klein's Dobish Torte, a dessert. It was overwhelming, considering everything else that was going on. So the book sat on the buffet, lonely and forlorn.

I am now ready to resume writing recipes in Sydney's new cookbook.

But alas, after much searching and a call to her cell phone, Sydney tells me that she took the book to her apartment where it is gathering dust from lack of use (because it is empty, still). Most assuredly, she is disappointed, disenchanted and a little bit let down.

After just a bit of cajoling, Sydney is returning the book to my kitchen, as I now have an idea about how to organize the recipes. I also accept the fact that my handwriting is that of an artist, making it more interesting. And Sydney knows that she may have to cook with me in order to get every recipe right.

But there is still one problem I almost forgot about: I have five daughters and three sons. They're all going to want one.

Like Scarlet always says, "I'll worry about that tomorrow."

Until then,

Deber