Future

My great-grandmother had ten children, eight of whom lived to adulthood. When none had yet left the household, she used to bake golden-brown dinner rolls before dinnertime, cooling them in a towel-lined basket from which the smell of the rolls inside would waft through her whole house, announcing that the meal was almost ready to eat. Afterwards, if any of the rolls remained, the children would grab them out of the basket as a snack or to eat at lunch.

My grandmother had six children. Her mother passed down the recipe for those same dinner rolls down to her, and in the same fashion, she would bake them in the early afternoon and leave them in a basket on her kitchen countertop after meals were done. The table in her and my grandfather’s house, in time, hosted dozens of family friends, guests, and cherished extended family members, all of whom would end up having one of my grandmother’s dinner rolls at one point or another. Each of her children, just like she did when she was younger, would sneak a roll from the basket throughout the day, until all that was left was a pile of crumbs lining the bottom.

When my father married my mother, his parents passed down to him a family recipe book, a hundred fifty pages of jumbled, handwritten-and-copied notes on the dishes he had grown up with and how to make them just so. At the back of this book was the original dinner roll recipe, passed down from his mother’s mother to my grandmother, to him, and my mother. As a child, I often saw my mother kneading bread dough on a floured countertop on days when guests were expected, holidays, and special occasions, and on those days the warmth of the oven would dissipate throughout the house after what we knew as Mom’s dinner rolls had been pulled out and left to cool on a wire rack by the kitchen windowsill. I remember being able to make several of the buttery, crusty rolls disappear - as if by magic.

When I moved out, my parents passed a family cookbook on to me, which reproduced in photocopy a great deal of the recipes their families had handed down to them over the generations. At the back was my great-grandmother’s dinner roll recipe, slightly smudged with repeated copying but still legible.

There will be no one for me to pass the recipe down to. My house is quiet at dinnertime. There are no guests, no visiting relatives, no children. I rarely bake anything these days, much less a recipe for dinner rolls which could feed a dozen people. The recipe book my parents gave to me has, for the most part, simply collected dust on a shelf in my bedroom, crammed in between a notebook I haven’t touched since I was a child and a guide to photography I opened twice before realizing that taking pictures of things wasn’t as interesting as it had seemed.

Sometimes I take it down and hold it for a moment without opening the cover, then replace it on the shelf.