Mom's Breakfast Nook Cooking Library

On a small countertop adjacent to our round, butcher block breakfast table, framed by a small window and flanked by bookshelvesw on each side, was the nerve center of my mom’s cooking emporium: her small library of cookbooks jammed into the bookshelves and sheafs of handwritten recipes, including a diminutive 3 x5 cardfile box containing the inscrutable secrets to 3,1017 of her most favorite dishes.

When we removed all of the personal effects from the house after her passing a few years ago, this culinary library, I’m afraid to say, was tossed. The books were all moldy and littered with exoskeletons of typical kitchen-invading creatures (already too much information here) and her hand-written recipes were, well, unreadable.

The fact of the matter was, mom’s handwriting generally, a smallish cursive style punctuated with all sorts of idiosyncratic abbreviations, was always unreadable. The postcards I got from her when at sleep-away camp — Honey, was the salutation, love mom and dad (she always added his presence) was the close, and anything in between was anyone['s guess.

Still, I kinda wish I had held onto the small cardfile box jammed with recipes. As bad a cook as she was for the most part, I always loved her french lace cookies, her slightly burnt almond bread/cookies, her granola and raisin health cookies. I’m pretty sure I could have taken her handwritten inscrutability and reverse engineered it with a reasonable chance of success.

Of course the house was chock full of this sort of memorabilia, mom being something of a packrat (to put it decorously). So amidst all of this chaos and memory, and feeling the need to cleat out the house for an imminent closing, doing the cherry -picking was not much of a viable option.

So instead, I celebrate that remarkable library here, in the cloud so to speak, where 3 x 5 notecards can be stacked up to the rafters without cluttering a thing. Sometimes, I think we miss out by this lack of clutter.