Receipts

About 20 years ago I organized all of my recipe clippings. There were dividers and topic headings and sub-categories. And then followed 20 years of reading about food and cooking for a family. Oh, and stashing kitchen equipment manuals, because I might need a refresher on how to adjust the peeler thickness on the apple peeler-corer-slicer. Or how to make jiu niang in my Instant Pot. Wouldn't want to forget that, would we?

It was a MESS, is what I'm saying.

As I tried to sort it out I realized that there were at least three different kinds of recipes in there. There are the ones I like and want to make again, like pan bagnat. (But I don't want to look it up on the NYT website, because that yellowing clip from August 2007 reminds me powerfully of picnics past. It stays.) Then there are the aspirational recipes, like Sri Lankan Dal and Stuck-Pot Rice and Lentils. I would like to be the kind of cook who knows exactly where to buy curry leaves and exactly how to coax a perfectly browned rice crust out of the bottom of the pan in one piece. Someday I would like to host a traditional New Orleans brunch, with Eggs Sardou and Crêpes Suzette.

Finally, abundantly, a little absurdly, there are the sentimental journey recipes. 

In the summer of 2011 my husband and oldest son went together to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. In theory, I was 100% on board with this trip. But they were gone for almost three weeks at a time when Stella was sleeping like a feral little batlet. Which is to say, hardly at all. Near the end of that time my mother-in-law drove to Gladlyville and we took the other four kids south to my aunt's farm. We met up with my mother, and I spent a few days surrounded by grown-ups who loved me and cooked for me. My aunt made this bean dish and it tasted so ambrosial in the moment that I asked her for the recipe. Her handwriting is like and yet not like my mother's. And when I hold this recipe in my hands I remember the fierce heat of that day, the noise of the cows cooling off around their pond, the blessed relief of being tended after two weeks of relentless tending. I can't recycle that, even if I will never make this bean bake.

"What's a can of real celery?" asked Elwood, who did not grow up reading the Riley sisters' handwriting. "It's red kidney," I told him.

When Joe was 6 or 7, judging by the spelling, he wrote up a recipe for Goo. It calls for 31 cups of marshmallows and 12 inches of chocolate, which you must mirowave for 20 seconds. "Well," said Elwood, "we'd have to find a mirowave if we wanted to make that one." But I will never recycle that recipe either.

Most precious of all, I found a cake recipe in my grandmother's handwriting. She's the person who taught me to bake as we turned out pound cakes together, Saturday after Saturday. It's the only thing I have in her handwriting in this house, though there may be some old letters lurking at my parents'. It is jotted on the back of a school lunch menu; a quick search of the day-month-year alignment suggests that it dates from either 1970 or 1964. I am never going to make a prune-spice cake that calls for 1 C. Wesson oil; it's just never going to happen. But when I brush my hand across those words, gently and with a full heart, it is a form of connection with my long-dead grandmother, who wrote those words on this paper when she was still strong and capable.

It's not only the recipes from people I know and love that have sentimental value for me. Back in 2002-3, Nigella Lawson wrote a column every other week for the NYT. That was the year we were living outside NYC, the year when I was so lonely and miserable. Every other Wednesday I would thump down the stairs happily, eager to read her column over a cup of coffee. I look at those clippings and I remember: there are always bright spots. Hard times do get better.

I suppose that a person who keeps blogging about how BAKING = LOVE is destined to have a hard time trimming down her recipe collection. And organization is just not my defining trait. (Can you imagine if organization were your defining trait? I'll pass on that one, thanks.) I do not know quite what I will do with this pile of potential and remembrance and useless old Vegetarian Times recipes taped to the back of recipes that I do actually want to keep. For tonight, I will pat my grandmother's recipe one more time, tenderly, and tuck the loose odds and ends back into the binder pockets.

People used to call them "receipts" instead of recipes, and there's something fitting about that name: receipts are confirmations that something has been given and received. I can't flip through these pages without remembering all the gifts I have been given.