The Recipe That Isn’t About Food

Somewhere in the archives at Washington State University, there’s a recording of my great-grandmother’s voice. Ruth Sevdy, interviewed in 1979, describing how she canned meat, vegetables, and fruit on the wheat farms and dairy farms of eastern Washington and Idaho. How she made cough syrup from scratch. How she moved from Glenwood to Palouse to Garfield to Pullman to Viola, following her husband to wherever the work was during the Depression.

She also boarded college students, making room in a life that was already stretched thin.

I don’t can.

But I’m an IFS therapist, which means I make room for people in crisis and regulate alongside them while the ground shakes. Ruth did the same thing. She just used a spare bedroom and a pot of soup.

The family recipe made it to me. It just doesn’t look like anyone expected.

What Gets Passed Down

In Internal Family Systems, we talk about legacy burdens — the protective strategies, fears, and beliefs that get transmitted across generations. A grandmother who survived famine passes down a relationship to food that her grandchildren carry without knowing why. A great-grandfather who couldn’t show weakness during wartime passes down an exile of tenderness that shows up three generations later as a man who can’t cry at his own father’s funeral.

These burdens don’t require words to travel. They move through the nervous system, through modeling, through the things that go unsaid at the dinner table. A child learns what feelings are acceptable by watching which ones get met with comfort and which ones get met with silence. The learning goes deep, below language, into the body itself.

But there are also legacy gifts: the strengths, capacities, and wisdom that travel the same invisible pathways. Resilience. Creativity. The ability to make something from nothing. The instinct to open your door when someone needs shelter.

The problem is that the gifts and burdens often travel together, wrapped around each other like roots. The recipe for survival comes with the recipe for suffering. And part of the work, my work, as a therapist and as a human being trying to do right by my ancestors and my children, is learning to separate them. Keep the nourishment. Compost the scarcity.

Ruth’s Gifts

When I listen for what Ruth passed down, I hear:

You make room for people. Even when you don’t have enough. Especially then.

You learn the skills that keep people alive. You don’t wait for someone to teach you. You figure it out.

You move. When the work dries up, when the situation changes, you go where you’re needed.

You preserve what matters. Summer doesn’t last. You seal it in jars for winter.

These gifts have served me. I’ve built a career on making room for people in crisis, on learning the skills that help people find their ground, on being willing to move toward difficulty rather than away from it.

Ruth’s Burdens

But Ruth was also tough. The archive calls it “strong,” and she was. But I know what strong meant for a woman born in 1897, moving across the Depression-era West, following work, housing students, canning everything, never stopping.

Strong meant: You don’t rest.

Strong meant: Your needs come last.

Strong meant: You hold it together no matter what.

Strong meant: Tenderness is a luxury you can’t afford.

I’ve carried these too. The part of me that doesn’t know how to stop. The part that believes my value is in my usefulness. The part that learned to can my own feelings, seal them away for some winter that never ends.

Practicing During Collective Trauma

There’s no manual for how to stay present when the ground is shaking under everyone, including you. Ruth didn’t have one either. She just kept canning. She just kept opening the door.

And I’ve noticed something: the legacy burden wants to run the show. Be strong. Don’t stop. Your needs come last. Seal it up.

But the legacy gift is wiser than that. Ruth didn’t just can food. She taught her community how to do it. Meat and all, which apparently takes skill. She didn’t just survive. She made survival communal.

The gift isn’t self-sufficiency. The gift is mutual aid.

The Work of Unburdening

In IFS, unburdening is the process of releasing what a part has been forced to carry: the beliefs, emotions, and energies that don’t actually belong to it. The part doesn’t disappear. It transforms. It gets to be what it was before it had to protect.

The burdens make sense. They always make sense. They were survival strategies, forged in fire. The work isn’t to shame them. It’s to thank them and release them.

Unburdening the Recipe

I’m learning to unburden my own recipe. To keep the preservation without the deprivation. To keep the strength without the hardness. To keep the making-room without the running-on-empty.

Ruth’s voice is in an archive, but her voice is also in me. And I’m starting to hear what she might have said if anyone had asked her what she actually needed:

I’m tired.

I did the best I could.

I hope you don’t have to work this hard.

Rest, sweetheart. It’s okay to rest.

Four Generations

My daughter is Ruth’s great-great-granddaughter. She’s growing up in a world that feels just as uncertain as the one Ruth moved through. Different disasters, same ground shifting underfoot. Climate crisis instead of the Dust Bowl. Economic precarity that rhymes with the Depression even if it doesn’t match it. The sense that the systems meant to hold us might not.

And I watch her, and I see it: the strength.

Not the hard kind. Not the seal-it-up, needs-come-last, don’t-you-dare-rest kind. Something else. Something that might be what Ruth’s strength looked like before the Depression got to it. Before survival required so much armor.

Ona makes room for people. She notices who’s struggling. She has a fierce instinct for justice and an open door in her heart.

She has the gift.

My work, my real work, the work underneath the work, is to pass her the recipe without the scarcity. The strength without the armor. The preservation without the message that she has to can herself down to nothing to be worth something.

Ruth moved across uncertain terrain and kept people alive. I sit with people in crisis and help them find the parts of themselves worth preserving. My daughter will do something I can’t yet imagine, in a future I can’t predict, with the same gift running through her.

Four generations of women, making room.

The Inheritance

I don’t can. But I teach people how to preserve themselves through impossible seasons. I make room for the parts that got sealed away. I help people unpack the jars their grandmothers filled. Keep the fruit, release the scarcity.

My great-grandmother gave me a recipe. It was never about the food.

It was about survival. It was about making room. It was about the fierce, exhausting, beautiful insistence that we will get through this winter, and we will not get through it alone.

The recipe keeps traveling. And each time it passes through hands, we get the chance to keep what nourishes and release what no longer serves.

Ruth Sevdy’s oral history is part of the Washington State University History 398 (Women in the West) Oral Histories collection, 1979–1986, Archives 194, Box 3, Folder 34. Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA.