Happily married Sarah’s problem was work: Pulling crabmeat deftly from its shell, she pursed her wide mouth and shook her head. “They drive me crazy, these ladies,” she complained. “They all want fancy cocktail parties, and they think they can get them for $5 a head.” Not much later, Sarah escaped from catering, enrolled in a seminary and became an Episcopalian priest. The last time we talked, she confided, “I never let anybody know I can cook.”

Blurred red ink on an index card outlined Aunt Sally’s Angel Pie, her company dessert, a pecan-meringue shell filled with bittersweet chocolate mousse. One of my father’s four sisters, Aunt Sally, born Selma, was my fanciest aunt, red-headed and vivacious. When I was striding stubbornly into marriage at 19, she and her sisters threw a kitchen shower for me at her Beverly Hills home—north of Sunset, the toniest neighborhood, of course. Each guest was asked to bring two index cards, one with a sure-fire recipe, and one with a “recipe” for a happy marriage. I dumped the tips on domestic bliss after I walked out on my husband six years later, but I kept on making Aunt Sally’s pie for a while. The brown stains on the card still smell faintly of vanilla.

After the divorce, I kept moving until I got to Paris, where I lived for three years. My kitchen there was just a two-burner hotplate and a tiny refrigerator, but I collected recipes nevertheless, maybe looking for comfort or nourishment I wasn’t finding anywhere else. I tore the recipe cards out of Elle magazine every week and squirreled them away, no matter how unlikely I was to make anything resembling Salade aux Langoustines et Mangue—in those days, crayfish and mango weren’t exactly in the budget. And here’s a strange one, a recipe from La Varenne, a cooking school in Paris which I swear I never attended. Yet I must have been there at least once, because that’s my own handwriting in the margin of this recipe for lamb chops baked in puff pastry, for heaven’s sake. I can’t imagine I ever dreamed of making such a dish, but I carefully noted, “Always cook meat to be wrapped in pastry in advance because it must cool or the dough will melt.” I’m sure that’s still good advice, and I’m sure I still have no use for it.

I was living in Los Angeles again when I added Andrea’s recipe for chocolate pudding to the collection. Made with both bittersweet chocolate and cocoa, it was typical of Andrea, who was never satisfied with anything—from recipes to relationships—unless it was as intense as humanly possible. She and I met in a writers group and soon discovered that the pleasure of complaining about editors was trivial compared to our most profound link, the love of food and cooking.

During the too-short decade we knew each other, me in California, her in New York, talking for hours on the phone, visiting coast-to-coast and plotting the downfall of the publishing establishment, she sent me a half-dozen or so recipes. She headed the homey rice salad recipe “for a lot of folks,” because she loved nothing better than gathering her family and friends around her and forcing them to eat. This was not a woman who cut corners: At the top of a soup recipe she noted, “The better the stock, the better the soup!”

When Andrea was dying of cancer at 49, she and her husband maxed out their credit cards and took a last trip to Paris. She’d been plump for years, but by then she was so thin that she ate with abandon. It looks like I stuck the postcard she sent me from Paris into the file too—she reported everything she savored, from croissants slathered with creme fraiche for breakfast to a six-course Michelin-starred dinner featuring Beignets de Foie Gras Caramelisées au Porto, a dish that sent her into rapture. The last time we spoke she was in the hospital for what turned out to be her final stay; I guess it was a chance for a profound conversation, but instead we talked about meals we’d shared, dishes we’d made, and those heavenly foie gras fritters.

Realistically, there are only a handful of recipes here that I’ve even looked at in the last 20 years. If I threw the whole file in the trash tonight, my cooking wouldn’t suffer a bit. But my soul would miss this beat-up old folder, its corners worn soft and fuzzy over the years. It contains a strange and wonderful buffet, serving up moments I didn’t even know I remembered, until the recipes brought them back to life.

Two of Heidi’s favorite recipes:
Sarah’s Hot Olive Cheese Puffs
Andrea’s Double Chocolate Pudding

Heidi Yorkshire has written for Bon Appetit and other national magazines, and she reviews restaurants for Willamette Week.