The Recipe Box and the Kitchen
On the shelf above the stove sits a metal recipe box.
Picture a mother and daughter, Martha-Jean, 73, and Ana, 44. Martha-Jean is selling the house where she raised Ana and moving to a small town in Mexico. The house has a yellow kitchen with a gas stove, a window over the sink and a counter marked by fifty years of rolling pins.
On the shelf above the stove sits a metal recipe box. Inside are cards in Martha-Jean's handwriting and in her own mother's. Some have grease stains. One says Sunday dumplings and has a thumbprint of flour in the corner.
Ana flew in to help. On the third day she sat on a kitchen stool and asked, "Mom, are you selling the kitchen too?"
"The buyers want the stove," Martha-Jean said. "And the cabinets are built in."
"I thought the kitchen was where everything was."
Martha-Jean said nothing for a while. She had thought so too. On the last Saturday, the buyers came by with their toddler to measure for curtains. The mother stood at the sink and looked out of the window and said, "I can see us making pancakes here." Martha-Jean felt her chest tighten. She had to leave the room.
She stood in the hall for a minute. She thought about the dumplings. She had made them in that kitchen, but the dumplings came from her mother's hands, and her mother had carried them in her head long before she wrote them on a card. The kitchen had been a good place to make them, and other kitchens could be good places too.
That night Martha-Jean took out the box. She and Ana sat at the table and copied every card onto a fresh page. On the back of each one Martha-Jean wrote who it was for and what year, and one sentence about the day she first made it. For the dumplings she wrote: The night your father burned the first batch and ate them anyway.
The thing and the feeling
| The thing | The feeling it holds | Where the feeling goes |
|---|---|---|
| The yellow kitchen | Fifty years of feeding a family | A young family making pancakes there |
| The gas stove | Sunday dumplings, and a burned batch | The stories on the backs of the cards |
| The recipe box | Her mother's handwriting | Kept by Martha-Jean, with copies for Ana |
Ana now has her own copy of the cards in a binder. Last winter she cooked the dumplings in her apartment for her children. She called her mother and held the phone over the pot so Martha-Jean could hear them simmer.
You could…
- Copy each recipe, and write on the back who it was for and when.
- Cook one dish in the old kitchen on its last night.
- Send a copy to a family member who will cook it.
- Take a photograph of the stove with a pot on it.
What dish do you make that nobody could make quite the same way? Tell us in the comments. Someone reading may be ready to write the first recipe card.
Tell us in the comments