My mother was an excellent cook. Her meals were complex, flavorful, and creative. She baked her own bread, catered to my father’s sweet tooth with all kinds of amazing desserts: pies, chocolate eclairs, apple crumble, cookies. Her stews and main courses had depth and richness. She cooked with lashings of wine and butter, and although she used recipes, they were merely jumping off points for her creativity.

She was also not a woman much devoted to method. I think you could fairly call her general style slapdash, except for the fact that her results were so wonderful. Her handwriting was distinctive, but often scrawled (much like my own) and such recipe cards as she had—and she had a lot—are often nearly impossible to decipher. My niece very thoughtfully gave me a dishtowel with some of my mother’s recipes reproduced in her own writing, and when people see it they almost always ask: Can you read that? Usually, I can. A lifetime’s experience. But sometimes reading them isn’t enough.

My old friend, Julie, from sixth grade, like so many Wisconsin natives, is German through and through. She was lamenting recently that most of the old restaurants that served Sauerbraten are gone. Sauerbraten is a dish that requires three to five days to marinate the beef, and comes with complicated side dishes. Very German. My mom always made it, and although I have the recipe, I never have. So, back in December when things were hectic I told Julie—who is a treasured friend—that come January I would make Sauerbraten for her husband and her. It was a leap of faith.

Sauerbraten is one of those things that really does require a recipe. The seasonings and details vary regionally: Some versions have raisins, some have crumbled Lebkuchen, some have a chunk of rye bread at the bottom. But the fundamental seasonings are the same: apple cider vinegar, sugar, bay leaf, peppercorns, cloves, onions, lemon. It doesn’t sound good, does it? But it is delicious: the German version of sweet and sour. The beef has been marinating since yesterday, and today I will make potato dumplings—which scare me— and red cabbage. So I am depending heavily upon my mother’s recipe cards.

The funny thing is my mother’s recipes are a bit like that old Far Side cartoon, where the mathematics professor has a long equation with an arrow pointing to the phrase: And then a miracle occurs. Many of the steps are not clearly explained. It makes me laugh. SO like her. For example, the recipe tells me the ingredients for the potato dumplings (Kartoffelklösse), but it’s kind of vague on how to cook them. The Sauerbraten is the same. I inherited her authentic German cookbook, and it, too, assumes that every idiot knows how to cook dumplings. But the Sauerbraten steps are so elaborate and complex that they tell the close reader much about the German mind.

My mother didn’t have a German mind. She had a passionate, fiery and creative Irish mind—which made her an interesting match to my studious, brilliant, but also passionate father. Tomorrow will be their wedding anniversary—79 years ago they were married at the Navy chapel in Anapolis—so it seems appropriate to be making the meal that was my mother’s specialty and my father’s favorite. And I think the best approach for me will be to throw culinary caution to the wind and adopt my mother’s joyful carelessness. If nothing else, it will be more fun.

I will report back.