THE RECIPE BOX

“After she died, I made dishes from it for months, wanting to feel closer to her, wanting to understand us.”

I came across the box during the rushed cleanout of my mother’s independent-living apartment. I thought my sister would want it for one of her three daughters, but they get all their recipes online. I made room in my bag.

Things to know about my mother: She was Lutheran, she was German-American, she knitted and quilted hundreds of items for people in need, she was proud to have rid herself of her Queens accent, she was vain about her legs. She died in 2018, just shy of 92, alone in a skilled-nursing facility. I had planned to be there until the end, despite our 16-year estrangement and the prickly détente that followed. But Mom shooed us out of her room, tired of being watched, and I went off to the airport knowing that everything unsaid and unforgiven would remain so, at least in my lifetime.

She cooked three meals a day, seven days a week, for 66 years, and I vividly remember eating some of the dishes this recipe box produced, yet I have no memory of the box itself. I can’t conjure her flipping through the cards at the round oak table in our Connecticut kitchen or pulling out the perfect dinner choice with an Aha! I can only see her standing at the stove sautéing onions in margarine in her cast-iron skillet, stirring in flour, whisking in milk. She called it white sauce. I didn’t learn the words roux and béchamel until I was in my fifties.

I didn’t see a picture of her abusive father or even know his name until I was 28. All she was willing to tell us about her girlhood were everyday things: rationing and victory gardens and coloring white oleo with a packet of yellow dye. There are cards in the box from this era, including a banana cake that called for sour milk—handy when the iceman was late. There are clipped-out recipes from the 1950s, long before I was born, including one for traditional Maryland crab cakes from my parents’ time in Baltimore, when they had three—not five—children and life was undoubtedly easier for a woman who didn’t enjoy kids.

I didn’t know, when I was 28 and asked her about her father—I didn’t know that in just four years I would become estranged from my father too, and by association from her, after confronting them about my childhood sexual abuse.

My mother was not sweet, but there was sweetness to her—when she talked to my baby brother, for instance, or laughed with her friends. She was a highly competent cook who took no joy in cooking. She loved attention but would deny it if I said so. After she died, I made dishes from the recipe box for months, wanting to feel closer to her, wanting to understand us.

When she was alive, her anger at being implicated in a “terrible crime” (her words) lasted long after we’d reconciled, and so our phone calls were limited to safe topics like the weather. I wish I’d had the box then, so I could have asked her about her notes on the recipe for Good Casserole, or if she ever made the applesauce ham loaf that spoke to our German heritage. I wish I’d told her how often I thought of her when I sautéed onions, how much I appreciated her teaching me her pie-crust recipe. I wish we could have transformed our soured relationship into something as satisfying as that banana cake.

—Stephanie Weaver

What my mother fed me in 1965: corn dog, fries and Coke.

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Stephanie Weaver, MPH, is a writer and TED-style speaking coach. Her fifth book— Bitter, Sweet: How to Heal Yourself When Your Family Is Broken—is due out in April and explores family estrangement through the lens of her mother’s recipe box.

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