My Mother's Cookbook

Last year for Christmas, my oldest daughter wanted me to hand write all of my favorite recipes on recipe cards and give them to her as a gift.  She specifically said no computer print outs, they must be handwritten.   I mean really, who writes today, everything is done on the computer!  So after some tiring and hand breaking days of writing out the cards, I presented them to her as she wished.  I had two cookbooks of my mother's and I gave her one of those books along with the cards.  We like to keep things in the family, we're Italian.  I kept the other one of my mother's cookbooks and my sister had one, so there were three books all together. I asked my sister if I could copy the handwritten recipes from the book that she had, and this is the book you see below.  My sweet, dear sister gave me the book, because she said she didn't cook much, and all she wanted was copies of a few handwritten recipes in it, so I copied them for her.  The main recipe she wanted from the book was the pizzelles my mother use to make.  My sister is the pizzelle maker in the family, no one can top her pizzelles, she makes hundreds and hundreds of them for Christmas.

Let me start by saying that my mother was a fantastic cook.  It showed all over the kitchen when she was in there making meals.  There would be food everywhere, the counters, the stove, and yes even the ceiling. We all still laugh about her adventures in the kitchen.  As you can see from this very old cookbook that is stained (she used it a lot) that it has a few of her very own handwritten recipes in it.  There were recipes in the book that did not have titles on them and we didn't know what they were, so the recipe was baked to figure out what it made.  I can bet my mother knew what the recipe made.  I made the chocolate cake (from a previous blog) from this book and had to decipher some of her writing, because it was stained, and I could not read it.  What a treasure this book is, it's dirty with memories of homemade meals and baked goods that she used to make.  She also use to smoke, it has burn marks from dropped cigarettes , it's a piece of her that is left behind.  We laughed when we saw all of this in the book, because that was her and will always be her. The binding is all dried up, it's ripped, the handwritten recipes are faded or blurred, the pages are falling out, it's stained with food and has to be held together with a large rubber band, but you know what, this is HER book and these are HER recipes, and every time I use it I will remember all those fun times in the kitchen with mom.