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The Holy Grail of Recipe BooksLike most women, Mom gets a little stressed out around the holiday season. Okay, if I'm going to be honest, she gets a lot stressed out. (My father, however, doesn't seem to bat an eyelash at the preparations going on around him. He vaguely is aware there is an important date pending that may require him to shower and shave for a family dinner, but that's about it on his radar screen.) In between cleaning and decorating and mailing out Christmas tidings, my mother takes some relaxation in her two-month-long holiday baking marathon. Starting in October there will be cookies, and candies, and cakes and, of course, giant made-from-scratch Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Baking is Mom's form of a day at the spa. Like most cooks, the every day recipes Mom makes throughout the rest of the year are stored in her memory. She can whip up your average spaghetti dinner on a whim. But, for the extra special, once a year recipes, she hauls out the Recipe Book. Mom's Recipe Book is off-limits to strangers, non-family members, and even most friends. To get access, you have to either be related by blood, or prove your worthiness of the Recipe Book through a set of heroic tasks worthy of some Greek legend. There are life-long friends and neighbors back home who've never peeked in its pages. Mom's Recipe Book is practically as sacred to her as any text found in any holy shrine in ancient Egypt. Like a scene out of a Hollywood adventure movie, Mom would take the Recipe Book from its cupboard home once a year to begin the holiday baking marathon. I swear, you could actually hear the theme from Indiana Jones in the background when she lifted it off its shelf. Once, before I was officially let in on the book's secret language, I snuck into our kitchen, climbed up on the counter, and took the Recipe Book down from the shelf by myself. I tried making sense of the note cards and clippings inside it, but it was no use. They all read like ancient hieroglyphics, and I hadn't learned to translate yet. There were no actual measurements listed, and the ingredient listings were in Mom's own shorthand, and without the Rosetta Stone I had no hope of deciphering the recipes within the book's covers. I put it back, disappointed. Few of her recipes have actual measurements in the ingredient listings. There are no cups of this and teaspoons of that like in your average recipes. Mostly, it's "take a pinch and a dash" and "a half a handful." Mostly, she measures by taste and previous experience. She can judge the finished product by just sight and smell--no temperature gauges and time tables for her. Like my sister before me, I was about 10 when Mom first let me crack open the Recipe Book for my first supervised try at baking. She explained the hieroglyphics and showed me how she measured ingredients and the difference between a "pinch" and a "dab." It was as if she was letting me in on the big family secret. Like in the movies, I half expected a gang of karate-chopping chefs to spring out of the shadows and thwart us on our quest for the perfect sugar cookie. Instead, the heroes of the day won and I sat a plate of pretty little sugar cookies at the dinner table that afternoon. I've been fascinated with the Recipe Book ever since. Now that I'm older, I have my own version of the Recipe Book. Inside are the secrets passed on to me from my mother and grandmother. I have my own recipe for Christmas fudge that will bring tears to a grown man's eyes. And it's written in a hieroglyphics only myself and my mother can decipher. And, every year, when I get stressed through the cleaning and decorating and mailing out of my own Christmas tidings, I make sure to take time for relaxing in the kitchen and in the pages of my own sacred Recipe Book. Now, if I could just get the theme music from Indiana Jones out of my head I'd be well on my way to Christmas happiness. Jennifer M. Latzke can be reached by phone at 620-227-1807, or by e-mail at jlatzke@hpj.com. 12/17/07 Date: 12/11/07
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