This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

These days when I want a recipe, I pull it off the Internet. What could be more convenient? But when I want my mother's baked-bean recipe — as I did this weekend — I pull it out of the beaten-up card file I've had for years.

We must have been chatting on the telephone when I first asked my mother for that recipe all those years ago. Clearly I'd grabbed the first scrap of paper I could find and scribbled down the ingredients in handwriting that is barely legible. I may have told myself at the time that I would copy it out properly on a 3-by-5-inch notecard. But, of course, I never did. I just stuck the baked-bean recipe in the recipe box, along with all the other paper odds and ends I have in there.

Take Martha's Clam Chowder, for example. It's scribbled down on the back of a piece of letterhead I created for myself when I first started freelance writing. In true 1980s fashion, my name was hyphenated to go along with my big old Farrah Fawcett-Majors hair. The address listed is from our first Salt Lake neighborhood, where my husband and I listened to trains rumble through the night.

The recipe itself was given to me by my good neighbor Martha. She made it for me after I had a baby, and I thought it was so good, I asked her for the recipe. I've since made that clam chowder almost every Christmas for 30 years.

Actually, many of the recipes in my recipe box have names attached to them. Becky's Cream of Jalapeño Soup. Ruth's French Bread. Jerri's Sour Cream Potatoes. Kim's No Bake Cookies. Louise's Green Salad. And (of course) Pat's Baked Beans. Whenever I see those recipes, I think of the people who shared them with me and remember where we all were during that time of our lives.

Many of the recipes in my recipe box are in other people's handwriting. People used to do that — write down favorite recipes and exchange them. After I did a column about Jell-O and how you never see it served anymore, a reader named Joyce sent me a handwritten recipe for Peach Jell-O, with a note saying the recipe could be doubled. Unlike my handwriting, hers is regular and readable.

My favorite handwritten recipe comes from my grandmother. It's for "quiche," which I'm pretty sure she never actually made. No. She was more of a meat-and-potatoes cook. Nobody knew how to cook a steak better than she did, probably because she lived in Wyoming where people eat steaks for snacks. I loved eating meat at her house.

But quiche? I think she liked the idea of quiche. A quiche is all fancy and French, and classy people who don't live in small Wyoming towns like it. So really my grandmother's recipe is aspirational. It's for Aspirational Quiche.

In fact, I have a number of aspirational recipes in my recipe box. I have an Aspirational Gingerbread House recipe, for example. My late friend Shauna Horne always made a spectacular gingerbread house during the holidays, and I often imagined myself doing the same thing with my boys. In my making-a-gingerbread-house-together fantasy, I pictured my children laughing and having fun like the von Trapps. But I never did make gingerbread houses with them — too much work — and in reality my boys probably would have just smeared frosting in each other's hair. And also on their lederhosen.

Not all the recipes are handwritten. Some of them were clipped out of the newspaper, like the one claiming to be the original Bratten's clam chowder recipe. A couple of the recipes — like the bran muffin recipe my mother gave to neighbors along with some homemade bran muffins for Christmas one year — were typed, a reminder of the way things were before computers were invented.

Going through my recipe file is a little like going through a scrapbook — a history of my life captured on notecards. Sure, recipes pulled off the Internet are convenient.

But how many personal stories can they tell?

Ann Cannon can be reached at acannon@sltrib.com or facebook.com/anncannontrib.