The lost recipe found!
One day, more than 20 years ago, I was sitting at the kitchen table in my Grandma and Grandpa's house in northern Wisconsin, after another successful morning of squirrel hunting in the woods on their property. I was doodling on a yellow pad of paper when my grandma asked me about all of the squirrel hunting I did and why I liked it so much. Ever since I was a wee lad I'd be out squirrel hunting whenever I could and probably shot and ate more squirrels from the woods adjoining both their farm and, later, the woods that surrounded the home they built after they sold the farm, than they might have imagined could possibly inhabit those forests.
Anyway, that afternoon my grandma asked me to write up a recipe for her, for how to cook squirrel. She surely wasn't asking because she needed to know. After all, she had spent much of her life cooking for her husband and herself, and their 11 children, as well as the constant flow of friends and extended family that always seemed to be a part of their daily life. I think she just asked me to write something up for her because she knew that hunting and cooking those critters was something I enjoyed, and that's what grandmothers do.
So, not having any idea, really, of how to actually record a recipe, this is what I came up with, my first written recipe for anything. I doodled a little picture at the bottom of the page and taped the paper to the inside of one of her cupboards, where it stayed for many years. One day, years later, I opened the cupboard to get a plate and noticed that the paper wasn't there anymore. I asked Grandma what had happened to it, but she didn't know nor even realized that it was missing. I was a little saddened by its disappearance, because it was a marker of sorts, an artifact of memory, so to speak.
An hour ago my brother posted on my facebook page a photo-scan of the recipe I had written all those years ago. Apparently he was the culprit who had swiped it from Grandma's cupboard! I'm glad he saved it. It's funny, as I look at it now and see how primitively and sparingly I wrote it.
Anyway, it made my day seeing this little piece of personal history again.
Addendum: The plot thickens! I shared this post* with my brother and he replied, "Last night Mom and Dad handed me the yellowing paper and said it fell out of one of Grandmas old cookbooks. I posted it for you to see... Killer of innocent Tree Varmints."
So, it appear that my bro did not pilfer the lost recipe after all. Grandma must have taken it down and secured it in one of her cookbooks for safe-keeping, which begs the question, did she not tell me that she had done so because she simply had forgotten that she had done so, or did she feign ignorance because she valued and wanted to keep the little paper her grandson wrote. I like to think the latter.
* I felt it proper to change the title of this post from "The stolen recipe found!" to "The lost recipe found!"
