If Marie Kondo, the superhero of organizing, saw how I keep my recipes, she’d probably faint on the spot. The spine of my “Best of Family Circle” cookbook is stretched far beyond any bookbinder’s worst imaginings. The inside is stuffed with all manner of collected recipes — those once tried and forgotten favorites I know by heart, those I hope to try someday and those I’m never going to try (read: yam chili), but for some reason I hang on to the possibility.
Finding a specific recipe — this past holiday it was for mini cherry cheesecakes — would be an exercise in frustration for anyone with even a modicum of OCD, but I always manage to find what I’m looking for. This season, I also rediscovered something I wasn’t: a roadmap to past and present cherished relationships, illustrated through a generous offering of ingredients and their preparation.
One friendship forged in the fires of a political campaign in the mid-1990s is evidenced not just by shared support for our chosen candidate, but a desire to learn the food traditions of an unfamiliar holiday. Oklahoma-born Martha, like me, married a Jew, and unlike me, mastered hosting the Jewish holidays with their plethora of special dishes that this Connecticut-born Catholic had never cooked before.
About halfway through the pile of recipes inside the cookbook cover is a typewritten page entitled Ginny’s Rosh Hashanah Menu. Martha, the original hostess with the mostest, laid out my festive game plan from the Kiddush to the first and second courses, an entrée, side dishes and desserts. She didn’t stop with just this overview. I have her printed recipes for two different kinds of homemade knishes, honey baked carrots, multiple versions of honey cake, sweet apricot noodle kugel and more.
As I remember it, my first holiday hosted for David’s family was a success. As I comb through Martha’s recipes, though, it’s her kindness I relish even more.
A recipe from the candidate we worked for is among the pile, too. Well, at least a response to a question about a recipe I sent him. On Office of the Governor stationery is a note from me to Bill Weld asking him for tips on preparing a wild rice dish he once served at a dinner party.
“You can’t let the rice know you’re afraid of it,” he quipped in his note back, along with advice to add copious amounts of salt.
Among the other recipes clipped from newspapers and taped to scraps of paper, hand-copied on pages ripped from a paper tablet, printed out from recipes browsed on the internet and one literally written on the back of an envelope, are several in my mother’s distinct handwriting. She must have given me a bunch at once because there is also the cardboard backing of a check register on which she wrote, “Enclosed [are] my recipes and some old, old ones I thought you might like to try sometime.”
Most are written on index-size recipe cards, the kind that the organized souls among us keep in a metal box in alpha order. Not these: in no apparent order there’s a recipe for meatloaf, for champagne punch, macaroni and cheese (Who needs specifics? “Two cups of milk and a lot of cheese. Buy ends from the deli,” she instructs), meatballs and her Italian sauce which despite her Lithuanian heritage is still the best I’ve had.
I may never make beef stew again for my part-vegetarian family but I’ll pause as I search for the banana bread recipe shared by a friend I made in Jack’s preschool and treasure my mom’s cursive writing and breezy asides — one pound “more or less” of good chuck stew meat — that perhaps I wouldn’t have come across in a more orderly portfolio.
Recipe trading is something I’ve engaged in throughout my career. It appears so anyway from the recipes taped to paper with the logo from the first job I had post-college through to a newspaper clipping taped to a sheet of paper from Massport where I worked 15 years later for “authentic meatballs.”
The “authentic” note is in the handwriting of a colleague, Joey, who became a close friend and made me the first pasta and red sauce topped with peas I’ve ever had. In my own handwriting are notes from that same era after a meeting I had with the head of the Boston building trades union. Before we got down to the business of discussing whether Massport would commit to using union-only labor on its projects (um, no), we traded notes on making pesto (combine arugula and basil with pine nuts and parmesan (yum, yes).
Recipe exchanges can indeed odd bedfellows make, and combing through a disorderly pile of them will elicit memories and fondness as nostalgic as a whiff of apple pie with homemade crust baking in the oven. I found two recipes for that, one my mom’s and the other the banana-bread-baking friend’s. The latter is scrawled on the back of a large white flat envelope. It will be easy to find when I need it.
Virginia Buckingham
Virginia Buckingham is a former president of the Marblehead Current board of directors, a frequent commentator on WCVB’s On the Record and author of “On My Watch A Memoir.” She is working on a second memoir, “As This Mountain” in her newly empty nest and writes a biweekly column for the Current.
