Acquaint yourself with someone's recipe collection and you acquaint yourself with them, a bit. The yellowed clippings, recipe cards stained from frequent use, the penciled notes in the margins of cookbooks all tell a story.

Recently, I've gotten to know Itsuko Ishimoto in this way. Ishimoto, who died a couple of years ago, was born in Kaua'i, one of six children of a picture bride and a plantation worker. She retired as a teacher from Kalihi Waena Elementary. She loved children, and though she never married, she devoted herself to her nephews and nieces.

When the family was cleaning out Ishimoto's home, her niece, Sandy Nakamura of Mililani, did not want to see her treasured auntie's recipe collection simply discarded, as though all those years of cooking and care had not mattered. So she e-mailed me and we met in Pearl City, where she bequeathed to me a precious box that then swallowed several evenings and half a weekend as I pored over Ishimoto's cookbooks, clippings, pamphlets, Hawaiian Electric recipe cards and even pages of mimeographed recipes that I imagine were the fruit of recipe exchanges between teachers.

(Who remembers mimeograph machines? The strangely alluring smell of the ink, the way the slightly damp pages emerged from the machine cold to the touch, the way we competed to get to help out in the mimeograph room?)

Judging by the many hand-copied pieces — on slips of paper, the backs of old memos, inside the covers of books — Ishimoto liked fruit-based sweets: apple chip cake, peach icebox cake, mandarin orange cream, fresh strawberry pie, guava gelatin, raspberry shortcake, cherry cream cheese pie, passion orange Jell-O dessert, mango bars — all were in her collection. This may have been because she had frequent occasion to use them: at family gatherings, for classroom parties, colleagues' birthdays and retirements, parent-teacher events. Teachers do so much in this way.

Nakamura said her auntie loved the arts, travel, collecting and cooking. In a touching e-mail, Nakamura wrote: "The dishes bring back memories of going on beach picnics, eating at the eldest auntie's house every Sunday and trying Auntie Itsuko's new-found dish. She used to make homemade ice cream, the kind you had to crank. The rule was, if you wanna eat, start cranking the wooden bucket. I was so blessed to have a wonderful and unselfish auntie who spent her free time with us kids."

I wish I'd had the chance to know Itsuko Ishimoto and talk cooking with her; I think we would have been kindred souls in that regard.

Here's one of those mimeographed recipes, pineapple scones, which was annotated in her hand. She changed the sugar in the scones from white to brown for more depth of flavor.

PINEAPPLE SCONES