There it is. In all the swoops and swirls, the dips, the flourishes, the misspellings, the slanted letters, the shaky hand. There’s the story and the memory. There’s the cook. There’s the guy, the gal, the friend, the aunt, the spouse, the sister, the dad, the mom. There’s the he, the her, the who, the what, the when. There’s the life.
Handwritten recipe cards and cooking scrapbooks are the heartbeat of the kitchen. They are the record keepers of culinary explorations. The physical testaments of good times and good food. The guardians of memories that ensure that loved ones long gone remain present and that favorites stay afloat.
On a handwritten recipe card, no one ever dies or moves away or leaves the friendship or the family. With every dot of an i, cross of a t, loop of an o, handwritten measurements, ingredient lists, and instruction guidelines pass over illnesses and arguments, ignore long distances and intermittent communications, rise above world events and traumatic upsets. They defy decades and borders, cities and languages, personality clashes and cultures. Hands down, there is no better way, and definitely no more delicious way, to get closer to a memory or a person than through food made from a recipe that has been passed down from one cook to another.
Whip up Aunt Louisa’s banana bread, Grandpa Gordon’s hot fudge cake or Cousin Camilla’s corn chowder soup. Put on a pot of Paula’s poblano chili or Theresa’s heirloom tomato sauce. Mix up a casserole of Betty’s baked brown rice or Sarah’s cheesy egg souffle, and these cooks suddenly appear in exactly the way you remember them. It doesn’t matter if the recipe is two years old, 28 years old, or 200 years old; magic still surrounds the very foods that once made the making of them so memorable.
In the late 1990s, my mom made a slim binder for each of her kids filled with all of our favorite family recipes. At the time, she was just learning how to use a computer, so instead of handwriting each one, which she normally would have done if there wasn’t so many recipes and four sets of copies to be made, she typed them out page by page, category by category, and printed them out. One copy for each binder.
I don’t recall how long it took her to type these recipes into the computer, nor exactly how many she included, but I do remember the excitement that I felt when the binder arrived. My mom grew up in a small town in the Pacific Northwest during the 1940s and was raised on food she often describes as wholesome and nutritional. Her parents valued hard work, resourcefulness, outdoor activities, and homemade food always made from scratch.
My grandmother would be the first to say that she did not think of herself as a great cook, but everything she ever made that I remember was delicious. Pot roast, twice-baked potatoes, homemade bread… those were some of her specialties. My mom learned the basics of cooking not so much from her mom but from her home ec class in school. When my mom became a mom herself and moved to California, my oldest sister remembers simple recipes and a lot of health food coming from the kitchen while she was growing up in that same from-scratch manner that my grandmother championed too. Fifteen years later, when I came along and the whole family was living in New York, my mom was traveling the world with my dad, courtesy of his airline executive career. Her culinary palate and pursuits expanded to include more international cuisine from the places she was often visiting. France, Italy, Germany, Egypt, Greece, Africa, Asia, the Mediterranean all influenced what she was making at home in one way or another.
Like my grandmother, my mom wouldn’t openly boast that she herself is a great cook. Even though the food she prepares has always been, and still is, undoubtedly delicious, and she’s well known among her friends and family for making lovely meals. But what she lacks in confidence or personal recognition, she more than makes up for in wholeheartedly promoting a good recipe when she sees one.
While I was growing up she was a devout reader of magazines like Sunset, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, and Gourmet. My parents entertained quite a bit, often treating their NYC restaurant-regular-eating friends to a home-cooked meal at our family house located in a sleepy suburb along the Hudson River. And because my dad did a lot of dinnertime/cocktail party networking, my mom was always trying out new recipes on us kids that would be suitable for party fare or hosting my dad’s European colleagues.
So when her slim binder arrived in the mail just after I finished with college and was ready to start throwing my own dinner parties, it felt like the best, most dependable gift in the world. Thanks to her binder, I had all the good recipes in hand. The ones that always brought comfort, the ones that always received rave reviews, the ones that traveled well for potlucks and picnics, and the ones that looked especially pretty on a plate. The ones that came from her sister’s kitchen (also a wonderful cook) and the ones that came from her mom and dad and their parents. And the ones that my mom had perfected over years of revisions. In the binder were all my favorites… Thanksgiving stuffing, Grandma’s casserole, all the fruit pie recipes, the Israeli chicken, Aunt Patti’s chocolate layer cake, the tortellini summer salad, the three bean casserole, the German-style chicken with the creamy noodle sauce, the much-loved potato salad.
Not long after the binder arrived, my grandmother passed away at the age of 97. One of the things I asked my mom if I could have was some of my grandmother’s handwritten recipes from her recipe box. Back home, I taped each one, a little over two dozen in total, into the blank areas that separated one typed recipe from another in the binder. Those early additions of Grandma’s recipes led to further cutting and pasting inclusions as I, too, discovered and collected recipes from various sources. Friends, food magazines, newspapers, on-loan cookbooks, my brother and sisters, their spouses, their families, my husband, his family and a whole host of people I’ve had the joy of sharing a meal with along the way over these past decades all have a presence via a recipe or two or twenty in the binder.
