Recipes

We were headed out of my great-aunt's funeral when my aunt asked me if I had my Granny's recipe box.  It's a small wooden card file that she kept handwritten and clipped recipes in.  I do.  It's the source of her homemade macaroni and cheese recipe and the rice pudding recipe I pull when I feel bad and want something not at all healthy but deeply comforting.  My uncle wanted a cake he remembered Granny making, an apricot nectar cake, and she asked me to look for the recipe. 

Today I got around to looking for it.  After a day of cleaning in an attempt to try to bring some order to the neverending landslide of chaos with which I seem to be surrounded at all times, I opened the cabinet, took out the little brown wood box , and sat down in a chair in the living room to look for the requested article.  There are probably more than a hundred recipes in the box, and there is some order, but not a great deal, to them.  Granny's neatly typed cards are in with irregularly sized pieces of yellowed newpaper clipped from the EMEPA newsletter or the local daily paper. 

As I flipped through them with the tips of my finger, I saw recipes from other members of my family, many of them gone now, from members of my community, the august ladies of the church, and I smiled as I thought of those women and those particular dishes.  They were famous for some of those dishes.  Whenever we had a churchwide fellowship or a family reunion, they could always be counted on to bring those specialties. 

I don't cook like that.  Few women of my generation do,  I think.  It's not that I can't cook; I have the skills.  It's that I rarely take the time needed to assemble the ingredients, use the machinery, do all the intermediary steps that produce the glorious final results.  Looking through the box made me sad, and not only for the lost ladies.  I always miss them.  It made me sad for the way I live.  Even though I choose it for its convenience in my hectic and tiring life, sometimes I can't help but think "modern convenience" has lost something in its microwave translation. 

I typed up the recipe for Apricot Nectar Cake, converting the old Underwood print to modern fonts and a Word document, but I also pulled three or four others and typed them up, too, one for the barbeque chicken I remember her making in her crockpot, one for the buttermilk pie I love and can't get anywhere else, and one for the self-crusting fruit cobblers which are the fastest and simplest of all the Southern desserts.  All of the recipes I chose are easy, all should mix up quick, and I think that all of them will yield leftovers for days and days.  I am going to try to blend in a little of what's in that little brown box and see if I can't take some of that pride those ladies had back into the preparation of meals.  It seems too important a thing to leave undone.