The Lost Recipe
(by Cindy Roos Young)
At five years of age, I remember standing at my little toy ironing board (the only “tabletop” low enough for me to reach) with a bowl, a peeler, and a cucumber so that I could have a hand in the preparation of salad for supper. My mother was a terrific cook, and she decided when I was very young that she wanted to pass her joy of cooking on to me.
She was famous for her homemade spaghetti sauce, even if her fame was only among our extended family and neighbors. It was slow-simmered for hours in her well-worn cast iron pot. Our next-door neighbor used to tease her when he smelled it wafting out of our kitchen window and onto his screened-in porch, saying that it absolutely had to have booze in it because nothing could possibly smell that good without a little beer or red wine. It had neither. It was just plain, slow-simmered good.