Mom's Old Handwritten Recipes

Long before the internet became a storage center for any recipe you could ever wish to cook, moms had a different system for finding the recipes they’d use to feed their families. They wrote them down on recipe cards and stored them by the hundreds in recipe boxes and binders.

For some of us, the strongest memories of Mom take place in the kitchen, and reading her handwritten recipe cards puts us right back at her side as we helped her cook and offered our services as taste testers.

We asked a few friends of Legacy to share images of the handwritten recipe cards that they saved after their mothers and grandmothers passed away, along with the stories that come to mind when they cook from those cards today. Looking back at the recipe cards brought up powerful memories and emotions… and it may have prompted a few of us to step into the kitchen and recreate those favorite dishes that were once made with love by Mom.

Valerie: Banana Nut Bread

“I asked my mom to write down some recipes for me maybe 10 years ago. She typically made things without measuring and instead did it by 'handfuls' and 'about this much,' but I made her write them down for me, because I'm not very good in the kitchen and needed cups and tablespoon amounts. My mom wanted to teach me growing up, but I wasn't interested and I remember saying, ‘We have microwaves - I'm all set.’ It's an opportunity I really miss not taking! What's most significant to me about these recipes is my mom died unexpectedly three years ago, shortly after Mother's Day, from complications with pneumonia at 64. When I’d asked her years before to write down those recipes, I was only thinking that I wanted to make the banana bread and peanut butter cookies from my childhood because nothing is better and I need measurements! What they've turned into are two treasures. We didn't know we were on borrowed time. You can see the pages are stained from use, which I think my mom would love because it means that I'm actually using them!”

Judi: Hot Buttered Rum Mix

“My mom, Joyce Albers, died 8 years ago. She was a fabulous cook, and also taught high school home ec classes. She could whip up a pie crust in her sleep. My dad, Tom, would push back from the dinner table and say ‘Good meal, Joyce.’ My kids still say that! Mom would have a tub of hot buttered rum mix in the freezer, so if people stopped by at the holidays she could serve them a tasty hot drink. The things I like about this recipe is ‘real hot water’ – not boiling, or anything specific. And that she wrote ‘Love, Mom’ on it. I suspect I asked for it, she wrote it and mailed it.

Chuck: Chocolate Chip Cookies

“Every year just before Christmas when I was a kid, my mom, her sister, and her mother would spend an entire weekend baking cookies. Usually at Nana’s house, but one year that it was at our house I remember a friend coming over and being truly overwhelmed by the site of hundreds of cookies cooling on every flat surface. Traditional Italian cookies were the main event, but as a kid my favorite were chocolate chip cookies. They made a bunch of those at Christmas, too, and of course my mom would make a batch here and there during the year, too. I was in my late twenties when my mom died, and learning all the family recipes had just not been on my radar. By the time it was, my mom’s sister and her mother were both gone, too. I had ended up with my mom’s recipe tins, but though the cookie recipes were there, they were intimidating: a lot of knowledge about how to proceed was assumed and not written down, and they were written to make a ton of cookies. Luckily, an aunt on my father’s side had her own versions of the Italian cookies and was very happy to teach me how to make them. My wife has a strong family tradition of cookie-making as well, so we took on the task of making her family’s traditional cookies as well as my family’s Italian cookies. One year I was telling my wife about my mom’s chocolate chip cookies, that they were my favorite cookies as a kid and that they were different somehow than the usual Toll House recipe. My mom had her own special variation, though I couldn’t say exactly what was different. We went looking through her recipe tins and sure enough, we found it, written in my Mom’s hand on a folded sheet of notepaper. And it was of course enough to make a thousand cookies or so. But we did the work of cutting it down to a more reasonable yield, and made them that Christmas. When they came out of the oven, I knew they looked right. And when I tasted one it transported me right back to her kitchen. That first bite literally brought tears to my eyes. Another year, looking through the tins again, we found another chocolate chip cookie recipe, this one professionally printed and clipped off from the box that Crisco sticks come in. Crisco. That was the odd ‘secret ingredient’ in my mom’s recipe, the ingredient that made them so different from most chocolate cookie recipes that use butter. We compared it to the recipe my mom had written down and it became clear: my mom’s special chocolate chip cookie recipe was just the recipe from the side of a box of Crisco, but tripled. Now my nieces and nephews are young adults, and, at a younger age than I did, have become interested in learning the family recipes. So we have them over to make Christmas cookies every year, the Italian cookies and the chocolate chips. And, like my mom, we sometimes make a batch at other times throughout the year. They are my daughter’s favorite cookies, just like they were mine when I was a kid, and she has been helping me make them since she was about two years old. Now, at not quite six, she nearly has the ingredients list memorized and proclaims herself a chocolate chip cookie expert. I thought that if each of us made a recipe from the book, it would be our way of keeping her memory alive.