Recipes
My affection for recipes goes way back. I don't cook much but I've been collecting recipes since, it turns out, grade school. My sister called my mom tonight for a recipe for macaroons, which we thought would be a good dessert to bring to our cousin's upcoming birthday. She wrote the recipe in a familiar green book that I had almost forgotten about, that someone brought all the way from the Philippines - an unusual family heirloom, you might call it. There is nothing special about this book. In fact, it was one of those things that the sugar milling company my father used to work for gives out during anniversaries or some such milestone.
It's a small, green planner for the year 1984 that one of us (my sister or I) had discovered in the back of some old cabinet long after 1984 had passed. I was in grade school, eager to practice writing in script. I would copy out recipes that I thought sounded interesting (Peanut Butter Snowballs, Sunshine Salad, Marvelous Muffins) from magazines, books, even those corny cooking shows. My sister wrote her classmates' then five-digit phone numbers, so I, the little sister, collected as many as I could, too. In the back of the book, there are notes from a Sunday School class and a stern reminder to "Memorize the foll.: 1. All songs 2. All memory verses". There are answers to some kind of quiz: 1. care, race, acre 2. pale, leap, peal 3. name, amen, mean, mane, etc. I had always loved turning words inside out. A page is filled with cliches that would come in handy for those motto sections in slumbooks. "Do your best, God will do the rest." "Lend a hand." And my favorite, "If you drink, you die. If you don't drink, you die. So drink, but moderately, so you live." There are Chinese characters for man, eye, enter, woman, roof, and peace. And then some torn pages, where I had probably written the name of some boy.
Flipping through the book, I smile wistfully as the handwriting gets more legible and the recipes more complicated. Then there's a recipe in my mom's handwriting for cassava cake - short, almost curt. "1 cup cassava, 2 cups coconut milk, butter, sugar, bake 40 min at 350 c." And I cringe, embarrassed to think that she had probably seen my squiggly, childish writing and the recipe for Nutted Three Cheese Log. One of the last recipes I wrote in the book is the one for banana cake, written four - maybe five - years ago, during the summer of bananas, when someone from my dad's farm brought tons of bananas, which ripened faster than we could possibly eat them, and we made banana cake all summer long. "Mix, fold, bake, decorate," I had written, from an Eraserheads' song. Then, a few clippings from newspapers (Fiesta Lengua, Seafood Paella). In the last few pages, my mom had chronicled her blood pressure for about five days and then stopped just like that. The next section of the planner is entitled "Some Basic Tips in Sugar Cane Culture," always present in any book-type thing given out by the sugar company. And then, in the Notes section of the planner, someone (presumably one of our former househelp) had written all of our names (my dad, my mom, my sister, and I) in pretty letters. There's also a slip of paper with a recipe for Sweet and Sour Sauce in my former nanny's handwriting.
Tonight, I discovered a curious little envelope, slipped in between the pages, with my name written on it, 19F, and a date - 10/19/99. Inside I found xrays of my two impacted wisdom teeth, extracted that same year. I remember looking out the window, focusing on a butterfly and yet feeling the dentist tense in exertion. Finding the book tonight has triggered mostly happy memories of a simple, carefree childhood and has made me realize how very different I am and things are now. There are still enough blank pages in the book for a couple of years' worth of recipes, most of which will never be used. Still, I feel a certain fondness for this battered green planner from 1984, with water rings on its cover, that says so much about me.
{Everything Hits At Once, Spoon}
