Second Place: Secret Recipes

The dig began the summer after you died, in our old island farmhouse.

Ghosted by three generations of writers and artists, I excavate my way through the old house—a museum of antiques and books and family heirlooms. In the hallway, the watercolors you painted: lupine and lady slippers. Old manuscripts buried in attic chests. Cobwebbed memories clinging to the barnboard bookshelves dad built when we first moved in fifty years ago.

I move slowly, watchful of the delicate balance of our literary ecosystem. Let’s start with the bookshelves, Mum, I tell your ghost, where you are surrounded by everything you love. Old-fashioned boardgames. A black and white photograph of us at the beach. Books about England, about wildflowers, about cooking. Outlaw Cook, Fading Feast. Real American Food, with its prized author inscription from Jan and Michael Stern: “Dear Karyl, we love thinking that you have our book in your house…because we know and love your house, thanks to Cook & Tell. Keep cooking, keep telling!”

King Henry figurines. Teacups, toasters, typewriters. Also: hats. Lots of hats. Berets, rain hats, fishing caps slung from splintery beams in the old barn you and dad turned into our living room. The antique top hat you wore in the Memorial Day parade when I was nine. How we hoisted your tiny piano onto the Mother’s Club float. How you played The Battle Hymn of the Republic on its yellowed ivory as the procession wound its way around the island. How the islanders clapped.

The musty scent of centuries as I wander through stacks of ancient encyclopedias. Caressing the spines is like touching old skin. Chalky. Rough. In the distance, the whisper of church bells.

I spend days touring these exhibits. Weeks. Months. It is difficult to tear myself away from the past. The lure of our family history has me in its archival grasp.

Your father and his nostalgia, you’d say, before you forgot he was your husband, before you forgot your life—your father was always happier staying in the past.

All this—and I, the sole curator, making room for my own self.

*

In the far corner of the attic, where I snuck cigarettes so long ago, lie the languid remnants of a foodie’s life.

A grocery bag from the old A & P where dad bagged groceries the summer you two first met, its contents overflowing. A tattered recipe for Parisian Rice Salad written on a notepad. Once-glossy pages ripped from an old Ladies Home Journal for a brunch buffet. Fan mail from your readers, sharing their favorite brownies and potato salads. Recipe cards in faded ink. A spiral-bound cookbook from the Methodist Church bake sale.

And the stacks of Cook & Tell, the newsletter you wrote and illustrated for more than thirty years. My memories waver like the rippled glass in the attic windows. Your aura permeates every barnboard bookshelf, every cedar clapboard.

From the shrouded fog of reminiscence, specters of ancestors appear. Grand-Mère’s tea set, tarnished sterling. Handmade Valentine’s Day cards I made you—faded hearts, Crayola sentiments. Passports and past lives sheathed in Ziplock bags—Peru, Morocco, Austria, Greece. Old Butterick patterns. Remember that flowered blouse I made in Home Ec, I whisper, with two different length sleeves? All the outfits you sewed for me. Skirts, A-line dresses, a jumper.

 When I was in Junior High, you wrote in your newsletter all those years ago, we didn’t have cute, young Home Ec teachers or boys in our class. We had Miss Bryant. In Miss Bryant’s eighth grade Home Economics Class, we did not have fun.

Before we ever got to cooking, we had to make shapeless white aprons and tacky little headbands in the sewing room, under the critical eye of the unsmiling Home Ec teacher. Once outfitted in identical kitchen costumes, we were allowed to cook.

I was never at ease in the Home Ec room. I had no aptitude in the ways of the kitchen, no interest in things culinary, and Miss Bryant scared me.

 In the dim silence of a 40-watt bulb, future me collides with the comforting past. Here, in attic shadows, glimmers of grandparents: sketches and sepia-toned portraits, a battered Bonwit Teller hatbox adorned with violets. Typewritten manuscripts on onionskin paper crackling with age. A vintage Gourmet magazine, open to a story by your mother-in-law: “A Kitchen is a Kingdom.” In the red scrapbook, her newspaper columns. The faint scent of mildew embedded in its fragile pages. Recipes for pumpkin cornbread and apple crumble.

 You will find yourself belonging more and more to your old house, my grandmother wrote, years before you gave birth to me. For this is what happens: you belong to it, not it to you.

In these strata, I have unearthed a time capsule preserved in centuries-old attic amber for discovery by a future civilization.

My attic is a room-sized version of a small town whose population swells to the point where no one looks familiar any more. In short, you told your readers, I have lost my way.

