Life by Hand

My mother was a woman who loved to host dinners and cocktail parties, wide-ranging in her choices of dishes, an early adopter of avocadoes and jicama. Her baked scallop appetizers, dusted with homemade bread crumbs and broiled in the oven, were plated on actual shells. But she was also a fervent believer in recipes. In our household, it was always ½ cup of flour, not a handful, ¼ teaspoon of salt, never a pinch.

I still have her battered copy of , although I’ll admit I never use it. For me, recipes always felt like that teacher in English class, the one with the red pen, ready to swoop down on any grammatical transgression. As a child, I tried