The Recipe Card Collection That Never Fed Anyone

Margaret Chen kept a wooden box on her kitchen counter in Portland, Oregon, filled with over two hundred recipe cards written in her grandmother's careful hand. Pork dumplings with ginger and scallion. Red-braised fish for New Year's. Sesame noodles that could make a grown man weep. Margaret loved reading them. She'd pull out a card on a quiet evening, run her fingers over the faded ink, and smile at the memory of her grandmother's tiny kitchen in Taipei.…