Food legacy

This is the sort of thing you see in overly-sentimental movies, like The Notebook, or read about in books like Anne of Green Gables. And it is beautiful. Sarah of The Yellow House, a foodie blogger living in rural Virginia, recently became the recipient of a rather emotional bounty from the women of her fiance's family.

A bundle of yellowed, dog-eared, food-splattered recipes, stretching through the generations, hand in hand, across more than a hundred years.

There were several recipes for nut bread and other popular dishes from the 50s and 60s. Thrift-inspired preserves and pickles from the Depression and War eras. And turn-of-the-century recipes, made immensely and timelessly personal for being embedded in letters written from a mother to a daughter.

When I cook my mother and my grandmother's salmon rissole recipe, I think about them, and the times they taught me to cook these rissoles, and our many, many family meals together. I can still picture the oil spitting in the pan in Nanna's tiny kitchen. It was not much bigger than my pantry is today.

What an extraordinary gift these pages must be to Sarah. A chance to absorb, through food and words, something beautiful of her new family.