05/18/2026
My mother handed me an old wooden recipe box and said, almost like an apology, “I don’t know if any of this is useful.”
It was October. The lid was snug and sticky. When I pried it open, the smell of old paper and faded ink wafted up and out of those cards. I couldn’t name why it was familiar, but the scent was undeniably home.
Inside were recipe cards in my grandmother Alberta’s handwriting. Pressed Christmas cookies. Scrapple. A recipe for homemade goetta, a staple at our house, pork and spices and pinhead oats cooked in a crock pot and formed in loaf pans. My mother has passed this out at holidays since I can remember.
Alberta was her mother, born in 1913. She grew up in an orphanage outside of Cincinnati, Ohio during the Depression, raised 4 children on a single income, and fed her family three meals a day without reliance on packaged foods.
Something happened between Alberta’s generation and mine. A whole body of knowledge that lived in women’s hands walked out the door, and we didn’t notice until the door had been shut for decades.
I’m trying to chase it down, through recipe clippings, stories and lessons passed from my grandmother to my mother and on to me, so I can teach it to my son.
I’m sharing it here because I think a lot of you are standing in your own kitchen holding the equivalent of a recipe card you don’t know how to use.
I started with the recipe cards. But then my aunt shipped me old documents from my grandmother’s childhood. Papers from the orphanage she was raised in. In between faded photographs and birth records was a muddled story that told me something about Alberta I was completely unprepared for.
Tomorrow, I’ll tell you what it said.
It changes the whole story.
…. I have found my voice, through food, and it’s an absolute honor to cook for you 💜
