Question 

My 90-year-old mother wants me to take her recipes. I think she secretly wants me to make some of her recipes. They are old, soiled, and hard to read. I frankly do not want to make any of those old dishes that she made. I could just take her recipes and dump them in the recycling bin. She would never be the wiser. You can only save so much you know. Before I just dispose of the ancient recipes, I thought I would see if others have had the same dilemma that I am having. There is part of me that feels a little bit like a brat because I do not treasure what was important to her. Truth be told, I am too busy working and caring for my mother to even consider looking at her recipes. I barely have time to cook these days. Helping her to clear out her house is quite the job, and I cannot take everything with me, nor do I want to. What are your thoughts about recipes? 
 

Answer 

I can visualize an old recipe box with well-worn and stained handwritten recipes. She likely has old cookbooks with the covers ripped and pages falling out. It can be a bit of a sugary and flour-stained mix. Some pages may even be stuck together. These are the kitchen memories of a time gone past. If your mother is 90, she likely spent most of her time in the kitchen. She cooked pre microwaves and almost everything was homemade. Bread, cakes, cookies, roasts, cooked cereal, and on. She honed those recipes over a lifetime, and you grew up eating her concoctions from those recipes. It is easy to understand why you would simply want to toss what she has. Being as busy as you are, you do not have time to even page through what she collected over her lifetime. You have your own cookbooks and the internet. You have anything you want at your fingertips. We all do, and it is so easy to find any recipe you might want with a quick search. The thing is the recipes you find will not be your mother’s. I recommend that you place her recipes in a box, seal it up, and store them for now. Save the dirtiest and most worn ones, as those are the ones she made most often. Someday I suspect you may have a quiet afternoon and a desire to make something from your childhood. It may not be soon. Your mother might be long gone. You may be retired before that afternoon arrives. I cannot predict when it will come, but I do think that it might. You can toss her recipes at any time in the future that you desire. I do recommend that you hold them a while though. Prepared dishes bring back powerful memories of childhood, good conversation, a picture to share with siblings, and provide connectedness. It is not something that I would just toss at this point in time. If you can, hold on to them for a while or find a sibling that is willing to do that. I predict that you will have a reason to enter that box at some point and will be glad that you have it.