One of my friends recently gave me a beautiful and unique gift. It was her late mother's recipe box, stuffed with tattered and yellowed recipe cards written in her own hand. They were the foods she had grown up with.
A few weeks later I visited my mother, who is now nearing the end of her life, and she too gave me a wonderful gift--her 1947 cookbook that she got as a wedding present. It too is stuffed with many of the hand-written recipes that I had grown up with.
Few things in life can take us back to our childhoods, or make us feel closer to loved ones who have gone, than to eat the foods they once prepared. Not only do we have our mother's recipes, we have many of our grandmother's recipes as well, since the passing down of recipes from mothers to daughters is a tradition in many families. We've decided to preserve our mother's recipes so we can share them with others before they completely fade away. We may also publish them in a cookbook someday, with a portion of the proceeds to go to our mother's favorite charities. Somehow, we don't think our mothers, or our grandmothers, would mind.
