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Illustration by Christine Wei
It is faded, dog-eared and musty smelling now. It has travelled with me for decades as we moved from city to city, across Canada and around the world. My trusty old file folder box of favourite recipes is full of dishes from friends, family and loved ones, some still here, many now gone. And oh, the sweet, sometimes spicy memories that burst from that box every time I dip in - it’s like a recipe box of nostalgia. Food for thoughtfulness.
Under “Appetizers and Beverages” is a tequila-stained scrap of paper with a hand written recipe for Best Margarita. Its from my best friend, Carol Anne. The paper is worn and wrinkled now, just like us. Throughout the years, Carol and I shared many giggle-filled evenings singing and knocking back those Best Margaritas as only besties can do. Olé my old friend. Although mine is a mock margarita now, I still clink glasses with you across the miles.
Sprinkled generously throughout the box are neatly typewritten index cards, now a bit faded and shabby like the box. Recipes for traditional Russian Doukhobor dishes such as borscht, blintsi, vareniki, kartoshnik. All were typed by my Russian mother in law over 50 years ago.
She gave me those recipes so I would be able to prepare them for her boy. I still suspect she left certain little ingredients out, so that they would never be as perfect as his Mom’s. But, like our good relationship, those recipes have withstood the test of time. I pulled out that borscht recipe so my partner could have what he calls “Russian Penicillin” when COVID finally got us this past summer.
Neatly folded inside my recipe box is a rich reminder of Pepita, who I met at 17. We were hippie chicks together, mud bathing in a stream on a rural Nova Scotia farm and frolicking on the streets of old Montreal. Pepita went on to become a documentary filmmaker, me a journalist. Not bad for a couple of teenage groupies from New Brunswick. I lost Pepita to cancer several years ago, but the richness of our friendship and all we shared remains with me. Her recipe that I treasure is for a perfect chocolate cake, as dark and beautiful as her dancing brown eyes.
In the unmistakable slanted handwriting of my childhood friend, Murielle is a recipe for Lentil and Brown Rice Soup. Despite the efforts of the strict nuns in our Catholic grade school, her distinctive writing style continued. I have never made that soup. I don’t like lentils. But every time I hear the word lentil I think of Murielle’s recipe and her special way of writing and I keep it just because it reminds me of her.
As happens in life, if we live long enough, some friends become estranged along the way. I still have a saucy salsa recipe from Rocket. Every time I make his Mother’s Chili Sauce, I relish the sweet taste of a friendship once shared.
Another favourite is “Patsy’s Festive Egg Nog.” Patsy was the smartest person I ever knew, scary smart comes to mind. She wrote the ingredients on a hand-made Christmas card. Sadly, ALS took its toll on Patsy and she opted for a medically assisted death. I miss those cards, like I miss Patsy’s sharp wit. But we can toast to her memory with her her egg-nog recipe.
Finally, filed under Sweets and Treats in my folder of fond memories is my Mom’s hand-written recipe for shortbread. She called them “Short Cakes” and I have the recipe carefully covered in plastic. Each year I take it out gently, terrified it might be faded or illegible. But it survives. My Mom’s writing in cursive is perfect and small. It reminds me of her letters that she wrote as I travelled far from our rural New Brunswick home. I make those short cakes every year. It’s a Christmas tradition. And there’s one little piece of advice at the end of the recipe that always gets to me: “Watch.”
Decades ago, she was showing me how to make those short cakes in her cozy Maritime kitchen. As we chatted away, we left them in the oven a shade too long and they burned to a crisp. She was embarrassed. Those short cakes with the icing and the cherries on top were her pride and joy. Now they are mine. Each holiday season, as the aroma of short cakes wafts from my oven, I’m filled with warm memories of the Christmas spirit in my Mom’s humble hometown kitchen.
Loved ones here or gone all share my kitchen. They have a special place in my treasured recipe box, their love scribbled on scraps of paper, neatly typed on index cards, surrounded by pretty notepaper, noted in perfectly formed cursive script, or dashed off in latter day emails. Most of all, they are all baked into a corner of my heart.
Marlene McArdle lives in Nelson, B.C.