I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the social ritual of sharing recipes and why people have such a personal investment in it. This is a theme that gets stuck in my head from time to time, because I’ve never managed to fully articulate what’s at stake, at least not to my satisfaction.

I started pondering this again when I was tracking down the recipe for sunshine strawberry preserves, which a reader had asked for and which was the focus of last week’s column.

In my search, I initially began looking through old fund-raiser cookbooks that my mother collected, and one in particular caught my eye. It was produced by the Assistance League in Long Beach, Calif., in 1947. What distinguished it from others was that all the recipes were reproduced in the contributors’ handwriting.

The signatures of all of the cooks also appeared inside the now-tattered paper cover. As was typical for the time, most of the women signed their names as Mrs. Â plus their husband’s name. Interestingly, all the contributors abandoned the formality when they signed their given names at the bottom of the recipes that they had written out by hand.

The recipes themselves contain shorthand; some are simply ingredient lists, while others narrate instructions, leaving readers to assemble the list of ingredients and guess about quantities. Many assume you’ll know where to set the dial on the oven and how long to bake.

Leafing through the book felt very familiar, very much like the occasional tours I make of my mother’s recipe card box. There, however, many of the names attached to the recipes are familiar to me  neighbors from way back when, church ladies, my mother’s PEO sisters and various relatives.

Most of these people, my mother included, are gone now, as I assume are most of the women who belonged to the Long Beach Assistance League 55 years ago. But their favorite cookie and luncheon salad recipes are still here, though the cards in my mother’s recipe box are starting to yellow and the ink has begun to fade.

While I doubt that any of these people saw distributing their recipes as a way to achieve some kind of immortality, that’s exactly what they did.

As a child I remember my mother’s recipe box as a site of intense activity. She cooked a lot and hoarded recipes like they were baseball cards. New ones were always coming in and I frequently saw her sitting at the kitchen table scribbling her own on index cards, to give away in trade.

I’ve tried to imagine the social relationship that recipe cards represented for women in that generation and earlier. Certainly, the giving and receiving of recipes was an act of communion, just like sharing a meal. That part is easy. But it was much more than that  and that’s what I can’t quite nail down.

I got a glimpse of it last week, and it has to do with human connectedness, not only in the here and now but also with those who came before us and those who will follow. In that respect it may have a little bit to do with immortality, but it’s more about having a place in the network of humanity. Something on the order of six degrees of separation.

Last week’s column on sunshine strawberry jam elicited an e-mail from Sue Hess, a woman I don’t recall ever meeting but who, like me, is from Emporia. She wrote to share the strawberry jam recipe her mother, Ruby Thomson, made and passed down to her. Sue was able to trace the lineage of this recipe, which was given to Ruby by Matilda Brewer, whose only child, Bob, was killed in World War II. Oh, and by the way, my grandmother, who died in 1958 when I was just 2 years old, was Sue’s first-grade teacher.

I feel like I know them all. And now I have Sue and Ruby and Matilda’s jam recipe  and you do, too.

“This is a perfect jam recipe; easy and makes a bright red product and delicious,” Sue writes. “I used to make this up in a larger amount, can and store. The preserves stay this beautiful color.”

Strawberry Jam

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1 full quart strawberries, washed and stemmed

1 quart sugar (place 1 pint of it in a kettle, adding 3/4 cup boiling water)

Let this boil to the crackling stage, or until it almost caramelizes. Add berries, then the remainder of the sugar (dry) on top of the berries. Cook rapidly, but do not stir. Let stand until perfectly cold before canning.

 When she’s not writing about foods and gardening, Gwyn Mellinger is teaching journalism at Baker University. Her phone number is (785) 594-4554.