Grandma's Recipe Book

My grandmother kept her recipes in an old tobacco tin on the bottom shelf. No actual books. Just scraps of brown paper bags, torn grocery lists, and church flyers with writing scrawled on the back.

You could see the panic in the ink depending on the year. The early stuff from when she first got married was neat and slow. Later on, when she had three boys tearing through the kitchen, the words turned into a fast mess with grease splatters and tea rings over the ingredients. Right across the pancake page she wrote in pencil to add more flour when it rained.

She never used measuring cups. Butter was whatever chunk she sliced off the block with a butter knife, and salt was just a shake from the tin until it looked right. Nobody else could ever copy her cooking because half the steps were missing from the paper. She just knew it in her hands. That tin stayed in the dry sink until she passed, and it still smells like old paper and woodsmoke.