🥄 A Pinch of Yesterday: The Bryan Kitchen Archives, Blog Two: Correction, Connection, and a Gold Star.

Oops. It turns out I misread the name. It wasn’t Mary A. Bryan after all. It was Mary A. Ryan.

And honestly? I think she would’ve forgiven me for the mix-up, especially once she saw how hard I was trying to get it right.

When I first opened that 1928 copy of The Settlement Cook Book, I saw flour-dusted pages, handwritten recipes, and a small, cut-out Gold Star tucked with care between the chapters. I guessed the owner might’ve been Mary A. Ryan, based on a clipped star. But the more I dug, the clearer the truth became.

The star? It wasn’t just a keepsake. It was a tribute.

Painstakingly cut. Perfect edges. No jagged lines or careless corners. This wasn’t clipped quickly or by accident. It was saved… intentionally. Reverently.

A star-shaped tribute dedicated to Sgt. Thomas F. Ryan by Mary A. Ryan, celebrating a war bond purchase, rests delicately over an open recipe book.

That little star led me down a rabbit hole of records, where I found SSGT Thomas Francis Ryan, a

WWII veteran born in 1914, buried in St. Petersburg, Florida. His wife? A woman named Mary A. Ryan. They had one child who died young—too young—and when Mary passed in 1959, it seems their story slipped through the cracks.

Until now.

The more I studied that star, the more it felt like a heartbeat. It wasn’t random. It was deliberate. Once I found Mary A. Ryan, everything else started to fall into place.

And just like that… the cookbook had no home.

It likely passed from hand to hand—quietly, without fanfare—until it ended up in an antique store in Texas, waiting. Covered in time, grief, and grease spots. Waiting for someone to care.

And I did.

I didn’t know what I was looking for when I picked it up. All I knew was that something about it pulled me in. That’s when the real work began—the emotional detective work—piecing together scraps, looking at clippings not as decoration but as clues and wondering about the woman behind the margin notes, imagining her hands folding pages, slicing ads, jotting down wartime substitutions with a pencil that’s now faded.

And then the heartbreak hit. One child, gone too soon. A husband who survived war but still somehow never outran the shadows. And a book filled with life… outliving all of them.

I started thinking: How many others like this are out there?

How many handwritten cookbooks or clipped-together kitchen bibles are quietly gathering dust in estate sales and antique shops—each one holding not just recipes, but remnants?

Remnants of love. Loss. Resilience. Identity.

A mysterious photograph of an unknown man lies nestled between the pages of a 1928 cookbook, discovered amid handwritten recipe notes.

🧵 Connecting Threads: Have You Found One Too?

Have you ever stumbled across a recipe card in your grandmother’s handwriting? Or flipped through an old book at a garage sale only to find a name, a note, or a folded-up clipping that made you stop?

Tell me. I want to hear your stories. Because A Pinch of Yesterday isn’t just about Mary anymore, it’s about all of us who’ve inherited fragments—and found a way to piece them together.

A vintage newspaper clipping featuring recipes for Applesauce Cake and Peanut Butter Icing rests atop an open cookbook, surrounded by handwritten notes.

Coming Soon:

Blog 3 – “From Mary to Meemaw: Two Women, One Legacy”

A tribute to my own grandmother, Meemaw Manon Wallace, whose cookbook echoes with handwritten wisdom, recipe clippings, and sass straight from the apron pocket.

“To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.”— Thomas Campbell

Mary’s heart lives in this book. And now? It lives a little in mine, too.