Little Reminders

I looked down at the old cookbook page; stains from previous cooking endeavors had left colored tints of pale pink and burnt umber across the edges; the remains of delicacies long since partaken and gone.

I hadn’t looked inside this particular cookbook in ages. Mostly because it was so old and delicate, with pages slipping away from their binding even as I had pulled it from the shelf. It was nearly forty years old, and many of the recipes were for strange sounding things like noodles encased in gelatin, and every image showed some kitschy kitchen contraptions in psychedelic colors.

The cookbook was my mother’s, at least it had been, back when she was still amongst the living and the baking.

Frankly, I wasn’t even sure why I had pulled it from the shelf now. It was one of those books that was faithfully packed away with every move, only to be put back on the same shelf at each new residence. Permanently parked between a vegetarian cookbook I had flirted with once, ages ago, and one on baking your own bread; an endeavor I fully intended to take up one of these days.

Whatever my reasons for opening this relic, I now found myself sitting at my kitchen table, gazing at a recipe I had not thought of in years. A recipe for cookies that my mother had baked faithfully every Christmas; a cookie that I waited in anticipation for as the holidays approached each year. Every year, that is, until I turned eighteen, when my mother died suddenly.

There was no joy in that holiday, or in the one to follow. By the time I was able to look forward to holidays again several years had passed, and I forgot all about this tradition...until now, that is. I looked down the page, and was surprised to notice spidery scrawls, made with a ballpoint pen in my mother’s handwriting. “Robin’s favorite cookies” she had noted in the margin.

Tears welled up as I remembered the innocent and carefree days of my youth, and I found myself skimming over the list of ingredients. Surprisingly, I had everything on hand, and found myself pulling bowls, measuring spoons, flour and sugar from the cupboards. I began pouring ingredients, sifting, mixing, and inhaling that rich, buttery smell I remembered so well from my youth.

I followed all of my mother’s notes; changing a teaspoon of vanilla to two, adding an extra egg, and even the quaint-sounding “dash of nutmeg”. Unable to resist, my finger slid along the side of the bowl, scooping out a taste of this confection. A burst of nostalgia struck me and I remembered a kitchen of years ago; Bing Crosby crooning about his dreams for a white Christmas, my mother handing me one of the mixer beaters to lick and my greedy wishes for just a little more dough to cling to that precious metal.

I rolled, and cut, and baked per the recipe instructions, and breathed deep as the air filled with the scent of baking cookies. I could hardly wait for one to cool, and found myself juggling a still hot cookie from hand-to-hand. I broke off one soft edge, and then found I couldn’t eat. I sat down, holding that cookie, as the tears came, hot and fresh. The cookie had cooled by the time I pulled myself together and finally took that first bite.

I looked back at the cookbook, back at that scribbled notation “Robin’s favorite cookies”, and I wondered what other things I may have forgotten. I began to thumb gently through more of the pages, nibbling on my cookie as I went, lost in memory. I found a recipe for a beef stroganoff that, according to mom, was good for feeding a large crowd, and that dad must have really been nuts for pecans, because there were several nut-filled recipes noted with reminders of “try making these for Don” next to them.

I spent the rest of the afternoon pouring over those pages, inserting scraps of paper on recipes she highly recommended that sounded as if they would be nice to try. Some pages mom simply changed an item or two, others were more heavily marked up through her own trial and error. I reached the end and was amused to see dozens of my impromptu bookmarks now jutting out from the cookbook’s I once consider not worth my time.

I carried the book to my office, set up my scanner, and copied those pages before carefully tucking them back into their proper places. Maybe one day I would find a way to preserve the book; until then, I would have to content myself with tying a string around it in order to keep more pages from falling out.

I gently placed the book back on the shelf; this time in a new place, next to the cookbooks I used more often. I gathered up the dozen or so loose pages I had just printed out, and set them in my “most-used” recipe folder.

All except the cookies.

That sheet I pinned to the front of the refrigerator with my favorite magnets…. a gentle reminder of things that were not completely lost.