Taken piece by piece, the attic’s contents are somewhat marvelous: the stamp collection of my youth; the collected grade-school works of a daughter who is now a college freshman; the hunting and fishing regalia of a husband who hasn’t been hunting in twenty-five years, or fishing in ten.

The worthless and valuable are present in roughly equal quantities. There’s the cradle, circa 1700, in which the abovementioned daughter spent the better part of the first two months of her life. Eleven jars of my orange marmalade, circa 1978, that cooked too long and dark and never thickened. Slipcovers for furniture we no longer own.

But taken as a whole, the attic’s contents are a mess.

The attic of my dreams is a Memory Lane under the eaves. It should smell of old wood, like the inside of an antique desk. The attic of reality—the one in the house on Love’s Cove—is a dead end. It smells of mothballs. A proper attic is a nostalgia scrapbook in 3D, furnished with trunks full of antique gowns and old love letters. My attic houses old clothes—the wide-cuffed, the narrow-lapelled, the tacky—stuffed in boxes along with hopes they will rise from the ashes of fashion disfavor sometime hence. For romance, we have ten years’ worth of canceled checks.

The quaintness quotient of my attic is zero.

But why should I clean up the place? What would I do for aggravation?

An upper story in chaos seems a minor enough vice to hang on to. It’s the only one I’ve got.

And I—last in the lineage, creating a future legacy.

*

Three thousand miles away in my other home, there is no attic. No framed Home Sweet Home hanging crookedly above the door, the one you cross-stitched a lifetime ago, its red embroidery thread now a shade of dusty rose. This house is stucco, not cedar; as beige and bland as the desert that surrounds it. In this kitchen, we could fit three of our island kitchens.

I have no attic to excavate. But I do have cupboards. And in those cupboards, there are recipes.

The Moosewood Cookbook from my early twenties, when I fancied myself a vegetarian. The old Joy of Cooking you gave me for a wedding gift, complete with food stains and notes penciled in its margins. The Lucite recipe box, a wedding gift from my first my mother-in-law. Microessays scribbled on tiny recipe cards, stories splattered with layers of memory. Beef stroganoff. Egg tarts. Casserole Italiano.

For what are recipes but the stories of our lives?

*

Favorite Peanut Butter Fudge (1974)

From the Kitchen of: Mum

Cook to soft-ball stage on candy thermometer: 2 c. sugar, ½ c. milk, dash salt. Add 1 c. peanut butter, 2 heaping dinner spoons of marshmallow fluff and 1 t. vanilla. Beat until it starts to thicken. Pour into buttered 8” pan.

We were a family, once, but we were an odd family: two intellectuals and their only child. You, the freelance artist and dad, the oceanographer. All those places you lived—Boston, Annapolis, Miami, Houston, San Diego—only to end up on the little Maine island where you and dad met twenty years before. The island where I grew up, in our old farmhouse that looks out on the cove.

In that old house, I first learned to cook. You taught me how to make a lattice pie crust. The rolling pin awkward in my little-girl hands. In that tiny kitchen, no bigger than the galley on dad’s sailboat, we baked Christmas cookies and peach pies and licked peanut butter fudge batter from a wooden spoon.

 The kitchen is the one place in our house where you can’t go to sit down and read a magazine, you wrote in Cook & Tell years later. There’s no room for a chair, and the kitchen table is in the dining room. So you go in there on business and all business is transacted vertically. But the business is a pleasure. It is satisfying and soothing to cook, to make things to eat, to put a collection of ingredients together in the same room and watch something magic happen.

 When dad left us for another family, I made a special dinner in our little kitchen on New Year’s Eve—a Parent Trap-style attempt to get you two back together. The tourtière itself was magic: buttery pastry, a subtle hint of cloves in the pork filling. But the magic of reconciliation, I learned, exists only on the silver screen.

Even cleaning up afterwards is like a miracle: Everything is a mess, and then everything is back in order. The curtain falls on another performance in the Theatre of the Kitchen. Tomorrow the show opens again.

Our-family, fractured. The way the eaves have split away from the roof on our old house.

*

5-Can Casserole (1978)

From the Kitchen of: “Mom2”

Mix together 1 can tuna, 1 can cream of mushroom soup, 1 can cream of chicken soup, 1 can evaporated milk, 1 can chow mein noodles. Put in casserole dish and bake 20 mins at 350.

I was the second runaway in the family. Three years after dad left, I also left for another family. Another mother, another high school, another life. Me and a tote bag stuffed with Levi’s and flannel shirts, on a greyhound bus bound for a remote fishing village on the easternmost spot in the nation. First to see the sunrise. Edge of the earth.

