Ask granddaughter Karen Ray why that is, and she'll tell you biscuits made directly on top of the flour sack means "no bowl to wash."

Does lovin' get any better than that?

Aztec resident and daughter of locals Pat and Lila Greer, Karen Ray included the flour-sack biscuit recipe in her family's heritage cookbooks.

She was the editor-in-chief of two books. The first is It's Mealtime with the Greers, featuring three generations of ranchers' recipes from Colorado homesteaders, the Greers of Hesperus. Five years later Ray paid tribute to the other side of the family, the Eldridges, with an even larger cookbook, Cooking with the Eldridges. Ray's mother, Lila Greer, is part of that clan, who homesteaded in rural Colorado at Picnic Flat, between Bondad and Marvel.

The two ranching families joined forces in 1953 with the marriage between Lila Eldridge and Pat Greer. Karen Ray is the youngest of four children from that union. The two cookbooks chronicle the lives and family histories of both pioneer clans through family photos and recipes.

It was Ray's elder sister, Frances Horvath, who lit the fire under Ray to get the collection of recipes on paper.

"Frances said, 'Karen, you need to do this,'" Ray recalled.

At the time, Frances was battling breast cancer with chemotherapy and radiation. Frances had a 6-month-old son, Ray said, and her future was uncertain.

One evening, after Ray came home from work, she sent 100 letters to relatives and explained her cookbook project.

"I didn't know if it was going to be in memory of (Frances)."

The recipes came pouring in - more than 350 of them. Ray smiles when she recalls a recipe for three-bean salad. Nowhere on the index card were beans listed as an ingredient. Often Ray had to pick up the phone.

Today, there are dozens of Web sites that offer convenient software and templates that make it easy for families to self-publish and inexpensively print as few as six family-heritage cookbooks. But Ray, like her pioneer ancestors, chose to produce them last-century style, when cookbooks were made from scratch.

Ray typed recipes "one at a time" on a slow clunker of a keyboard. She bundled them on an old, 3½-inch floppy disk and sent them snail-mail "back East" to Iowa, ordering 500 copies.

Ray's mother, Lila Greer, is proud of her daughter, and pleased that she has put up a slice of family history.

Greer says she's sad that women now have to make tough choices. Many work long hours outside of the home, leaving little time or energy at the end of the day for families to spend time cooking together. She says mothers do the best they can. She credits 4-H for teaching kids how to make their way through the maze of pots and pans.

Still, go to the county fair and each year, you'll see fewer pies on the shelves, and fewer shiny jars of canned peaches. Kids, like their parents, just aren't cooking as much these days, she says.

When her youngest daughter asked for help, Lila Greer eagerly rolled up her sleeves. She teamed up with Frances to proofread. She wanted to help connect her grandchildren to their kitchen roots, to the family photos and the cross-stitch advice tucked between the recipes.

Advice such as: "It may be face powder that gets a man, but it's baking powder that keeps him."

It's the truth, printed right there, as clear as how to make Lila's Cinnamon Rolls.

Within those pages of Greer and Eldridge family history is practical advice, too; some from Greer's own mother.

"Leftovers taste best in a clean bowl," or "It takes a heap of cooking to make a house a home."

The project was a lot of work.

"I remember a mincemeat recipe that called for a "bowl of this and a bowl of that," Lila said. Her job was to assign quantities to recipe ingredients and rewrite instructions too vague for interpretation.

But what Lila Greer recalls most vividly is handing over her recipe for cheese soup, the nourishment that sustained Frances during those dark days when she was undergoing treatment.

"It was the one thing she could eat."

Fifteen years later, Frances is now a two-time cancer survivor. She makes big batches of that same cheese soup, using her mother's recipe. She freezes it and gives it to friends when they are undergoing chemotherapy, her mother says.

As the next generation of Greers packs up and moves down the road to fast-food worlds miles away from rural La Plata County, they take their family cookbooks with them.

"It's so much more than (instructions) to make a meal, Ray said.

kbanesi@frontier.net