Mom’s Recipe File

I’ve just inherited my mom’s recipe file. It is in a box 3” high by 5” wide by 11” long and has probably around a thousand recipes on 3x5 cards. There are the casseroles Mom cooked on our old 19’ cabin cruiser or camping on a 2 burner stove. There is the original Brown-edged Saucies applesauce cookies recipe (yum.) I swear there’s more melted cheese than you’d ever want to use these days. But the valuable things here are the signatures at the end of so many of the cards; sometimes more than one to show the path this dish took first through the local Catholic church then through neighbors. Marguerite, Bea, Johann, Florence, Mildred and Dorothy are all friends or relatives of my mother – and therefore women who also helped shape the woman I am today. I think the most prized card in the box isn’t signed, but I know what it is: my Grandmother’s dill pickle recipe, in her hand. I’ve never seen another pickle recipe like it and nothing tastes the same.
Her pickles were kept on a shelf in the basement and you had to go past the scary coal bin to get to that shelf. It was worth the trip.
Like many of my new inheritances, I don’t know what I’m going to do with this box, but there are many parts of it I plan to keep.