 At forty, I was suddenly single, you wrote in your first newsletter. I needed a job to bring in some shekels and to assure me I was of value to somebody besides my dog and my daughter, so I talked the local weekly into giving me a food column that was part day-in-the-life, part recipes.

 In the vast kitchen of the other house, where my other family lived, my other mother baked oatmeal bread in the woodstove. She made spice cake from a mix and spaghetti pie, too; served up Kraft macaroni and cheese in all its orange neon glory. In that old nineteenth century inn—the Bed & Breakfast my father never quite got off the ground—I could get lost. There, I was fearless.

 Each column would include a recipe that would correlate with the “story,” however tenuous the connection. Whether this would be possible remained to be seen. But I was cocky, borderline impertinent, and whistling in the dark about almost everything in that transitional time of my life. I was noticing puddles and rainbows more keenly than before. My home, my friends, and my neighborhood had taken on new significance. I had the feeling that endless subject matter was out there to plug into and turn into writing–and, I hoped, reading–matter. 

 Fourteen years old and already I knew everything: how to hide, how to drink, how to twist the knife.

*

Verna’s Mustard Pickles (1981)

From the Kitchen of: Verna M.

Bring to a boil: 1 c. salt, 1 c. dry mustard, 1 t. alum, 4 c. sugar, 1 gallon vinegar, handful of pickling spice. Cool and pour over cucumber spears. Store in jars or crocks.

Three years later, on a snowy Sunday in February, you and dad drove four hours to the old mill town in the North Woods to see me—from separate starting points, because by then, we had all started separate journeys—the three of us crammed in Verna Muldoon’s riverfront row house, where I rented a room during my senior year of high school. Verna in the background leaning against the kitchen sink, teacup in hand. Paul Harvey on the transistor radio atop an ancient Maytag. Verna: she might have been smoking a Pall Mall and if she wasn’t, the tiny kitchen reeked of it, seventy-some years of chain-smoking embedded in its walls. I wondered if you noticed the peeling yellowed wallpaper; if you noticed how Verna’s hand shook as she raised the teacup to her puckered lips. You would have noticed the lack of lipstick, though, for you never went anywhere without mauve Revlon on your lips, even if it was to the living room to practice piano songs for church, but you probably would not have noticed that the teacup was half full of blackberry brandy.

 The female offspring I used to call The Kid arrived for a short overnight visit last weekend, you shared with your readers. All of a sudden she was too attractive, too tall, too blond, too adult to be called The Kid anymore.

While turkey soup simmered on the back burner, Amie’s recorded music once again played through the house, filling closets, corners and the quiet places in our thoughts. From a perch on the kitchen counter, we sparred about politics. I was asked to explain my position on the ERA. She tried on my shoes, she washed the dishes, she borrowed the car.

My electric Brisker was admired, as well as the crackers therein. The pot of experimental blue cheese spread I had just made lost considerable ground. A quantity of peanut butter graham cookies was noted, duly approved and consumed forthwith. She didn’t even ask her usual, “Did you use whole wheat flour on these?” and seemed not to notice I had.

Sunday afternoon came and Amie went. She left only cookie crumbs and the sweet smell of shampoo and bath powder in the upstairs bathroom. I sat quietly in the chair by the slow fire in the living room woodstove, remembering. Goodbye Amie, I said to myself. That was you.

And if you didn’t notice the liquor at 10 a.m., it was because you were there for one reason: to sign the emancipation papers that would proclaim me an adult at seventeen. And in that moment, none of us could have guessed that in unshackling myself from my family, I would detach from my own soul. That three months later I’d be dangerously close to quitting high school. That I’d be living in a trailer home in that mill town with a violent husband. That, twenty years later I would desperately want to jump from the twelfth floor of the Cleveland Hilton. That in the reparations I would make to my family decades later, I would become a mother to my parents and best friend to myself.

*

Rae McPherson’s Coffee Cake (1982)

From the Kitchen of: Pansy

Cream together ½ c. shortening, 1 c. sugar, 2 eggs, 1 c. buttermilk, 1 t. vanilla, 2 c. flour, 1 t. baking powder, 1 t. baking soda, ¼ c. brown sugar, ½ t. salt. For topping, ½ c. chopped nuts, 1 t. cinnamon, ¼ c. brown sugar

Pour half the batter in pan, layer with half the topping, repeat. Bake 35 min at 350.

When I was eighteen and attempting to be the perfect wife, I cooked everything: broiled mushroom-and-blue-cheese appetizers; Chex mix; seven-layer dip; sweet and sour pork; blueberry cobbler.

