In 1965, when Evelyn Silverman Reinfeld and her family moved into a ranch-style house in New Jersey, she designed her own kitchen. She selected a restaurant-grade fridge and a mixer larger than the professional KitchenAid line on the market, and installed a Corning cooktop and an additional gas stove in the basement for different types of cooking. Closets in the house were full of cooking utensils and baking pans, recalls her daughter Patricia Reinfeld Kolodny. And, in one closet sat small fruit cakes that she doused with Cointreau, an orange-flavored liqueur, that aged for five years before they could be consumed.

“She had the two volume set of Gourmet and she used that as her bible,” explains Patricia, who goes by Patti. She also turned to the Joy of Cooking and The Settlement Cookbook, but she had her own recipes as well, and likely, says Patti, adopted some of the recipes made by local women with German roots she hired to help her when she hosted parties. Regardless of the source of the recipe, everything in Evelyn’s kitchen was made from scratch. If someone in the family requested a coconut lemon cake for a birthday, the coconut flesh was grated by Evelyn.

“She had a cookbook with her own writing, but when she passed away, we couldn’t find it,” Patti says. “Basically, everything was in her head.” And she didn’t like children scampering around the kitchen, so none of her recipes were transferred to the next generation through cooking together.

Today, only three of her recipes remain in the family. Her stuffed cabbage, turkey stuffing, and her gefilte fish, which originally came from Evelyn’s mother Nettie, whose mother came from Eastern Europe — though no one is quite sure from where, possibly Hungary. Both the stuffed cabbage and the stuffing were written down because Patti’s husband insisted upon it.

The gefilte fish? Well, that’s another story. The family’s famed gefilte fish recipe was passed to Patti when Evelyn was in the hospital in 1974. She had suffered a heart attack and was in the ICU, Patti recalls, when she told her daughter to go to the nurse’s station and grab a notepad. Evelyn was having fish delivered later in the day to make gefilte fish and she didn’t want it to go to waste, so she dictated the recipe to Patti and told her to go home and make it. “That was Evelyn Silverman Reinfeld!” Patti exclaims.

Evelyn dictated the instructions, including her own twist on Nettie’s recipe, cooking it in a fish poacher in a loaf shape, so the gefilte could be served in elegant slices instead of crude balls. That year, Patti made the gefilte fish and brought it to her mother in the hospital. “She was satisfied that we had done a fairly good job,” Patti says. In the years that followed, Evelyn continued to make the fish until the last few years of her life.

Patti still has the recipe she wrote down in the hospital and today, she and her daughter Johanna make the recipe together in Johanna’s Manhattan apartment for the seder they host annually. While Johanna doesn’t have many memories of cooking with her grandmother (though the two baked cookies together) Patti says her daughter inherited some of Evelyn’s traits and kitchen skills.

When Johanna was little and her grandmother would stay over the two shared a room. “My mother must have whispered in her ear after Johanna fell asleep: ‘Be frugal, don’t be like your parents. Learn to bake. Be a good cook. Be clean,” says Patti. Somehow, by osmosis, the important things transferred.