With each new recipe addition, my enthusiasm for cooking grew and grew. The binder grew and grew too. Eventually, it outgrew the slim size that my mom initially packaged the favorites in, and I transferred everything to an extra-large 3-inch binder. Quickly enough, that one filled up and overflowed, too. So a second extra-large 3-inch binder was acquired, and I divided half of my mom’s original categories into one binder and the other half into the second binder, thinking that I had arrived at the ultimate storage solution. But my enthusiasm for cooking and recipe collecting has yet to calm down, and the two binders are now stuffed full to bursting once again.
Despite their stuffed sausage appearance, now when I flip through these two binders, I see nothing but joy in years and years of memories. I see my mom’s handwriting in the original recipe category tabs.
I see my husband’s handwritten recipes for his pork pie inventions.
I see my sister-in-law’s slightly charred recipe card for baking powder biscuits that accidentally got stuck to the bottom of the baking sheet and cooked right along with the biscuits. I see the handwriting of my dearest friend, whom I’ve known since kindergarten, on a recipe for oven-roasted leeks that marks the first Thanksgiving that we cooked together.
There’s a recipe from my dad’s ex-wife written on his airline office stationery taped into the casserole section. There’s my grandmother’s delicate and lacy penmanship, my aunt’s large and loopy handwriting, midcentury recipe cards, tanned newspaper clippings from up-and-coming chefs featured in the New York Times, and hundreds of hand-cut recipes from all the great cooking magazines before they went online, before they created paywalls to access them, or before they folded for good. Recipes from Saveur, Bon Appetit, Gourmet, Southern Living, Cooking Light, Martha Stewart Living, Food & Wine all fill these binder pages, making them like my own homemade version of epicurious.com
The gift that my mom gave me years ago is the gift that has literally and figuratively kept on giving day in and day out. And it just keeps on encouraging more cooking and more collecting. That’s the power of a good passed-down recipe. I have my mom to thank for all this collecting and curiosity. For my love of old recipes and the memories they represent. My mom and I don’t always see eye to eye on everything, but when it comes to cooking, we have a shared interest and a mutual understanding surrounding food and meal-making that can always bring us together.
A lot of people inspire me when it comes to cooking, but it’s my mom’s slender binder of a book that was the original muse that started all this recipe collecting to begin with. I don’t think she could have known the depths to which I would eventually come to love her gift while she was typing away at those recipes on the computer all those years ago. How much her act of recording them would come to mean so much to my culinary journey. But now those recipes are among my most prized treasures. So it’s with a sincere heart on this Mother’s Day, that I wanted to say thank you to my mom for the joy she created in passing down our family favorites.
To celebrate the day and the occasion, I’m so happy to share one of the recipes from my mom’s family favorites collection. The recipe is for homemade chocolate sauce. A sweet treat companion that both inspires and complements so many other desserts.
Quick to make (less than 15 minutes) and lovely for all sorts of foods, it is thicker than syrup, yet thinner than frosting in consistency. It can be poured over ice cream like a hot fudge sundae, drizzled over a simple sheet cake like frosting, layered in clear glass stemware for parfaits, or served like a dipping sauce for fresh fruit.
Always a winner in my book, I have made this recipe so many times for so many different holidays from Valentine’s Day to Christmas and every season in between. I’m not sure where my mom got the recipe from – if it was truly a family recipe that was passed down to her or if it was just a favorite that she picked up somewhere along her culinary adventures. I could Google these ingredients and probably find the source pretty quickly, but for once, the provenance doesn’t interest me. I’ll always think of it as my mom’s homemade chocolate sauce. And in turn, whenever I make it, I always think of my mom and her gift of good food. Tried and true.
Chocolate Sauce
Makes 2 cups
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2 tablespoons flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup boiling water
1 tablespoon butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
Mix together the sugar, cocoa powder, flour, and salt in a medium saucepan.
Add in 1 cup of boiling water and stir constantly over medium-high heat while the mixture comes to a slow boil.
When the consistency thickens enough to coat a spoon but still drips off the spoon in a slow, steady stream, drop by drop, it’s ready to be removed from the heat. This consistency level usually takes about five minutes to achieve. Stir in the butter and vanilla. Serve hot or let cool to room temperature. If you have any leftovers, it stores well in the fridge in an air-tight glass jar for up to five days.
If you serve this as a dipping sauce with fruit, in a parfait, or over ice cream, let it cool to room temperature. If you are serving it over cake, serve it hot. There’s also room to add your own additional accompaniments too in the form of chopped nuts, coconut flakes, or a dollop of whipped cream as my mom suggested in her original recipe. However you choose to enjoy it, I hope it becomes a new favorite family recipe in your kitchen too.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there who inspire kitchen adventures in more ways than one. And cheers to my mom, for every single home-cooked meal, every single shared recipe, and every single family favorite that was recorded in the marvelous, magical gift that has now become my most treasured memory-keeper in the kitchen.
In the Vintage Kitchen: Where History Comes To Eat 