Following the Recipe

When I married the Big Guy in 1996, his mother gave me a gift that quickly became one of my most treasured belongings. It was a small gray file box filled with handwritten recipes on simple index cards. 

They weren’t just any recipes, though. They were all of her family’s favorite recipes with little personal notes added for clarity. I like to use a little less sugar, she wrote in the margin of her brownie recipe. At the bottom of her peanut butter cookie recipe, she added use cheap peanut butter, it works better.  Her coffee cake recipe included a small paragraph advising me that you can add blueberries or chocolate chips if you like, but I would leave out the cinnamon if you do.

In the corner of several cards, she added the name of the family member who was best known for that particular recipe.  That’s how I knew the sour cream coffee cake was Sara’s, the Quagmire bars were Aunt Neva’s, and the applesauce oatmeal cookies came from Great-grandma Goodwin. Aunt Libbee’s name popped up on many of them, as did Grandma Tice’s.

I remember sitting there at my wedding shower, holding that little gray box and feeling like I had just been invited to join an exclusive private club.

Over the years, I added my own recipes and notes to that little box. Aunt Ida’s Texas sheet cake. Aunt Marian’s porcupine meatballs. My friend Meg’s strawberry tofu pie. 

That last one really made the Big Guy mad when he discovered the tofu wrapper in the garbage. “You’re trying to poison me!” he roared.

“Oh, you loved it,” I told him. “You ate four pieces.”

“That was before I found out it had toad food in it,” he grumbled. “You can’t just sneak that shit into people’s food. That’s just wrong.”

Meg’s strawberry tofu pie aside, the recipes in that little box were used again and again and again. The cards became stained and wrinkled.  I thought about typing them all up and saving them on my computer, but it seemed almost sacrilegious to see those recipes copied down in anything other than my mother-in-law’s neat cursive writing. 

When the Big Guy and I separated, we fought bitterly over that little gray box. It was mine. His mother gave it to me and I used it for eighteen years. Oh, hell NO, I wasn’t going to let him have it. Folks, we fought an angrier custody battle over my recipe box than we did over custody of our children. 

“Why do you want it so bad?” I demanded. “You never even use it.”

“I’ll copy all the cards for you,” he told me. “You can have copies of the recipes. I just want the cards.”

“Why?”

He rarely stammered, but he did at that moment. He couldn’t look me in the eye as he muttered something.

“What? I can’t hear you.”

“My mom wrote them, okay? Someday, when she’s not here anymore, I’ll have her recipes in her handwriting. That’s …. important to me.”

Oh.

Oh. 

Needless to say, I let him keep the little gray box. We never got around to making the copies for me.

I sobbed when I found that box in his kitchen cabinet after his death. He had organized it and added new recipes to the old ones. But those stained, wrinkled, creased cards contain more than just recipes. They contain memories, emotions, experiences, love. The Big Guy’s recipe card for his sweet pickle relish has his fingerprints and sweat and probably some of my tears from reminiscing when I found it. 

I have no desire to ever try to make his sweet relish, but Lord, I’d give anything to watch him make it one more time. He’d clamp the antique food grinder to the edge of the picnic table in the back yard and swear at the cucumbers, onions, and peppers as he cranked the handle and watched the pieces fall into my big red Tupperware bowl. He’d sweat and complain about the mosquitoes and vow that this would be his last batch, and the kids and I would just hover behind him and breathe in the spicy, heavenly aroma.

I swear I can still smell it when I see that card in the little gray box. 

Recently, my sister shared a picture in a group text between us siblings. “Recognize this?” she asked.

It’s my mom’s recipe box.

For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. 

I recognized it immediately. Of course I remember it! How could I have forgotten all the times I saw Mom flipping through the little cards with her own notes in the margins? I had just assumed all of her "specialties" were all in her head, and that they died with her in 1987.

I have no idea what recipes it holds.

I remember her lemon meringue pie, her hot bacon spinach salad, her homemade chicken cacciatore. I miss her cooking and I miss her, even though she’s been gone from my life longer than she was in it. But seeing that little blue box makes me feel like there’s a part of her here with me, hugging me and telling me that everything’s going to be all right. 

I wish that all of the answers to life’s questions were written down on a stained, wrinkled, creased card in a little box somewhere.  That there might be tiny handwritten notes in the margins, telling me it’s all going to work out somehow. That everything really is going to be all right.

That I’m not as alone as I sometimes feel.

But there's no little recipe box for life, is there? No matter how much I want one, or how much I want to leave one for my kids after I'm gone. Because I've finally begun to realize that life isn't about following anybody else's recipe. Sure, we need to glance at the cards with their measurements and handwritten notes, but in the end, life's all about creating our own specialties and maybe -- if we do it right -- leaving our own set of handwritten notes in the margins for the next generation.