E was in a baking mood last weekend, but none of her tried-and-trues were feeling what she was in the mood for and so she asked me to pick something for her to make. When someone asks me if I want cake, the cake I immediately want is a recipe that my Great Aunt JJ handed down.

It’s a wacky chocolate cake, and just in case you don’t know why they’re called that, it’s because they don’t have any milk or eggs in them. Although they were popularized during the rations of World War II, they’re also a huge hit with little kids because their rise comes from the explosive combination of vinegar and baking soda.

In much the same way as E, I was in the mood to make something one hot summer day when I was bored. My mom directed me to Aunt JJ’s recipe, and just like that, I was hooked. It is an easy cake to make as all the ingredients go into one bowl, and it mixes right up. It’s so moist and delicious that it can stand alone, or if you really want to take it over the top, you can add just about any flavor icing and it becomes the most decadent dessert on the planet.

Over the years, I’ve substituted the highest quality ingredients, and at the end of the day, this cake tastes best with plain old Hershey’s cocoa, and whatever other generic pantry items you have lying around.

So I sent E to my recipe box, where Aunt JJ’s neatly penned recipe is safely stored in a plastic sleeve. (I have found many similar recipes on the internet, but her proportions make all the difference.) A few minutes later, I heard a disappointed sigh come from her corner of the kitchen. “Mom, I can’t make this,” she said. I knew that we had all the ingredients, so I wasn’t sure what was putting her off. “I can’t read it,” she said.

Horrified that something disastrous had happened to the card, I jumped over the counter. It looked perfectly fine to me. “What do you mean, you can’t read it?” Aunt JJ’s handwriting was perfectly textbook, and there was nothing exotic on the ingredient list.

“It’s CURSIVE!” I took another look. It was cursive, but it was simple cursive. Aunt JJ left her flourishes for her cakes, not her recipe cards. I spent the next few minutes tutoring her in cursive, and except for the tablespoon and the teaspoon abbreviations, she eventually got it figured out.

Since nostalgia was the order of the day, as the cake was cooling, I sent her back to the recipe box for one of my favorite icing recipes. Now, even though it’s a delicious cooked vanilla icing, the reason it’s my favorite is because my childhood babysitter P’s directions, scribbled on the back of a piece of scrap paper include “Beat it like hell!!!” As a kid, I thought this was hilarious and loved to read the directions out loud.

P’s handwriting wasn’t nearly as fastidious as Aunt JJ, and the recipe also had the benefit of being in the presence of many, many episodes of “beating like hell” and so it was smeared and spattered and had definitely seen better days.

E took one look at it and said, “Nope! It’s cursive again!” I’ll be honest, it took me a minute or two to decipher it all, and that was with my reading glasses on.

As we baked and beat, I regaled E with other tales of Aunt JJ and P. Aunt JJ passed away long before she was born, and although she’s met P, she was too young to remember her, but Facebook keeps us in touch nowadays.

E was flipping through the rest of my recipe box, looking for other interesting recipes. When I got married, my bridesmaids included recipe cards in my shower invitations, and my recipe box is not only full of delicious recipes, but beautiful memories as well.

The WH’s grandmother shared her famous rice pudding recipe. I can remember one of my first visits to her house, and she had a giant cold bowl of it in the fridge. It’s the kind of rice pudding that you find in only the best diners, and it’s simple, cold and delicious. I received no less than three mac and cheese recipes, all claiming to be the world’s best mac and cheese. While all three of them are good, a recipe handed over by a friend who discovered the actual best mac and cheese holds a special place of honor.

While there are dozens of wonderful recipes in there, I’m acutely aware of a few recipes that aren’t in there, namely, my grandmother’s chicken pot pie (the soup kind, not the pie kind) and her halushki recipe. Why are they not in there?

Because she was a masterful cook, who couldn’t be bothered to write down the simple things she made all the time. “A handful of this, a little of that, a few pinches of this.” I dutifully followed her around and tried to capture actual measurements for her chicken dumplings, but nothing I ever tried came close to hers.

As I flipped through the rest of the box, I realized that other than a few typed recipes, and my friend ME’s peanut butter blossom cookie recipe which was printed in the meticulous hand of a grade-school teacher, most of my recipes would be useless to E unless she learns cursive. Although it has stopped being a required part of the curriculum, E was at least learning the fundamentals, and when pressed, could do a rudimentary job of writing.

However, after over a year of using the Chromebook almost exclusively, even her printing has suffered.

I know the internet makes jokes about old people using cursive as a code, and until I saw it happen, I didn’t think it was actually possible, but it is. I know school is almost over, and no one is happier about that than I am, but I think E and I are going to be cooking, eating and learning cursive on our way through my recipe box this summer, so that another generation can enjoy wacky cake and beat-it-like-hell icing.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.