Cookbooks and hymnals...

White Sauce.

It was the key ingredient I needed to recreate the delicious pasta my friend Karen made last Saturday.

It was the key to turning my ordinary every-other-week spaghetti into a mouth-watering delight for my family. And…

…it was the key to unlocking a great treasure left behind by my Grandma.

I think of Grandma Seawel most often when I’m cooking. Many of my very favorite foods came from her kitchen. Chicken and dumplings. Pancakes. Fried eggs. Lasagna. Garden tomatoes. Pie. Hot pickles straight out of the canning jars. There were other meals too, which perhaps due to overzealous experimentation were a little to “out there” for my young taste buds. But either way, there can be no doubt the woman loved to cook. And generally, I loved to eat what she cooked up!

Grandma passed away in 2003 and I soon after inherited her entire recipe collection. The wall hanging box is full of fading recipe cards; handwritten and typed, some stained, some taped together, many modified multiple times with Grandma’s tweaks for a myriad of meals…….and, I kid you not, no less than 442 variations on pie crust and filling.

Along with the recipe box came her 1961 edition Betty Crocker cookbook. Aside from admiring the vintage cover, I didn’t give much thought to the cookbook. But, I knew that if anyone could teach me how to make a proper White Sauce, it would be Grandma’s 1961 Betty! So I pulled her down off the shelf and opened her right up. Flipping through to the coveted White Sauce, the pages fell open to an unexpected treasure that stopped me in my tracks.

In typical Grandma Seawel fashion, there in the fold of the pages I found a stapled-together set of cards just like those preserved in her recipe box. Each one faded, modified with shorthand notes and re-modified with white-out . Each one bent near the staples, evidence that she had returned to these cards again and again for review.

However, on the cards I found recipes not for meals, but of another kind. They were the hand-written poetic words of what must have been some of her favorite hymns. Holy, Holy, Holy. Have Thine Own Way. My Jesus, I Love Thee. One I’ve never heard moved me deeply and I’ll share here as she had written it.

Holy Spirit breathe on me,
Until my heart is clean;
Let sunshine fill its inmost part,
With not a cloud between;

Holy Spirit breathe on me,
My stubborn will subdue;
Teach me in words of living flame
What Christ would have me do.

Holy Spirit breathe on me,
Fill me with power divine;
Kindle a flame of love and zeal
Within this heart of mine.

Holy Spirit breathe on me,
Till I am all thy own,
Until my will is lost in Thine,
To live for Thee alone.

What’s amazing to me is that the very moment Grandma put that small stack of stapled cards into 1961 Betty, God knew that decades later I’d be at home one evening looking for White Sauce…and that I would need encouragement…and that he would speak to me through what was left behind for me to discover.

When I’m gone and my grandchildren are rummaging through my things, I hope what they find points them to Jesus….and if they find something that fills their bellies with good food too….then so be it!

Bring on the White Sauce!