Cailean's Recipe Box

It’s a small box, but its beautiful, hand carved by Caelian’s great-uncle for his grandmother, back when he first took up the craft. It’s not perfect, and Caelian can feel the places where his uncle’s hand slipped while he was working, or where the filigree’s been worn away by his grandmother’s hands and then his mothers and now his.   His sister says it’s othrifrus, which means it’s dark and rich with veins of gold running through it. Caelian wouldn’t know either way, but he doesn’t think she’d lie to him about something like this.   Caelian never actually knew his grandmother, though he’s heard stories about how she traveled with his grandfather from port to port, collecting recipes and meeting new people. He knows she wrote them down on heavy pieces of parchment and kept them tied together with a long piece of twine. He knows her handwriting was elegant, though she had a heavy hand, and that she wrote in shorthand wherever possible. She never used a real measurements when she didn’t have to, and that there was so much love in everything she made.   When it was passed down to his mother, she added a few of her own recipes, mostly from Crecia or new things she tried out that worked better than expected. There are notes written on a couple of his grandmother’s cards, written carefully, with a heavy hand so Caelian can read them when he needs to.   It was a nice thought, even if it’s not actually necessary, given that Caelian knows nearly every recipe in the box by heart. He knows that bone stock tastes best with irwage and basil added in, and that verabor steeped in milk is good for making nightmares go away, to always keep othrifrus sap on hand for custard, and that flour ground from solasigh pods is sweet. It’s nice, though, to have the reminders, and if he’s a little endeared by the reverence Nicole treats his recipe box with, that’s alright too.