I don’t know why it’s called “Spanish bake” — and now, of course, I can’t ask. The recipe is simple: butter, sugar, eggs, milk, baking powder, flour, cinnamon and nutmeg. It is written in the elegant, slanting cursive handwriting that is absolutely recognisable as my grandmother’s — yet I’m startled to discover that she had perfected it by the time she was 12 years old.

“Sylvia Gutterman”, she wrote on the inside of the slim school exercise book. “Room 303; Grade 7.” On the first page is the date, Feb 3, 1915 — in fact, she was not quite 12. She was a schoolgirl in Chicago and this notebook, which I found while clearing several lifetimes’ worth of papers from my childhood home in New York, was her home economics workbook, and its pages are filled with wholesome, Midwestern staples that would serve a young woman well as she prepared herself for — what else? — marriage.

There is cream of tomato soup, apple charlotte and rice croquettes. There is vanilla sauce, Viennese carrots, beef loaf. There are columns clipped from a yellowing magazine offering suggestions for vegetarian cuisine (these include tapioca soup and egg soup and have not aged well) and “wholesome date recipes” — date breakfast mush, date fritters. Yum. None of the recipes, so carefully copied down, would cause Nigella any sleepless nights: these are recipes to fill your belly, not to thrill your tastebuds. I can’t swear to it, but the thought of an as-yet-distant war hangs over the fragile pages — but then make-do-and-mend was the rule rather than the exception. No conflict was needed to use up leftover salmon or make a cake using only one egg.

But one solitary evening not long ago, I made myself a simple supper of goldenrod eggs. (Goldenrode, as my grandmother wrote; and she spells yolk, yoke.) I can recommend goldenrod eggs as food for thought; they are simple, savoury, soothing. Make a white sauce first — butter, flour, salt pepper and milk. When that’s done, finely chop the whites of two hard-boiled eggs and stir into the sauce. Press the yolk through a sieve (“press the yoke threw a sift”) and sprinkle over the top. Add celery salt and more pepper; serve hot on buttered toast or a lettuce leaf. “A grate of cheese improves it,” reads the last line.

My grandmother — or her teacher, whom I imagine in steel-rimmed spectacles, a checkered apron pinned over her generous figure — was right about the cheese. There is, of course, no mention of Marmite, but I thought that it would be a judicious addition to the buttered toast; I’m not the sort who pours anything over a lettuce leaf and calls it dinner.

It is not the world’s most exciting meal, true. But then excitement isn’t always what’s required of a supper.

I never cooked with my grandmother — goldenrod eggs or anything else. Sylvia Gutterman married Don Friedman; my mother was their only daughter. She was born after they left Chicago, and shortly before they changed their surname to Franklin with the idea that this would be better for my grandfather’s business. And indeed, my grandmother’s, for armed though she was with the best recipes that the Chicago school system could provide, Sylvia Franklin was, from the late 1920s onward, an independent businesswoman.

She was a dress designer; her elegant clothes on sale in all of New York’s finest department stores, her patterns a staple of Butterick and Vogue. She travelled to Paris just after the war to work, and to bring back the antique furniture she adored; I would spend my childhood avoiding elaborately gilt and carved sharp corners. By the time I knew her — pretty much by the time my mother knew her, for that matter — cooking was mostly what the maid did. For the dinners we had at my grandparents’ apartment most Friday nights, my grandmother was the general, overseeing the tactics of the menu; her maid was a solitary army, advancing our meal from kitchen to table.

No — I love to cook not because my grandmother passed on to me the lessons she learnt in home economics in 1915, but because my father never shooed me out of the kitchen when he was making an omelette or spaghetti, or his amazing breadcrumb-baked chicken.

The truth is, I didn’t get on with my grandmother very well; to be perfectly frank, I didn’t like her. She was exacting, determined, stubborn, a woman with a very clear idea of how she wanted the world to be — we were the opposing poles of two magnets, repelling each other because we were, in the end, exactly alike. The Sylvia Franklin I knew was not a grandmotherly grandmother: I have no memories of being clasped to a warm, floury bosom or welcomed by the scent of baking cookies. She was always perfectly dressed, her fingers tipped with coral polish; now, I wish I’d had the courage to ask how to use the KitchenAid mixer that sat on her countertop; but I never did.

So it seems very hard to connect this Sylvia Franklin with the earnest schoolgirl of her workbook, at least, I think it is until I look more closely at what she has copied down. “Order of the Kitchen,” the first page begins, and a list of rules follows, the first being one I’ve never stuck to. “1. Do not speak in the room unless it is absolutely necessary, then speak in a low tone,” she writes. “2. Wash hands, put on apron, and take places quietly and orderly. 3. Find something to do all the time, work quietly and quickly. Keep desk closed while working and use as few matches as possible. 4. Do not put cooked food of any kind on top of table, and handkerchiefs out of sight. 5. Watch clock so as to finish on time.” Well, certainly I got the idea that it was a good idea to keep quiet as much as possible, and a desire for order was something she never lost.

But those closed desks, the hidden handkerchiefs, the cooked food off the table (where did it go instead?): they conjure a lost world, I had to discover many years later, mostly on my own. I’ve spent half a lifetime — the half that’s gone by since my grandmother died — reading books such as America’s Best Lost Recipes (Cook’s Illustrated, $29.95) and experimenting with Great-Aunt Ellen’s Upside-Down Lemon Pudding Cake (some stranger’s great-aunt Ellen, but what do I care?) or Naked Ladies With Their Legs Crossed (sort of like crooked doughnuts, since you were probably wondering). The truth is that, most likely, even if I had asked, my grandmother would not have expounded on her early lessons in home economics; they were not part of who she became.

Who do we become through the foods we choose to cook and eat, the recipes we treasure? My son is nearly nine: had he been a boy in 1915 he wouldn’t have had any home economics lessons anyhow. He’d have done woodworking or “shop” — so I can’t complain if he doesn’t get them now, not really. It’s up to me to let him stand by the stove, counting off the minutes on his watch as we soft-boil an egg; up to me not to say “Be careful!” every other second as he slides a knife through a cucumber.

Our kitchen has order, I like to think, despite its lack of silence . . . maybe I learnt something from Sylvia Franklin after all.

Tips from Twitter

twitter.com/timesfood

BoobieMcTweetie : Put a teaspoon of marmite into cottage/shepherds pie for much richer flavour

exromana: While cooking something pungent, keep a pot of water simmering with few cloves floating in it

SNBalzac:A little sugar when cooking chicken helps caramelise it, giving it better colour and overall taste

HannahGould: BBQ sauce: onion+garlic+butter.4 mins. +chopped toms+dark sugar+lea&perrins+soysauce+mixherbs+honey. 15-20 mins. Glorious!

Explore Food & Drink

• Gordon Ramsay

• Heston Blumenthal

• Recipes

• Wine

• Real Food

• Drinks

• Anjum Anand

• Eating Out

• Video Recipes

Times Recommends

• Jane MacQuitty’s party wine
• Oliver Peyton's Christmas pavlova
• Blood orange cosmopolitan