Listen as the pages of the magazine come to life in the Storytellers podcast showcasing the voices of Our State writers. Each podcast episode features a writer reading their column aloud, allowing each distinct voice to shine. Click below to listen to Editor in Chief Elizabeth Hudson read her column aloud. 

The old cookbook is bound in plywood, its cover stamped with the outline of an old-fashioned stove and the emblem of the Asheboro Jaycettes, a women’s club in Randolph County. Two holes at the top are strung with black twine — no staples, no glue — and inside are hundreds of handwritten recipes from neighbors and friends my parents knew.

They bought the book at the Asheboro Fall Festival in 1976. I can picture them carrying it home through the crowded streets, past booths filled with corn husk dolls and macrame plant hangers, the air sweet with candied apples, smoky with barbecue. They were young then, eager to try new dishes and make them their own.

Now, when I open the book, scraps fall loose, slips of paper bookmarking the meals I grew up on: chicken pot pie, squash casserole, the sweet potato pie that graced our Thanksgiving table for 40 years.

Here’s a Nilla Wafers box top tucked inside, its edges soft with age, the banana pudding recipe still intact, with my mother’s neat note to add an extra half cup of milk. Here’s a lasagna recipe from an old Skinner noodles box, my dad’s careful hand revising the amounts: 10 slices of pasta, 20 ounces of cottage cheese.

And the index cards, “From the kitchen of,” like the one for chocolate pie from Margie Stidham, who taught tole-painting in my mother’s shop. Her husband, George, fought in World War II. I hold her card and wonder: Was this his favorite? Did he look up from his plate and smile at her when she set it down?

Food and family, page after page, lives layered one over another.

These days, I go looking for books like this, at estate sales, at thrift stores. I open every old cookbook, hoping for a flutter of clippings, a tilt of handwriting on a card, the trace of some forgotten casserole everyone once knew.

A few weeks ago, at Freedom House Thrift in Greensboro, I found a stack of Gourmet magazines from the 1970s, glossy pages full of Cognac ads and aspic recipes. I used to read piles like these at my grandmother’s house, and it’s no wonder I ended up in magazines myself. I’ve never stopped loving the weight of them, the smell of paper, the joy of turning a page.

I’ve been reading through them at night. From one issue — November 1978 — a slip of paper fell out. A grocery list for Thanksgiving, written in a stranger’s hand, saved inside a magazine that waited nearly 50 years to find its way to me.

I’ll never know who wrote it. But there, among the potatoes and rolls, was a recipe for cranberry pie. New to me.

This year, I think I’ll make it. I’ll put it next to our sweet potato pie, and I’ll think of all the ways we save what matters, the scraps and clippings, the penciled notes and lists, the smudged cards, the slips from magazines, the hand-me-downs from hands long gone. All the fragments that add up to so much more than just food but also memories and stories and love and life, and we give thanks for the feast.

Elizabeth Hudson
Editor in Chief