Because folded in at the potato soup, with my name on the outside in her round hand, was the recipe.
Her potato soup. The one she made every October and every time somebody in this family got bad news, and the one she would never write down for a living soul, including our daughter, including me, for thirty years, because she said it wasn’t a recipe, it was just a feel.
It’s a page and a half. It has things in it like “cook the onion till it quits being loud.” It has a warning about the pepper. It has a line in the middle that says to use the blue pot and no other pot, which I had always thought was superstition and which she explains in one sentence and she is right.
And then I looked at the rest of that cookbook, which I had set aside with a “huh, thanks” and not opened for a year.
It isn’t a church sale cookbook. It’s her mother’s. Fannie Farmer, 1961, and Dot started cooking out of it as a bride in 1996 when her mother handed it down, and every page has her in it.
Margins full of dates. Nov ’99 — first time I made this right. 2004 — Bill hates it, don’t bother. Made this the week Mama died, couldn’t taste anything. A page for meatloaf with a line about our son coming home from the Army. A recipe for a cake she crossed out entirely and wrote never again beside.
Thirty years of our life, written in the margins of somebody else’s book, and I asked for a drill set.
I know she saw my face fall. That is the thing I have to carry.
Six weeks later she was gone before supper.
At the bottom of the soup page:
“Bill — I always said I’d never write it down. I’m writing it down. Don’t you dare tell the girls I gave it to you first.”
I made it in November. It took me four hours and it was not right, and I made it again in December and it was closer.
Our daughter came at Christmas and I gave her a photocopy of that page and she sat down at the table and cried into her coat.
The mixer is on the counter in her favorite color with the bowl still in the plastic. I use it about twice a year and I always feel foolish doing it.
The blue pot’s on the stove. I’m getting closer. I’m not there yet.