Since my mother’s death several years ago, I’ve gathered a pile of hundreds of recipes from the derangement of papers every death leaves behind. I added a few hundred more when my grandmother—her mother-in-law—died a few years ago. This last cache of papers surprised me; I don’t remember my grandmother ever cooking a meal for anyone. She lived next door to my mother and father for the last 20 years of her life, a perpetual guest in my mother’s living room, subsisting mainly on cigarettes and beer and the hot dishes cooked by other women and brought to her like peace offerings.

Still, here they are: recipes, hundreds of recipes, cut out of newspapers and magazines, from the bottom of advertisements and off can labels and on index cards and notepaper. Some are in my grandmother’s crabbed, backward writing, but most are in my mother’s meticulous schoolteacher’s penmanship. A few are in mysterious hands, likely gifts from long-gone friends and neighbors scribbled on the backs of envelopes, bits of stationery, handed on, copied again and again.

These aren’t lost classics or great secrets. Most of them rely on a single quality––speed. Here is Vegetable à la Supreme, requiring cream of mushroom soup, frozen broccoli, Minute rice, and an entire bottle of Cheez Whiz. Here is Tomato Soup Salad, with canned soup, Knox gelatin, cottage cheese, mayonnaise, and stuffed olives. Here are Easy Deviled Ham ’n’ Cheesewich, Saccharin Pickles, Chicken Spaghetti. There are also a great many recipes using zucchini: zucchini with tomato juice, with fried onion rings, with cream cheese, with whipped cream, with cream of mushroom soup, with nuts and crushed pineapple.

These dishes are based in convenience, the ingenuity of making do with a few odd cans and boxes, combining anything and everything you can put your hands on so as to avoid yet another trip to the store. Here are the endless reinventions of fusion cuisine, the creativity of limited ethnic poverty, the patent simplicity of country people, all wrapped into a Jet Age suburban gift box. Weird and wonderful, this criminal urge to avoid work, this wily feminine conspiracy of three-by-five cards. My mother worked a lot. At the end of the day, what she wanted wasn’t food but time––time out of her labor, time to goof off in her armchair reading romances and drinking coffee, smoking while she watched Mike Douglas watch someone else cook something.

In this whole pile are only a few familiar items, like Porcupine Meatballs––hamburger and rice rolled into balls and baked in a sauce of canned tomato soup––and Pigs in Blankets. I don’t know if I loved the name, evocative of luxury and comfort, or the doughy combination of Vienna sausages and Bisquick, but they were one of my favorite treats, rarely had. The fact is that my mother cooked the same few things over and over. After a few swings at Porcupine Meatballs or Scalloped Potatoes and Spam, you don’t need a recipe. You don’t even need a shopping list, and so you certainly don’t need to plan too much or think too far ahead. She kept a pantry stocked well enough for cataclysmic natural disasters, but the hundreds of boxes and cans were simply variations of a few basic things. (You can make Porcupine Meatballs with tomato soup, with mushroom soup or with cheese soup, and call it something different every time.)