Stirring Memories: Cooking from My Mother's Recipes

It always starts with the handwriting.

Faded ink, loops of cursive pressed into yellowing scraps of paper, some smudged from flour or oil—each recipe feels like a postcard from the past. My mom passed away from cancer three years ago, and yet every time I open her old recipe books, I hear her voice like she’s right next to me in the kitchen.

I never realized how much of her lived in those dishes until she was gone.

At first, I couldn’t bring myself to cook from them. Her handwriting, once so comforting, felt like a punch to the chest. I’d open a book, maybe read the first line of her delicious cake recipe, and close it again. It was like trying to speak a language I’d forgotten how to use without her translating the love between the lines.

Then one day, something shifted. I found myself craving her bread rolls and runzas—the kind she’d make when I was coming over from working a long day, or sad or just wanting something filling that would last as delicious leftovers. I gathered the ingredients, her hand-written papers all gathered in front of me like a holy relic, and began. My hands moved more from memory than instruction. Sautéing the onions, waiting for that smell that always meant home. I cried through most of it—some tears from chopping, most from missing her. But when I sat down with that first bite, I felt something I hadn’t in a long time: warmth that reached all the way in.

Now, cooking her recipes has become a ritual. A way to invite her into my everyday life. Her cornbread to go with my chili, her cheesecake on holidays, her bread rolls when I just need to feel held. Sometimes I even hear myself saying the same things she used to, like a kind of culinary déjà vu.

Cooking her food doesn’t fill the hole her death left—but it does help patch it, moment by moment, meal by meal. Her recipes are more than just instructions. They’re a love letter in every bite. A way to remember the sound of her laugh, the warmth of her hands guiding mine, the way she made something as simple as dinner feel like magic.

So when I stir her tomato sauce or knead her biscuit dough, I’m not just feeding myself. I’m keeping her here. Alive in the steam and the spices. In the stories I tell as I cook. In the love I pass on to those who sit at my table.

And I think, in some way, that’s what she always intended.