Recipes

"My own mother, your grandmother, gave me nothing in the way of information except a family recipe for plum pudding." Robert Nathan

Today, in a drawer of my mother's desk

I found a long brown box filled

with recipes clipped from newspapers

from magazines, written on index cards,

on scraps of paper scribbled over with purple crayon,

written in the flowing hand of my mother,

and, what took me back, scraps of yellowed paper

filled with my grandmother's blunt and jagged script.

I see than pencil, just a nubbin,

whittled with the paring knife,

and watch her touch the lead to her tongue

to darken the letters she pressed into the paper.

On cold Sunday mornings I smell

cinnamon, nutmeg, raisins,

rising from Grandma's coffeecake,

that crumbles in my fingers onto my plate.

She shows me the outward sweep of the rolling pin

opening pie crust like lily pads in spring,

heaping the shell with apples and fluting the edge.

We butter the scraps of leftover dough,

sprinkle on sugar and cinnamon, fold them over,

and bake until they are golden brown.

I bite into the flaky crust and chewy inside,

catching the flakes than fall

with my hand cupped below my chin.

At Christmas we roll dough for date-filled pillows

wreathed with fork tine lines and cut buttery dough

into stars we sparkle with sugar, and snowmen icy

with frosting and buttoned with raisins.

She had no recipe

for her final pan of bread pudding.

She opened the ice box

to see what scraps were left

and mixed them together--

a little dry bread, some sugar and milk,

a dab of green beans, a dab of corn,

so's not to waste a whit

for "something sweet to quit on."

I never got a recipe for plum pudding

and I, like Robert Nathan, might have lamented

the hunger still gnawing through all the recipes

jotted on cards or torn from papers,

but these recipes scrawled

in that hand as familiar as my own,

appeased my hunger

for ways we had not touched--

my something sweet to quit on.