Dabbling in domesticity, I wallpapered my new kitchen in white and harvest gold to brighten up the trailer’s paneled walls. Deep-cleaned the scratchy plaid wing chair that reeked of Marlboros. Served coffee cake and casseroles from the recipe card collection my new mother-in-law had written for me. Packed my husband’s lunch pail—olive loaf sandwiches and Toll House cookies—for his graveyard shift at the woolen mill.

The seeds for my newsletter were planted a week before my wedding, you wrote in the introduction to your cookbook. It had dawned on my mother, although not on me, that I was embarking on a major enterprise with a serious deficiency. I had no three-by-five card file of recipes, not a single family favorite committed to memory, and not even a scintilla of interest in cooking. In a week, I’d be married, I kept telling her, and cooked food would just happen.

I took her Joy of Cooking on my honeymoon and read it on the long drive from Massachusetts to Texas. As the years passed, I began to embrace cooking as a hobby and a craft, not just a survival skill. I like to talk. I like to meet people, and I wanted to know what they were cooking.

After six years of writing a food column for the local newspaper, I decided to cast a wider net, to find out what was cooking outside my neighborhood—to people like me, who enjoyed relaxed, foody conversation and ideas they could latch onto immediately, without being made to feel dysfunctional for not using cilantro. Thus, what began as a weekly column grew into the monthly newsletter, Cook & Tell.

It’s a long way from my mother’s kitchen. She gave me the nudge I needed to discover what fun it is to cook. Through thirty-some years and nearly four hundred issues of my newsletter, subscribers have helped me pass the nudge along.

 My stint as a starter wife lasted as long as my short-lived passion for cooking. And the groom.

*

Chili Con Carne (2001)

From the Kitchen of: Mum

Sauté onions and garlic in oil. Before done, start frying 1 ½ lb. hamburg in pan with onions and garlic. Add 2 T chili powder, 2 T. cumin, salt to taste and a dash of cayenne pepper. Add one can B & M baked kidney beans and 1 8-oz. can each tomato sauce and paste.

A year after the turn of the new millennium, your cookbook was published. I had a new husband, a new house, a new promotion in my jet-setting sales career. And three years of sobriety.

I wasn’t cooking much then, the microwave and Vita-Mix the centerpieces of my barely-used kitchen. On rare occasions, I cooked Sunday suppers as you had done long ago: meatloaf, roasted salmon and red potatoes. And sometimes, I made your chili, the room pungent with the aroma of garlic and cumin.

 In keeping with the definition of receipt, the old-fashioned word for recipe, I have been but one receiver in a chain of receivers. Like many of my readers, I have tweaked and tinkered with many of the recipes, but it is not my wish to take credit for them. For this book, you wrote in the Introduction, I’ve collected subscribers’ favorites, as well as my own. Some of the recipes represent the easygoing food that real people dig into on a daily basis and want to talk about, fiddle with and make again and again. Others were clipped from the papers of newspapers or magazines by avid collector cooks, who added notes in the cramped margins about optional ingredients and alternative methods.

There would have been no book without the newsletter and no newsletter without subscribers. I owe them each a big Thank You for sharing their recipes, anecdotes and precious memories, all of which have helped to make Cook & Tell what many readers have called their “favorite piece of mail” through the years.

 Over the years I’d grown distant and self-important, too busy to visit for more than a day. For so much of my life, I had been lost—to myself, to you, to the bottle. In sobriety, I found clarity. Possibilities. A new life. You found a new life, too: a book tour, radio interviews, a TV spot to pitch your book.

I never told you enough how proud of you I was.

*

You announced your retirement in your newsletter in the same way you acknowledged your second husband’s death. You buried the lede.

Your farewell, a one-liner signed with a “Toodle-Oo!” and a sketch of you in your apron waving goodbye appeared at the bottom of page four in your last newsletter, May 2013.

The year after you retired, I retired, too.

The sales career that had been my world for the past twenty-five years had slowly demagnetized my soul—relentless production quotas, multi-million-dollar budgets, too many business trips. I wanted to spend time with my husband and my dogs. To be home for more than a week at a time. I wanted to plant my roots somewhere solid: in the Southwestern desert home where we’d lived for nearly two decades.

Those roots, it turned out, were 3,000 miles away. Nothing is anchored in sand.

 Shortly before Amie’s arrival, you once wrote, I had been tidying up the shelves of my studio, where miscellaneous files and clutter have reposed, unconsulted, for lo, these many moons. Somewhere between folders marked “Random” and “Do Something” I ran across the family archives, a collection of the written works of a very prolific small daughter and a notebook of jotted down conversations and monologues of the sort kept by most mothers during the toddling to grade-school years of the bairns.

