Ghosts in the recipe file

I don't cook a whole lot, but I do have many recipes. And like old photographs, they are stashed not very neatly or with much organization into notebooks and file boxes. So when NSLS asked me for a maple cookie recipe that we used to make every Christmas I had to go rifling through things to find it.

Going through my recipes uncovers a lot of ghosts, and you never know what you're going to find when you turn over the next card or flip over the next page. A cake recipe in my dad's distinctively bad handwriting--after he retired he'd copy recipes for my mother when we asked her to send us one. Lots of 3x5 cards in my beloved MiL's hand. She was a great cook and a phenomenal baker and was always trying--and sharing--new recipes. None of them would make it into Cooking Light! She liked to send us samples, too, and there is a note (written on notepaper decorated with her favorite flowers) she sent with an applesauce cake for some holiday. And printouts of emailed recipes from my department chair when I was teaching. B started a catering business on the side and loved to share his best recipes. He intended to spend his retirement years cooking, but sadly he died just a year into that retirement.

And then there are the magazine clippings from over the years. Many of them I can picture where we lived and what I was doing when I saved the recipe--the cranberry nut bread I baked the first Christmas in Iceland (the first Christmas we were on our own as a married couple), the gingerbread cookie recipe I saved out of Good Housekeeping when Elder Son was just a baby, now stained with grease marks and flour smudges, the quiche recipe from Better Homes and Gardens that was supposed to be good for all occasions (just vary the fillings), the weight watchers recipes I've collected at various times, and a whole raft of healthy recipes featuring garlic and beans and leafy green vegetables, which I ought to revisit more often.

For years I've been saying I was going to organize all my recipes (and the notebooks they are stuffed loosely in represent the one real stab I took at doing so, before I went off to seminary). But I really wish someone had organized my mother's and my mother-in-law's. It would be a fascinating project to assemble their old recipes the way you assemble a photo album. When I think of my mother I think of her baking fruitcake and pound cake--two things she loved but never perfected--at least not to her own standards. NSLS and WW have some of my MiL's cook books, but just like the family photographs, I don't even know what happened to my mother's, or to all her handwritten recipes. So much history lost there. So many ghosts.