Recipe Box

It looks a little pitiful, graced with eons of grease and floured thumbprints, this chintzy hinge-topped recipe box. Beneath its lid, yellowed by butter and time, flimsy index cards bear stains, those ghosts of finished dishes, and blue ink polished to softness by salt. This dinner hymnal has duds and bygone fads, fattened with aspic, chipped beef gravy, derby pie, and “company coming” potatoes doped with sour cream. Resist the temptation to toss it as you clean out the cabinets at what was your parents’ house. There will come a day when the cure for what hurts is Brunswick stew, the steps surviving in your mother’s slanting script. You need to sing these hymns again, written in kitchens now cold by hands no longer stirring.