About this book

Our mother kept her recipes in a book called The Cook’s Own Book — a bound book of blank pages, lettered A to Z, that she filled over decades. Some recipes are in her hand; many were cut from magazines and pasted in; some were tucked loose between the pages, where they stayed. We learned to cook from this book — chocolate chip cookies from the Toll House recipe pasted under “C” for cookie.

She died on September 7, 2016. The book passed to one of us, but it belongs to all of us, so it lives here now, photographed page by page, exactly as she left it — stains, staples, margin notes, and all. The typed versions of the recipes are aids; her pages are the source of truth.

Some clippings in the book came from magazines. If something here is yours and you'd like it removed, write to [contact email] and we'll take the image down and keep only the recipe.