My younger son, Nick, was standing in the hallway outside the kitchen of our home on Sylvandell Drive with a piece of coffee cake the size if Kansas in his hand, when he stopped and became very serious. “Mom,” he said. “This recipe is written down somewhere, right? Because you can’t die until you write down the recipe.”

I assured him that the evolution of the family favorite was recorded, adaption by adaption, in the cover of my cookbook. Because the book with green-checkered trim is my favorite, I jot down my own, often-used experiments inside the cover.

No matter how carefully I record outcomes, there are some things that only experience can tell you. Applesauce can be subbed in if I’m out of eggs, water is better than milk for texture (but not if I’m trying to get calories in a sick child), and only I can tell if I use brown or white sugar in the batter.

I understood Nick’s concern all too well because, like a jigsaw puzzle missing a really annoying piece in the middle, my own childhood memories had a hole in them for years.

When my Grandma Sue Goeglein died, no one could find her peach cobbler recipe. Twenty or more years later, my cousin Tricia contacted me on a random afternoon because she’d been idly flipping through Great Aunt Clara’s cookbooks when she found my grandma’s recipe. I’m so lucky that she remembered my persistent queries at family gatherings–didn’t anyone have that recipe stashed somewhere?

“Somewhere maybe,” my cousins would say. “We’ll look.”

Tricia had found my heart’s desire jotted down on a loose piece of paper among seldom-turned pages. The cobbler recipe was the best gift she could have given me, but now it is doubly treasured because Tricia too has passed on.

I’m grateful my sons understand the power of food–tied into generations of celebration, grief, religion and tradition–because the right recipe can conjure a person, a place or a moment across time and distance. A virtually limitless power sprinkled with cinnamon.