Want to go down in history? Share your favorite recipes. Even baked beans may be enough to keep your memory alive for generations -- in a couple of families at least.

Take Jerry Cashwell. She hasn’t crossed my path in nearly 40 years but every time I crave baked beans, this lovely lady – my mom’s dear pal when I was a kid – springs to mind.

There she is at the Memorial Day summer kickoff party, the beach picnic, always bearing a steaming casserole: beans with just the right level of brown sugar toned down by a squirt of good-old yellow mustard. Somebody’s dad swigged too much beer at the beach one time and dumped Jerry’s beans right onto the sand. I nearly cried.

Before puberty I had mastered the eight-minute mix/ half-hour bake to produce the beans myself. Heading for my first apartment, I copied the recipe on an index card. That same card still resides in my first-ever recipe box. It’s practically brown now, scribbled with notes from various experiments. In a fat-free phase, I omitted the bacon. One Halloween I added black beans.

Scrounging through the box recently I came across the card and remembered Jerry Cashwell. Here’s the recipe so you can make her beans and perhaps pay tribute to Jerry yourself. Think of her with a jet-black page-boy and gigantic smile, standing barefoot in the sand in flowered pedal pushers. She’s the one holding the beans.