There was the New Year’s resolution written on the widely spaced lines of a second-grade paper: “In 1972, I will set the table every night and not sulk.” There was the story I commissioned the seven-year-old to write to lift my spirits one day when I was overwhelmed by ironing pile-up. I gave her a title and she was to do a story, which follows in its entirety:

The Ironing Lady: Once there was a lady who loved to iron. She ironed from morning to night.

To this day, rumpled articles of clothing dating back to those unironed first grade days remain unironed, unsummoned, at the bottom of Ironing Mountain.

Those were the days of pretend, which all mothers remember and most children forget. Perhaps the most charming line of all from the pretend time, is this one, recorded in my eavesdropping notebook. Speaking into the receiver of an unconnected but real-live telephone, the three-year-old repeats what she things she has heard her elders say time and again: “Hello, Mary? This is you.”

All families have their collected mementoes recorded in photos, notes, or indelibly impressed in memory alone. I remember Amie’s stuffed animal Valentine party, sailboat rides for dolls in the kitchen sink, a picnic with Pooh and all the bears, a birthday party for the beloved black dog, with a cake made of Milk Bones stuck together with peanut butter. These landmarks of an imaginative childhood bring a dimension of fantasy to the lives of the adults most closely involved. It’s a dimension that continues to enchant us long after the child has forgotten the ironing lady, the promise to set the table, the bears’ picnic.

*

I became a mother at fifty. Until then, the only kids in my life had tails: two dogs and a cat. Motherhood slowly seeped into my life and in a gradual role reversal, I became your mom.

You were still cooking then, a batch of applesauce from the crabapple trees out back; the occasional fish chowder; an omelette. Then, you still called me your daughter.

Later, a dishtowel caught fire; blueberries were left out of the cake you made for afternoon tea. So, we cooked together. I’d measure the molasses and flour and ginger; you’d mix the batter for our favorite molasses cookies. I helped you tie your sneakers, put on your purple mittens, wipe up spilled juice.

By then, you’d stopped drawing, so we walked through the woods taking snapshots to capture the lupine and lady slippers. The piano was long out of tune, its keys dusty. Sometimes you scribbled in a notebook, before the words lost their meaning. Before you lost your words.

By then, I’d become the meal planner, the cook, the grocery shopper. I made three-Bean Salad and lasagna; overnight oatmeal and blueberry pie. And I made your signature chili. And whenever I’d make a batch in your cast iron frying pan, seasoned with years of inspiration and love, you’d say: this chili is delicious; where did you get the recipe?

*

A few months before you passed away, you asked me to take over the family business. The afternoon had grown warm, the day more like August than late September. Behind you, a seagull squawked and I wavered for a moment. My grasp on the time-space continuum as tenuous as yours. And when I said, yes, mum, it would be an honor, your smile lit up your entire face then, eyes glittering like the sun on the bay.

How could I know that in preserving the family food writing legacy that began nearly a century ago, I would reassemble our lives through recipes? That I would discover the secret recipe to keep you alive forever?

 Welcome to Cook & Tell, I wrote to a new generation of foodies in the first issue of its digital reincarnation, a foodletter about cooking and family and life on a Maine island.

Almost half a century ago, my mom, Karyl Bannister, started writing Cook & Tell as a weekly column in the local newspaper. A few years later, she launched a monthly cooking newsletter by the same name which she wrote, illustrated and published for thirty-plus years, working her way into the hearts and kitchens of thousands of home, hobby and professional cooks all over the world.

As years turned to decades, she became a local celebrity, parlaying that monthly newsletter into a book deal, all the while still publishing her newsletter. And all without the internet or social media.

Although she passed away last year, I’m keeping her spirit alive by reviving her newsletter in small bites, with excerpts from the archives and occasional “orts” from me, all with recipes and sketches tossed in for good measure.

Our time together was sweet and precious and achingly beautiful. In the end, cooking reconnected us, a slow simmer of stories and suppers retold in recipes handed down through generations. Cooking brought me back to the kitchen, full circle. The magic had been there all along.

My world without you seems lonely at first, until I remember that you and all the family ghosts live on in this space. And in all our kitchens, real or make-believe, amidst the velvety aroma of ginger and spice, where memories melt the way our favorite fudge dissolves on our tongues, I say to myself: Hello, Mum. This is you.

-Amie McGraham

Amie McGraham grew up on an island in Maine where she spends summers as curator of family ghosts and recipes. Winner of the 2022 Intrepid Times travel writing competition, her work has appeared in anthologies and literary magazines including Brevity, Short Reads, Maine Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, Exposition Review and HerStry. Currently cooking up new stories for her foodletter Cook & Tell, she also produces a weekly 100-word newsletter, the micro mashup.