When I received my own copy of the Kinfolk Cookbook for my eighteenth birthday, I knew my relatives had finally accorded me adult status. The book, a sort of “greatest hits” compilation of favorite recipes from both branches of the family tree, was published in an unusual bout of industriousness back in 1976. My dad must have gotten a few extra copies made at the time, because my birthday gift was not a reprint but the real artifact. Bound with a plastic spiral and covered in brown leatherette, it’s the product of a decade that embraced pea green shag carpeting, waterbeds, and myriad other inventions of dubious aesthetic merit.

Some of the recipes are timeless: my sister Lori’s banana bread, my mother’s spicy Chinese salad, my father’s lasagna. Some are ripe for retirement, like the recipe for canned corned beef salad that employs a large package of lemon Jell-O, or the St. Pat’s Pineapple, which smothers cubes of the fruit in stunningly green crème de menthe liqueur. Elderly grandmothers and aunts contributed recipes for black cherry molds and homemade mayonnaise that seem antiquated and unappealing nowadays, but my Grandma Norma’s cozy Italian recipes remain timelessly delicious.

To me, the cookbook always conjures up an almost photographic vision of my family sitting on the back porch at our summer cottage in the mid ‘70s. My dad drinks Old Style beer in a flannel shirt, my mom’s hair hangs past her shoulders, my sisters are squinting and freckled from the Michigan sun. Maybe my Uncle Larry is preparing his special dinner: cooked hotdogs and a bottle of Thunderbird. I wasn’t in the picture yet.

Soon after I was born, my mom and dad divorced, and by now many of the book’s contributors have passed away. But this is precisely why I love the Kinfolk Cookbook. I may never have met my great-grandmother Goggy, but I can commune with her spirit by making her recipe for port-soaked pears.