The most valuable things have no price

My most valuable possession is worth next to nothing to most people. You can’t go buy it at a store or find it on Ebay, it has no monetary value what so ever.  The item that I hold most dear to my heart is an old green and red ledger book that my mom had turned into her cookbook. She gave it to me before she passed away four years ago. Sure there were other things she left me; jewelry and other bric a brac but that book means so much more. Within its stained and faded pages it holds more memories than any picture album.

I learned to cook over that old ledger book, many of the stains it carries are from my inexperienced hands dripping, spraying and dropping various foods on its pages. All these years later I couldn’t tell you the first recipe I cooked from its pages but it was probably chocolate chip cookies. I didn’t learn until I was older that it was the same recipe as was on the Toll House chocolate chip bag but she had carefully written it down by hand like every other recipe in the book.  As I got older she let me write a few in there myself my printing standing out starkly beside her flowing cursive. One of the recipes that is now written in the book in my childish hand writing is a recipe for chocolate cake, that has been in my family for years the original page having been used so much it fell out.

There was a time I could make the cake by memory I had baked it so many times the recipe still partially imprinted onto my brain but the best part of the recipe is the memory of the story my mom told me about when she learned to make the cake herself. The recipe is one that has been handed down on my dad’s side of the family so mom didn’t learn it until she married my dad.  The cake is a richer, denser cake than what you will get from a box but she couldn’t figure out why every time she made it the cake would fall, that was until the day she called one of my aunts nearly in tears asking what she was doing wrong.  My aunt asked her one question, “Is Billie in the house when you are making the cake?” Billie is my dad and of course he was. You see my dad and I both have a weakness for dense, chewy brownies and unfortunately for my poor mom that cake recipe also make great brownies if you open and slammed the oven door at just the right moment in the cooking process.

I also have many memories of the recipe book flipped open to the first recipe in the book on many cold winter weekend, the smell of yeast mingled with the ever present smell of coffee in the air as the batch of bread we had just finished kneading sat in her giant metal bowl in front of the fireplace with a towel draped over it. Flour would coat every surface in the kitchen, including myself. Mom never owned a bread maker or a fancy kitchen-aid mixer, we made all our bread by hand, kneading the dough until it was the right elasticity. In culinary school while all my classmates used the mixers I stood at my groups table working the dough by hand nearly in tears the whole time because it was the closest I had felt to my mom since she had passed. When the dough had proofed we would punch it down and form it into loaves, rolls and come into herb bread and cinnamon bread.  Dad always seemed to get home just as the first loaf came out of the oven. That first loaf never had a chance to cool and was usually gone before the rest had finished cooking.

That old book holds so many memories but now I have to treat it delicately, many of the pages are falling out and the ink is fading. I had planned on typing out all the recipes and compiling a digital cookbook, adding recipes too it of my own but I realized that isn’t the memory I want my future kids having of reading a recipe from a computer screen or from a typed out and printed page. I want them to look back when they are adults and talk about the memories they made over the hand written cook book their mom had put together. I print instead of writing it in cursive because my cursive is horrible but the important thing is that it will be filled with love and all my favorite recipes that my mom taught me.