My grandmother enjoyed spending the hour before dinner in her Rumford, Maine, kitchen. But it would’t be cooking. She’d bring out some Fractured French cocktail napkins—where Pied de Terre became a man who couldn’t hold his liquor and had to make use of the bushes, and Piece de Resistance became an extremely  voluptuous woman in a bikini—along with highball glasses, a mixer, and a bottle of alcohol, and while away the cocktail hour chatting in whatever language came out, French or English. French-speakers from other areas would find this local French Canadian French pretty fractured in general, but as long as everyone was local, or not too concerned about understanding every last word, a good time could be had by all. And if she could pull out the cruise ship Olympia playing cards and some pennies and convince everyone to play whist, so much the better. This was okay, that she was drinking and not cooking, because while Grandma Breton was a lot of fun, and we kids loved to play cards with her, she was also renown, at least in our immediate family, as a really bad cook.

So imagine my great surprise, verging on shock, when, upon my Uncle’s passing, I went to clean out the apartment that she and my father’s brother had lived in for over sixty years, and found Grandma Breton’s recipe box. An oxymoron if ever I heard one. This had to be explored.

My grandmother passed away at the age of 94 around 1980, so her heyday of cooking would have somewhat coincided with the development of frozen and canned foods. Her recipes evoked this in spades. Cans of pineapple, fruit cocktail, shrimp, ham, peas, mushroom soup, along with the basics of flour, sugar, milk, Crisco, Ritz crackers, macaroni, and, for some reason, dates, and if my grandmother’s recipe box is any indication, you were set to eat for all the long months of the cold Maine winter.

I didn’t find hardly a recipe I might actually cook, but every browning index card and ragged-edged magazine clipping evoked fond, and yes, proud, memories of my grandmother.  Widowed when her third son, my father, was less than a year old, she worked hard to support her three children, and once her own children were grown, played hard with friends—and grandchildren.  And with her newly discovered recipe box in hand, I remain eternally grateful that she whenever she came to visit, she left the cooking to anyone else.