They had recipes for strawberry jam, avocado and tomato salad, meringue cake, and lemon souffle.

Her personal recipes, handwritten, were in a wooden green box with apples next to the cookbooks. Irish Soda Bread. French Chicken Fettucine. Enchilada Pie. Joyce’s Chicken.

I sat and I stared and I sat and I stared and there it was: An idea for a story that eventually became part of No Place I’d Rather Be.

I would write about a cookbook that was handed down through the generations, from mother to daughter to granddaughter to great-granddaughter and on and on.

I would start this family out in Odessa, in 1904, in the Russian Empire. The cookbook would be carried out as they escaped the flames of the pogroms and fled to Germany. The next generation would take it with them as they ran from the Nazis and onto the Kindertransport. It would survive the near-annihilation of London during the Blitz, and it would end up hidden in a box, in an attic, in Montana.

The cookbook would show each woman’s life, her history. There would be recipes and drawings of families and farms, gardens and red geraniums. Blood and tea stains would spill across the ingredients. Gold lockets, red ribbons, and old photographs would be tucked between the pages.

I had a vision of a family in my head and wrote the vision, my mother’s cookbooks in my kitchen keeping me centered on the plot.

I will give my mother’s cookbooks to my kids. I will write on the inside cover that they belonged to Bette Jean, and I will write her birthdate and death date. I’ll write my name and birthdate. I hope my kids will give them to my grandkids and that they will give them to their children.

As we all know, cookbooks and recipes, from our mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers, aren’t all about the ingredients.

It’s about the love. All that love, handed down with hugs from one generation to the next, right beside the recipe for Irish Soda Bread.