Recipe Box Friends: Kate McDermott

My first in an occasional series exploring friends' recipe collections

Every recipe collection tells a story (a great many stories, usually) and almost everyone has such a collection that they hold dear. I’ve been sharing insights from my mom’s tattered recipe folder here frequently, and I want to broaden the insights and stories you read here to include those of other folks now and then. It gives me the perfect excuse, too, to learn more about friends and colleagues through the stories that their recipe collections evoke, about the treasures that they hold, the memories, delights, sometimes regrets and challenges that they represent. With each of these Recipe Box Friends posts, I know I’ll gain even greater appreciation—and I hope you will, too—for the value of these recipe collections, the depth of meaning and connection they can bring to our lives.

I can’t say how thrilled I am to launch this series with cookbook author, teacher, all-around pie maven Kate McDermott. Kate and I have been friends for many years. I’m lucky to have visited her Pie Cottage and have reveled in her pies, as well as her wisdom and generosity, for some time. What a joy it was to talk with her about her cherished recipes last week.

I’m presenting some highlights of the memories, perspectives, and insights Kate shared with me, part of our rich hour-long conversation. These will not be typical Q&A interviews. One initial question—tell me about your recipe box, or whatever form your collection of cherished recipes take—is all it takes to set off a stream of conversation that just naturally goes wherever it goes. I love being along for that ride and relish that each of these posts will reflect the distinct personality of the individual and their collection.

Thanks so much to Kate for sharing these photos and others below.

On her family recipes

“I would love to say that I had a recipe box that went back to my mother or my grandmother. I don’t,” Kate said when I asked about the origins of her recipe box, her beloved collection. She told me of being a kid and slipping into the pantry where there was a step-stool she could sit on. She’d turn on the pantry light, grab her grandmother’s recipe box from an upper shelf, and sit on that stool, riffling through the recipes. When her grandmother (who lived with them) died, Kate was in her 20s, living far away, and she wasn’t able to retrieve that box from the pantry. While she may have a few recipe cards that came from it, not knowing where the box itself went is “one of the biggest regrets of my life.” Among the treasured recipes of her grandmother’s that she does have is one she had to piece together from just a list of ingredients and from her memory of standing alongside her grandmother while she made it many times (“filling the gaps,” as I call it!). It’s shared in her cookbook Home Cooking: “My Grandmother’s Oven-Baked Beef Stew.”

Sharing the Family Trove

Speaking of Home Cooking, the title is extra fitting for that cookbook of Kate’s, her second. It grew out of a collection of recipes she started in 2004 for her son, who was in high school at the time. The first recipe in the collection? Mom’s Bread, a nod to when he was much younger and sat on the counter alongside her, getting his hands in the dough as she worked it. The three-ring binder of recipes she titled “A Cookbook for Duncan, based on mom’s recipes and a few others,” in which she wrote to her son “the learning and the sharing of these recipes began many years ago, I hope you will pass these recipes along to your children too.” Home Cooking with Kate McDermott was released in 2018, her family’s favorite recipes now in the hands of other families and becoming part of their meals and memories as well.

Distinctive Handwriting

“My grandmother was a better cook than my mom…my mom did other things better,” Kate shared. While more of her collection today may be inspired by her grandmother’s cooking, she does have a few recipes of her mom’s, including her Grasshopper Pie—“we loved that pie!” This recipe that holds treasured memories is among those in Kate’s book Art of the Pie. As she showed me that recipe of her mom’s, along with her zucchini bread recipe (both in the photos above), Kate commented on her mother’s classic cursive handwriting. “Everybody’s mother and grandmother had the exact same handwriting, it seems…the Palmer Method.” For so many of us, seeing that handwriting stirs up a special sense of connection and memory.

Preservation for memories, if not for cooking

A recipe card in Kate’s collection that’s in her own handwriting, having copied it from one of her mom’s, is for Hello Dollies. As she described the layered bars that include graham cracker crumbs, chocolate and butterscotch chips, coconut, almonds, and condensed milk, Kate mentioned that she’d thought at one point, “Oh, I’ll remake these and include them in one of my books…and when I tasted them I thought, ‘no one’s going to want to have these now’.” So why does she still hold on to that recipe? “My mom was a pianist and a piano teacher, she made these for her studio recitals.” What a perfect example of the value a recipe can have beyond its ingredients and preparation: it comes with the story behind the recipe, the memories it stirs, the connection to a loved one that it represents. There’s a thread of continuity even without necessarily cooking the recipe.

Multiple Collections

This is becoming a regular theme in conversations about recipe collections: that it’s rarely just one box or folder where someone has all their favorite recipes stored. In Kate’s case, that variety plays out with at least four different versions. Her “Family Heirloom Cookbook” folder is where most older recipes from family, neighbors, friends are stored. She has the ring binder with favorite recipes she cooked for her family, the “Duncan” collection. There’s also a notebook dating to 2008/9, “this is the one I started when I was going on my pie journey.” In it she kept track of testing, tasting, contemplating and evaluating pies. Of the three folders, it’s the only one she’s currently still adding to. And in her kitchen are some baskets in which other recipes reside, “like the strata in a geological formation…how far back do I recall making it? okay, so it’ll be in this basket, and I go down about this far….”

I love that Kate’s collection exemplifies how natural it is to not just have one single keeping-place for recipes: each of our varied boxes/folders/baskets/drawers can have a different role, reflect different parts of our life, and have different uses for us today. Some to cook from, some to jog our memories, some to inspire new ideas, some to share with family and friends. Some to simply cherish for sentimental journeys.

Keep it going...pass it on

Kate is clearly a big believer in the importance of being a conduit of beloved recipes and cooking traditions: not just gathering them from the past, but passing them on to be part of the future. The folder she put together for her son and the recipes she has shared in her cookbooks beautifully reflect that.

And those who take her pie classes get an extra dose of that pass-it-on wisdom that Kate shared with me.

“At the beginning of pie classes that I teach, I say ‘everyone has a pie maker in the family, who is yours?’ and it starts this conversation. … When I teach pie making, there’re all these people that stand behind me, generations of people that I don’t even know anything about, thousands and thousands of pie makers over centuries. I’m here, and the people that come to my classes are the next people in line. … I share with them that my goal is that they will go home and make pie and teach someone else, so that the line keeps going. That’s what sharing these recipes [gesturing to her collection] is like.”

What an ideal reflection to wrap up on. That we’re all part of the continuity of cherished recipes and food traditions, be they within our own families or part of our greater community. Share and teach and encourage others to pass it on as well.