Grandma’s Recipe Book

In 2020, when the world slowed down temporarily due to Coronavirus, my grandma, Joan Dick, sat down and took time to write out her favorite family recipes by hand. The world outside had gone quiet, stores closed, streets empty, but her kitchen was alive with memory. She wrote each recipe slowly, the way you’d write a letter to someone you love. Every page carried the weight of a life lived close to the land: a rhythm of planting, harvesting, cooking, and gathering. Each dish told a story, not just about food, but about the hum of farm life, the people who sat around her table, and the comfort of something warm baking in the oven on a Michigan afternoon.

She began with her own recipes, the ones she learned growing up in St. Ignace, just across the Mackinac Bridge in the Upper Peninsula. Many were the same dishes her mother made before electricity and grocery stores changed how people cooked, things like cinnamon apples, pumpkin bread, and potato casseroles that used what the farm produced and nothing more. After writing down those, she started reaching out to the rest of the family. Aunts, cousins, and in-laws mailed or emailed her their favorite recipes, some written on yellowed cards, others scrawled on envelopes. By the time she finished, more than twenty recipes had been gathered, a small library of taste, tradition, and love.

Gros Cap School where Joan attended. The school is 50 yards from Lake Michigan.

At that time, I was living in a small apartment, attending Michigan State University virtually as classes were shuttered. My world had shrunk to a screen and four walls. Grandma’s recipe book became a lifeline, something tangible, something real. I started cooking through it page by page. There was no pressure to perfect anything. Nothing about her recipes was intimidating; they were the opposite of the internet’s polished food culture. They were forgiving, flexible, and familiar, made to be shared, not performed. Each dish brought back the sound of her voice, the smell of cinnamon, and the feeling of sitting at her table as a kid.

Cooking those recipes reminded me that food isn’t just sustenance, it’s continuity. Every ingredient came with a memory, and every finished dish carried the echo of a generation before me. It became a quiet ritual: turning on the oven, opening her notebook, and feeling a sense of home I didn’t know I’d been missing.

As this blog evolves, I hope to share some of my favorite recipes from her book, the kind that bring families together and remind us where we come from. These aren’t complicated dishes or reinvented versions; they’re the flavors of real Michigan kitchens, made with orchard fruit, butter, and time.

Each recipe is a small piece of our story, written in Grandma’s careful handwriting and kept alive every time someone bakes, stirs, or tastes it again. And as long as someone keeps making them, the story keeps going.