Pound cake and memories

I decided today that I had a hankering to make a good ol' made-from-scratch pound cake. Although I have my favorite recipe (thanks, Gail) I wanted to look in a cookbook to decide how to make a lemon glaze to put on top of the pound cake. (Something I've never done before.) So I go to my seldom opened cabinet containing my cookbooks and I look for the my #1 cookbook: it's number one because it's the first cookbook I remember in my life and still the first cookbook I reference...the Plymouth Church cookbook. Now it has a fancy-smancy cover but I remember it differently. When I was growing up it had a pale blue plain cover with just a title. The pages appeared to be typed, photocopied, and bound with the black plastic loops. Pretty nice a cookbook for the time. I can not imagine how many times that book was pulled out of the drawer and used. It contained Jeanette's Easy Fudge recipe (made that quite a few times), her Almost Fried Chicken (a favorite for a new bride, not used to actual frying), and Delores' Lemon pie (not the jello kind). It had real home-cooking type recipes that you knew would be good because of the cooks who entered the recipes. It was the book I looked through as I dreamed of what I would cook when I got married. It's the book that had the rumpled pages, many stained with ingredients of whatever we were cooking on that page. It had the precious scribblings of Mommy and Mama who made notes to remember about a given recipe as they cooked it the next time.

Nowadays I don't look in the cookbook as much as I once did. All my favorite recipes have been promoted up to their places on index cards in my recipe box (thanks, Nancy). Never the less, some things (and memories) in life are irreplaceable.