Recipes For Success

Susan thumbed the pages nervously, listening to the paper crinkle. She opened the small black book, then closed it, and then opened it again. The bright morning sun illumined the pages, stained and yellowed with age. Each page contained a secret, carefully scribed in faded blue ink. It was not scrawled or scribbled; each letter was marshalled with impeccable penmanship onto ruled lines that had faded nearly out of existence.

The secrets were precious, but as she waited on that clear spring morning to find out if they had earned her twenty thousand dollars, the stains on the pages seemed even more precious than the neatly written words.

Susan had entered her family recipe book into combat. Combat with new wave fusions, Food Network flourishes, and all the avocado laced hipster dishes a team of college-aged chefs could muster.

The contest rules were vague; there was no single ingredient that had to be used, no particular category or meal that had to be explored, the magazine had simply put twenty thousand dollars up for the three best recipes any particular person had handy. After weeks of agonizing deliberation, whittling over one hundred recipes down to three, Susan had made her submission. She photocopied the original pages rather than transcribing them, as some small but satisfying tribute to her grandmother, and her grandmother’s flawless penmanship.

The recipes Susan selected represented the heritage of a happy home, and of Sunday visits with her grandmother. She caressed the crisp edge of one page; a hardened smear of Pavlova meringue turning one corner of that page into a stiff off-white triangle like a shard of alabaster. In that smear Susan could feel the warmth of the sun, but not the spring sun actually upon her. She crossed and re-crossed the smear with her thumb and saw herself basking in the radiant summer sun pouring through her grandmother’s immense dining room window. Her memory-self smiled in the vision as she made another huge wedge of Pavlova vanish from the plate.

Coffee stains decorated half the pages, and Susan grinned over the obscene diameter of them, remembering her grandmother’s hideous and far too large mug, shaped like a larger-than-life peach. She tried to conjure a recollection of her grandmother without the mug in her hand, but couldn’t manage to find the image.

Susan let a few more crisp pages fly from one side to the other until it landed on the pie crust recipe. There was only one pie crust recipe, and it was all the pie crust the men and women of her family would ever need. Countless beef potpies, raspberry custard pies, quiches, apple-pear pies, crisped custard tarts, and potatoes pies –colored green with shredded scallions, where all nestled into one indomitable pie crust, the recipe for which never changed. There was a distinct divot in the spine of the small black book corresponding to the pie crust, and if set open on a surface, the book would invariably open up to that page.

Neither Susan’s grandmother nor mother would use anything but a wire pastry blender and mix the whole affair by hand. Susan would never forget the look of scorn on her grandmother’s face when, at seventeen, she suggested using a food-processor crust recipe her then boyfriend swore by. In that moment she was convinced her grandmother was going to smash the obscene peach mug over her head. Instead her grandmother simply slid the bowl across the counter and handed Susan the pastry blender. After that, the food-processor was removed from its usual cupboard, and it was not until Susan was eighteen that she found it up on a high shelf in the basement, next to a collection of old empty shoe polish tins.

Susan was almost thirty now, her grandmother had passed some years earlier, and Susan’s mother was now grandmother to Susan’s son, and living in grandmother’s house, ever subject to the same Sunday visits. Attending the announcement of the contest winner was the first time she had left her son alone, ever. Nearly ten months, the baby was safe with his grandmother, being gently rocked, Susan imagined, in the same huge dining room window by which she’s devoured far more Pavlova than any one person should consume.

Susan flicked a few more pages and found again the Pablum scar, where she had, quite recently, spilt a small amount of the bland mixture onto the coveted baked cheesecake recipe. She was heart-broken, later finding the gluey cereal had cemented the pages together, fusing the cheesecake recipe with that of bran muffins. She had to restrain herself from frantically tearing the pages free, destroying both recipes, and instead stayed up one night with a clothes iron and exacto-knife surgically removing one page from the other. At length her efforts were successful, and there was a minimum of repair required. She passed the book to her mother who very adequately copied much of the finesse in her grandmother’s penmanship over the irrecoverable sections claimed by the Pablum.

Susan flipped back and forth again, fanning the pages in the clean spring air. She shifted her weight to and fro on the damp park grass and looked up expectantly at the large gazebo, in desperate need of some new paint, from whence the winner would be announced. She looked back down at the book and clapped it together, pressing a palm to either side, almost prayer-like.

There was a water stain growing on the ceiling of her living room she had been trying to attend to, but money was tight and time was tighter. Her father had passed, a long while before her grandmother had. Susan was too young when it happened to be certain of what she might have missed in having a father, but she thought that pale brown water stains on ceilings was something that she surely would have called Dad about.

As confident of the three recipes she had submitted: the Pavlova, cheesecake, and pie crust, Susan was confident in three things the money would go towards: some attention to the water stain, a new wire pastry blender, and a little black book. Her grandmother had all but filled the original in her hands, and her mother had finished it off by the time she was born. She would start her own, filling it up with new recipes, and some old ones too.

She kept her hands pressed on the time-dulled black cover and let the spring sun warm her face, pretending it was from the window of her grandmother’s dining room. It felt like a good day to win, it felt like a good day to bake, but more than anything it felt like a good day to start something new. Whether or not she won, she told herself, she was stopping off that morning for a new black book.