1975, when I was only 31, my mother suddenly died. Aside from some photographs and a few pieces of jewelry, she left very little that's tangible to remind me of her 57 years on earth. But the other day, scanning my shelves of cookbooks for a recipe, I noticed her copy of The Glasgow Cookery Book and took it down.

"Xmas, 1946," reads the flyleaf, "Best Wishes from Betty and Mena" — Mum's cousins. The book, bound in faded purple cloth, was "Issued by the Glasgow and West of Scotland College of Domestic Science (Incorporated)." I think Betty may have been a student at "Dough School," as the place was known. Subjects taught, according to a preface, included "Cookery, Laundry Work, Housewifery, Dressmaking, Needlework, Millinery, Sick Nursing, Hygiene, Book-Keeping, Upholstery, Dietetics, and Electricity."

A look at the recipes reveals just why food in post–World War II Britain was rightly regarded as execrable. The entire population had been half-starved for seven years at the time the book was published, and would eat more or less anything. Nonetheless, that doesn't excuse instructions such as the cooking times directed for vegetables: Cabbage is to be "steamed quickly till tender 20 to 40 minutes." In the winter, cauliflower will require 30 to 35 minutes of cooking time. Celery (why anyone would serve cooked celery as an accompanying vegetable remains mysterious) needs 40 minutes, while poor defeated carrots must be cooked one to two hours.

Thrift was essential at this time of rigorous food rationing, which went on for nine years after the war ended. Fruits and vegetables were limited to what could be locally grown. Adults had a weekly allowance of four ounces of dried eggs, a little bacon, one shell egg, and two ounces of butter — if available.

Meat was similarly scarce, and every part of everything was put to use: the recipe for Stewed Cow Heel and Cow Heel Jelly begins, "If the hoof has not been removed...." Potted Head requires a "thoroughly cleaned" ox head and 100 peppercorns, plus other spices. The recipe goes on to state: "a good head will make 16 lbs." For haggis, "take a sheep's bag and pluck [the heart, liver, lungs, and trachea], 1/2 lb oatmeal, 1/4 lb mince suet, and seasonings." Then, "Wash the bag in cold water, scrape and clean it well, let it lie all night with a little salt. Wash the pluck, put it in a pan of boiling water and boil for two hours with the wind pipe hanging out...." Yum. If making stock from bones, the book says, "second or even third stock may be made from re-boiling the bones with more water; these should not be thrown out till perfectly dry and perforated."

While I count myself lucky that ours was a family without the haggis habit (though there are many in Scotland who adore this national dish), I do have a clear mental image of those bones to assume an acquaintance with them. What's certain was the anticipation afforded at dinner time (lunch) by Granny's Potted Hough. Hough is shinbone of beef. Hough rhymes with loch. Not, mind you, "lock" — but loch, said with a glottal stop: the "ch" sound gurgled in the back of the throat like a French "r." Being shinbone, hough is full of gelatin. Potted Hough is a sort of meat Jell-O, full of highly seasoned shreds of beef. Unmolded, sliced, and served with tomatoes from Grandpa's greenhouse, it was a family favorite.

Though all this sounds rigorous, indeed, good times are remembered by delicacies in the book such as Grenadines of Veal (braised fillet of veal larded with bacon) and Huitres a la Tzar (a "hot savoury" of beef tongue and oysters served on cheese crackers), though I can't help thinking that some of these recipes could never have been cooked by the largely impoverished Scots. Roast pigeons, for instance, call for "a few vine leaves," an ingredient certainly not available then to families in that northern climate — except, perhaps, in the conservatories of the landed gentry, whose cooks, after all, may have been graduates of the Dough School.

Oddly enough, the authors seem to have gone out of their way to make truly good dishes sound positively unappetizing — apple sauce, for instance, appears in a list of "Nondescript Sauces," while there are three recipes for gingerbread: Gingerbread (Good), Gingerbread (Damp), and Gingerbread (Spongy). Methods of preparation include arcane instructions: When boning a fowl, "begin to bone at the merry thought." Recipes make use of odd ingredients like Paisley flour, coralline pepper, carmine, and sprue.

Flipping through the pages, I began to notice recipes that appeared on the table regularly when I was a child. My mother often made Cheese Pudding — on page 346 — for tea (supper). A baked dish making use of leftover bread, a little cheese, and only one precious egg, when served with tea, bread and jam, and possibly a slice of cake, it would serve four or five people.

Aunt Ness (my great-aunt) was famous for her peppery Hare Soup (page 46), as in The Tortoise and the Hare. Similar to jackrabbits, hares were sometimes shot by our farmer relatives and given to the family. The soup was more flavorful than much of our often bland fare. But then Aunt Ness knew a thing or two about seasoning, and the recipe whispers why the soup was so good — it calls for Port wine, red currant jelly, and (now I know why it was peppery) cayenne.

Granny sometimes made Queen of Puddings, a thrifty dessert much greater than the sum of its parts. Breadcrumbs are soaked in a mixture of egg yolk, milk, sugar, and lemon peel, baked till set, spread with warm jam, covered with meringue, and baked again to "a very pale brown." I recall how pretty it was in its earthenware dish, the yellow pudding surmounted by the line of red jam and pillows of snowy meringue. A great treat, and far better than boring Semolina Pudding (page 169) or scary Sago Pudding (page 179), with its clear jellied eyes like frog spawn.

My English father, a Yorkshire man, encouraged Mum to branch out beyond the book to roast beef and Yorkshire Pudding, Cornish pasties (he liked to slip one in his pocket for fishing trips), and even curries — an unheard of exoticism in those days — served with cooked plain white rice, never before met unless made into a sweet rice pudding.

However, on page 292 of Glasgow Cookery, in the baking section, the book fell open, as books do, to a much-used place. The pages were splattered by the ingredients of a favorite recipe. I looked closer, and, sure enough, the middle recipe was for Parkin, a Yorkshire cookie recipe much favored by my father. There were often some in the biscuit tin in the kitchen: dark brown, shaggy with oatmeal, sweet and warmly spiced, and each dotted with half a roasted almond. The brownish spots, the greasy patches, and the sandy grains on the pages came from mixed spice and cinnamon and ginger and lard actually used by Mum in baking batch after batch.

As this evidence of past industry came at me across the years, time fell away, and I realized with a full heart that the dark smudges on the bottom-outer corners of the pages were in fact Mum's fingerprints. Filled with surprise and pleasant shock, I felt as close to her as I have in more than 30 years.