Cookbooks, like diaries, reveal a person's soul

There's something about a good cookbook - the one you use most often, the one that sits stained and dog-eared on the shelf next to the shiny hard-backed and never-used tomes. It's more like a diary than a collection of recipes. You can read between the lines and see into a community's values, a family's history, a person's soul.

I inherited favorite cookbooks that belonged to my mother and grandmother. Both women wrote little notes on the side of recipes they tried, passages about where they were living when they baked that banana bread or fried that chicken, little details of parties they served a certain cake at, who in the family enjoyed the casserole (and who fussily picked out the green onions.) Though cooks write such notes only as reminders to themselves, they read like little mysteries or found letters to those of us who get them years later.

This same idea is sometimes carried out in bridal showers, where each guest gives the couple a favorite recipe complete with notations and anecdotes. It's like passing along the best of your family to a family that's just starting out.

Here in Hawai'i there are "heritage" cookbooks aplenty, where different ethnic groups proudly share their recipes like they're opening their hearts. It's a big deal to share obachan's namasu recipe or popo's prune mui mix, to let it out from the family and into the general public. Often, a relative's name is included in the title of the dish, so it's not just vinha d'alhos, but Grampa Johnny Freitas' vinha d'alhos. That way, total strangers can know what a great cook Grampa Johnny was.

Especially fun are the compilation cookbooks sold as fund-raisers. You gotta love the ones with short passages accompanying the recipes that give a snapshot of family history or tell why the dish is special.

These are from a cookbook '?ao Intermediate School published a few years back, and they say so much about the students' families and home life - how they feel love, what makes them proud and what makes them laugh:

"This is the most frequently made dish in my family. We all know how to prepare it and take turns, usually once or twice a month. Whenever I am homesick, I crave sweet and sour chicken made exactly like this."

"This recipe came to Hawai'i with my dad. He got it from my uncle in the Philippines. Many restaurants make this dish, but I like my dad's cooking better."

"When my mother was a little girl, she ate with her family at a restaurant. She ordered chicken tetrazzini and threw up. The manager felt so bad, she gave mom's family the recipe."

"My grandmother named this cake Holiday Cake years ago, and it's not Christmas without it. She knew if she called it Prune Cake no one would eat it!"

My favorite recipe that conjures up an image of its originator is from a dirty, creased and torn copy of a 4-H cookbook that I'm sure I had to sell as a fund-raiser when I was a kid (I'm just as sure my mother ended up buying my entire stash so I could make quota). On one of the last pages, in the section titled "Beverages and Drinks" (same thing, yeah?) is a recipe for chocolate milk submitted by some unnamed, earnest child. I can just imagine this kid being so proud at coming up with this all on his own. The ingredients listed are "milk and Quik" and the directions are "stir and drink."

Lee Cataluna's column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com