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Published on 11/16/1998 All articles from this issue

Recipes and relations

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By Joan Passarelli

Blue Jeans & Jelly Beans

Last week I was planning our Thanksgiving menu, so I took out my recipe box and started rifling through the cards. Far from deciding on a menu, though, I ended up thinking instead about the people who gave me the recipes.

My turkey stuffing recipe is probably the grubbiest and most stained of any. It's another relic from the early days of my marriage. We spent our first Thanksgiving with my husband's family, and my father-in-law is a glorious cook. I spent Thanksgiving morning chopping vegetables at his direction. In between celery stalks I took notes on this index card. I have used it every Thanksgiving since. It has turkey grease and butter stains on it, as well as the inevitable editing marks in pencil. I'll never rewrite it, though. I like it the way it is.

I smile when I see the cranberry coffee cake recipe from my mother-in-law. She baked it for my wedding shower. After we were married, on a visit to her house, I asked her for it. I still have the pretty recipe card she let me copy it onto. It's embellished with my penciled notes: pecans work as well as walnuts; 3 eggs are nice; and what amounts to an essay on the back about doubling, substituting, and garnishing the cake. She gave me her unconditional love along with the recipe. I can feel it whenever I make this cake.

In contrast I have the bran muffin recipe. A friend gave it to me about 15 years ago, but I've never made it. At first it was because I couldn't find the right kind of bran cereal it called for. Later it was because my friend had been hospitalized with anorexia. We've lost touch, and I don't know how she is. I'll never make that recipe, but I won't throw the recipe card away. It may be all I have left of her.

I have other recipes that I'll probably never make. One is for a chicken rice casserole that a friend made for me after my second child was born. It was delicious, though made right out of the pantry (canned cream of chicken soup is the main ingredient). I don't eat meat any more, but I keep the index card, carefully hand-lettered, that she made for me, to remember when she took time out from her own tiny ones to cook for me and mine.

The banana bread recipe is my oldest. It's from my college days when I had my first apartment. The cooking my roommate and I did was mostly vegetarian stir-fries and burritos. Then one day I was confronted with three blackened bananas in the fruit bowl. My mother's homemaking soul woke up inside me and said, "Time to make banana bread." I obediently scrounged up some ingredients and mashed my bananas.

Unfortunately, I didn't have my mom's recipe, the delicious one I'd grown up with. I baked something that tasted like a dry cake mix, not the dense, moist loaf I used to spread with sweet butter. I wised up after that. I phoned my mom with an index card and pen in hand and took down the recipe. Now I use it every few weeks. This one I never change.

I know I've passed on the tradition, because recently my third-grade daughter inspected the darkening bananas on our counter with a critical eye. "Mom," she reported, "it's time to make banana bread." I'll make sure she has the right recipe when she leaves home.

Joan Passarelli, a Mountain View mother of three, writes a monthly column.