Irene Hartford and Mary Hicks epitomize what I love most about Helvetia. The two sisters, now in their eighties, are part Swiss and part Irish, reflecting the integration of other immigrant settlers. They were born MacNeil on a neighboring farm, then moved to a big house in town, where Mary still lives. Irene, who looks like Gertrude Stein, spends much of her time at Mary’s house but lives across the road in the log cabin with the that remarkable sign — which she hung in 1939 as a joke with cosmic underpinnings.

Mary did much of the cooking on the family farm. She is one of the best cooks in town and acts as its culinary memory, in lieu of written recipes, for the town’s many fund–raising suppers. She always appears at the community hall just as those monumental undertakings hit a crisis point, when nobody can quite remember the proper way to cook the beans for the Ramp Supper or the gravy for another Helvetia tradition, the Chicken Supper held every third Saturday in August.

Although Mary’s house is enormous, everything seems to take place in the kitchen, which is at once immensely welcoming and a study in benign chaos. On the table is a disarray of supermarket coupons, ripening tomatoes, shopping lists, jars of pickles and jams, seedlings in paper cups, a glass of mismatched teaspoons for coffee, a jar of coffee creamer. There is usually a half–finished project going on: wild grapes being picked over for pie, cucumbers salting for pickles in a basin on the porch.

Visitors always fine something good to eat. Irene and Mary feed a lot of people in the course of a week, as everyone seems to pass their house at one time or another. “Are you hungry?” Irene will ask. “Well, we’ve hardly a thing to eat!” Mary will say, shaking her head and then pulling out a ham, or delicious beans cooked with home–raised pork, or hot yeast rolls from the oven. There is usually a pie around, and always preserves with something to put them on, along with coffee and a gallon jar full of cookies.

I have sat at Irene and Mary’s kitchen table for hours at a time, listening as they reminisce, embellishing and correcting each other’s stories. Memories and recipes intertwine, one sparking the other. The recipe for buckwheat dumplings reminds them of the buckwheat mush with creamed elderberries that they hated as girls. This leads to the story of when Irene ate with the men at threshing time, consuming huge potato dumplings stuffed with ham until she thought she would burst. The apples Mary is preparing for pie remind them of the cold cellar on their old farm, that was so perfectly designed it would keep butter hard as a rock.

Mary cooks by feel and by eye, as do most of the older cooks here. She knows intuitively what works and what doesn’t, but can’t always explain why. When I ask for quantities in her recipes, she has to think hard to pin them down them, and sometimes she can’t quite resolve the amounts. “Well, I don’t know. You just take whatever you have and go from there” — a logical approach for a cook accustomed to making do with whatever is on hand. “If you don’t have it, you don’t need it” is a philosophical principal in Helvetia, where stores are many miles away on winding mountain roads.

Everything in Irene and Mary’s kitchen seems draw me further into their world. Take the salted trout. Mary still buries fresh trout in a bucket with salt to preserve them for months, the way her mother did. The trout are then soaked in water for days to remove the salt, dusted in cornmeal and fried crisp in bacon fat, their bones tender enough to eat. From hearing that simple preparation, I can almost conjure up the childhood kitchen where Mary and her mother prepared huge meals for family and friends.