WRITTEN BY LYNN MURRAY WILLEFORD PHOTOGRAPHED BY BARRY WONG

	Chocolate-Chip Meringues and memories are among the treasures that Lynn Murray Willeford gathered in making a family recipe book for her son.

THE MONTH BEFORE our son Brook graduated from college, I shook a mess of stained, wrinkled clippings and odd-sized pieces of paper from the cookbooks in my kitchen and set to work on his graduation present. I meant to put together a book of recipes that would remind him of home — our family home — as he moved off into a world of his own. I called it "Recipes from the Dirt Road Diner" because, with the exception of three months in Costa Rica when he was 12, Brook had lived in a house his father built on south Whidbey Island's Little Dirt Road from his birth until the day he flew nearly 2,000 miles away to Carleton College.

Brook cooked with us in the kitchen from the time he was 3 or 4 years old. A picky eater, he gradually realized that he could eat what he wanted for dinner (big meat! minimum vegetables!) as long as he was willing to cook it. When he was 10 he bought a 1952 edition of "A Cookbook for Boys and Girls" by Irma Rombauer, paying a quarter for it at the local thrift store, and never looked back.

Some of Brook's culinary enthusiasms took a little getting used to. Despite being raised by a health-writer mom he referred to as the "nutrition police," Brook never met a recipe calling for a cup of butter he didn't like. Then there was his adventurous way with color. We liked the orange-tinted macaroni and cheese from scratch, but were a little leery when he dyed it purple.
 

Chocolate-Chip Meringues Recent recipes in Pacific Northwest Sparkling lemonade Pan-Seared Alaskan Sea Scallops

Like many of us, Brook has plenty of childhood memories connected to food and flavor. For him, Christmas requires the Chocolate-Chip Meringues and the French Bûche de Noöl Cake he and I have always made together while Nat King Cole crooned about chestnuts roasting on an open fire. For me, I cannot eat a piece of overcooked grilled meat without remembering my dad at the grill, burning everything his tongs touched. Old-fashioned recipes like chicken fricassee and pork and sauerkraut evoke weekends when my grandmother would visit. In compiling "Recipes from the Dirt Road Diner" for Brook, I was not only passing on the foods of his childhood but preserving some of his memories as well. When he cooks Gallo Pinto or Senora Silvia's Chicken Salsa, he will remember his months in the cloud-forest village of Santa Elena. The faces of his old island neighbors will pop up when he whips up Richard's Potatoes, Shirlee's Never-Fail Pie Crust or Cheryl's White-Lightning Chili. He'll think about his dad and me when he follows our recipes for "inis" (our version of scaloppine), or chicken curry. Instructions for second-cousin Mado's brandy-heavy French pot roast, Nana's margaritas and Aunt Laurie's fried dodies keep alive relatives long gone and connect him to those still with us.

I didn't know how Brook would respond to this spiral-bound book when I presented it to him at Graduation Day. It wasn't a car, a trip to Europe or even a gold Cross pen. It was just his childhood, told through the foods that meant home to him. I grinned with pleasure when, despite all the friends and relatives in the room, he sat right down and read through it. When he packed the next day for his summer job across the continent in Boston, he insisted on taking it with him.

Now that he has his own apartment, he cooks from it often. He called the other day to say that he'd shown the book to an interested co-worker, who asked to copy some recipes and told him it warmed her heart to read it. He's decided to copy and laminate the pages now so he doesn't stain the original when he's cooking. Who would have guessed that the way to a young man's heart was through a recipe book?