by Emily Johnson

Created on: January 08, 2009

When my 96 year old grandmother died a few weeks ago and we gathered in her kitchen after the funeral, family members shared memories of holiday gatherings, greedily eating everything she put in front of us and fighting over her mashed potatoes. A farm wife, she had comfort food down to a science. Her meatloaf and hot dishes (yes, that's what we call casseroles around here) were legendary. She could cure any cold with her chicken soup, the stock having been made from farm-raised chickens that actually saw sunshine in their lives. And there was nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, like her Dutch Apple Bars.

Grandma didn't leave much behind by way of material goods, or at least that's what everyone thought. But I discovered my own private gold mine: Her wooden recipe box with hand-written recipes going back to the 1930's, the notebook she used when the box filled up, and her many yellowed cook books with black-and-white photos and hand-written notes carefully made in the margins. Unbelievably, I was the only person who wanted these treasures. I choked back the tears when my mom passed them to me saying, "Keep them."

I love cooking in the digital age and have a laptop in my kitchen dedicated to recipe-hunting. But there is nothing that quite compares to paging through a good cookbook. Great cookbooks are used over and over again. Eventually they become memory-keepers, just as guaranteed to produce feelings of nostalgia as a family photo album. When you find that perfect recipe for a pot roast that just falls apart with a fork, you will go back to it again and again. Each time, you will be reminded of the last meal you prepared using the same recipe. The splatter marks of gravy on the page bring back warm memories of a Sunday afternoon in January when the delicious smell of roast vegetables filled your house and lured everyone to the kitchen. You remember the monopoly game your family played while you cooked, the pop overs that your daughter said were the best in the world, the laughing, the love and the lovliness of hearth and home. These are memories imprinted in your cookbooks that you can touch. No computer monitor can ever compete with that.

There will always be people in the world who love to cook, who want to learn or who just love food. And they will want something tangible that they can look at, touch, feel, and take to bed as reading material with a glass of wine. A laptop wouldn't be the same. So long as we food-lovers and chefs walk the earth, there will always be grandmothers passing their treasured cookbooks and recipes down to another generation. Just as memories never die, cookbooks are here to stay.

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