Recipe Box (Trisha)

Stuck on the top of one of our kitchen cupboard shelves is an old discolored box that’s been there for years, accumulating an odd assortment of rarely used recipes. It’s just an ordinary hard plastic recipe box and I have often thought about pitching it because for one thing I don’t cook. So why on earth am I keeping all those handwritten note cards – some of them so faded with age that I could barely read them even if I did cook! But I can’t bring myself to toss into the trash that beat up old box with its smudge prints left behind by the sticky fingers of whichever grandma it was who used it so regularly before she died. Denny and I simply can’t remember if we acquired the box from his side of the family or from mine, and it’s ended up turning into a kind of family culinary archive containing the likes of Grandma Maude’s recipe for trinkle cake, Aunt Marie’s porcupine meatballs, Grandma Miller’s Sugar cookies, Denny’s mom’s Cherry Pink salad and even my own mother’s Hungry Boy Casserole- a recipe I remember asking her to give me when my two sons were little boys even though I don’t recall ever using it. To be honest, I’ve never used the majority of the other recipes in that box either, including all those I clipped out of magazines in the early days of my marriage (back when I aspired to being a happy little Suzy Homemaker). But from time to time I get them all out and go through them one by one, carefully replacing them behind their dog-eared cardboard index tabs to make sure that the cookie recipes don’t get lost amidst the salads, the casseroles don’t mingle with the beverages, and so forth. Why bother? Why not just ditch the whole kit and caboodle and open up a little more cupboard space? It’s because stuck at the very back – which is where I inevitably end up putting it – is a tattered piece of brittle newspaper, yellowed with age and practically falling apart from being unfolded and refolded so many times. It’s a clipping from a newspaper with recipes for how to cook wild game – pan fried rabbit, squirrel, pheasant, wild goose. It’s from my Grandpa Ray who had numbered the recipes and asked Grandma to enclose them in one of her letters to me. I don’t remember that Grandpa ever sent me a letter and I don’t have a single piece of paper with his handwriting on it – except for those numbers he’d printed on that faded print of newsprint. It probably goes without saying that not once in my life have I ever cooked a rabbit, squirrel, pheasant or wild goose. But I cannot imagine getting rid of those recipes because it would be like letting go of my Grandpa all over again. Though he’s been dead now for nearly 40 years, I’ve still got that fragile piece of newsprint that opens up so many memories of him every time I unfold it. I guess that’s why I can’t get rid of the plastic recipe box either. It’s too full of links to other people I can’t let go of.