The Recipe Box My Mother in Law Left Me
Beneath it, there was a line ruled across the card, and below that line the writing changed. It was smaller and in pencil, and the pencil was newer than the ink, and in the corner she had added a second date, in pencil, 2002.
I will tell you what the note said as near as I can, because I have read it so many times that I could write it blind.
“Connie’s gravy, her first Thanksgiving, was thin. I lifted the lid and said Well.
I have wished that word back every year since. It was not about the gravy.
I was afraid she’d be a better cook than I am, and I couldn’t stand to find out so I took it out on her gravy. By 2001 her gravy was better than mine. She browns the flour longer than I ever had the nerve to. Dark as a peanut shell. Do that.”
I sat in my kitchen with that card in my hand and I read the bottom line once more, and then I put my head down on the table on my arms, and I stayed there until my coffee went cold.
When I sat up, the window had gone from gray to white.
I did not finish the box that day. I read maybe ten cards at a time, and then I would get up and run water over my wrists and come back.
I will not give you all two hundred. Most of them are not what you are picturing. Most of them are a woman keeping house.
The ham and bean soup said, soak overnight, and then, in the margin, Harold will not eat it without cornbread, so cornbread.
The tomatoes in Canning said whole tomatoes, raw pack in water, quarts, eighty five minutes in the canner, two tablespoons of lemon juice to the jar. Under that, in pencil, Mother Birchard said forty five. Mother Birchard was wrong.
The Funerals divider had a card for ham sandwiches on dinner rolls, a pound of ham to every five people, and a card for scalloped corn, and a card for a funeral pie, which in our part of the country is a raisin pie, sweet and dark, served after burials.
Her note at the bottom said, “Connie will not eat raisins and she will say it isn’t funeral pie without them. Leave the raisins out for her and let her say it. It is funeral pie either way.”
That one I had to read twice. She was right on both counts. I had said it at Harold’s brother’s visitation, in her own kitchen, and I had thought she was not listening.
The Sundays divider was the thickest, and the plainest. Pot roast with carrots, the oven at three twenty five. Chicken and noodles for company. A note that said, thaw the rolls Saturday night or there will be none, and one that said, church runs long in the spring, put the roast in at nine, not ten.