She had no idea how important it would become.

There was nothing particularly unusual about the recipe, submitted by an East Worcester woman named Sharon Coger. It called for the typical banana bread ingredients: oil, sugar, eggs, flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, milk, vanilla and, of course, bananas.

But it was a big hit, especially with Elizabeth's daughter, Arley (Evans) Schilkraut of Mahopac, who was 3 at the time.

For about a decade, the banana bread was a holiday staple in the Evans home, prepared each year at Thanksgiving and Christmas — until one year, when Elizabeth misplaced the recipe.

She wasn't worried. It was just banana bread, after all, and she knew she could find a different recipe. What she didn't count on, though, was the secret ingredient: tradition.

Elizabeth tried one banana bread recipe after another, but Arley was never satisfied

"I tried to reconstruct it," Elizabeth recalled last week. "I tried other recipes, and she'd always say, `That's not it, is it?'"

Finally, Elizabeth became frustrated with trying to duplicate the elusive recipe. So, she and Arley, then a teenager, went to Huntington Memorial Library and asked to look at The Daily Star on microfilm. They couldn't remember which year the recipe had been published, and back then the annual Cookbook editions contained hundreds of recipes.

"We sat in a little room at the library and looked through year after year after year of The Daily Star Cookbooks," Arley recalled Monday. "After we were in there about an hour, we thought, `Are we nuts?'"

Finally, they found the cherished recipe, and Elizabeth has been making the banana bread for Thanksgiving ever since.

She doesn't have to worry about losing the recipe again.

Arley, now 31 and married, has a copy in her own file.

——

Last year around this time, I told a similar story about a chocolate-cherry cake that became a sweet tradition in my family after my mother saw it in The Daily Star Cookbook 23 years ago. So I wasn't surprised when I heard Elizabeth and Arley's story.

For me, that's what The Daily Star's annual recipe contest is all about: friends, neighbors and strangers blindly sharing small pieces of their lives.

Each year, people put their favorite recipes out there, like messages in bottles, never knowing where they will end up. Some of the recipes have family histories before they make it into the pages of The Daily Star. Others are brand-new, created just for the contest. Some may never be tested; others are tried once and rejected.

Still others, like Sharon Coger's banana bread, are "discovered" by new families. These recipes are carefully clipped and pasted on index cards, then filed away to be brought out with the china or silver on special occasions. Some get splattered with batter or sauce, others are full of cross-outs and add-ons as cooks fine-tune the originals to suit their own taste.

Eventually, all these fragments of newsprint turn yellow with age. Still, they endure, passed from mothers to daughters like family heirlooms, lasting long after the day's news has been forgotten.

——

This year, 10 people will be selected to win prizes, as finalists in The Daily Star's 43rd annual Best Recipe Contest Cook-off. But a whole lot more will make connections — whether they ever know it or not — with other people who like to cook, and those connections could last for years to come.

Elizabeth Evans, for one, said she looks forward each year to trying recipes from what might best be described as "the neighborhood cookbook."

"I still haven't tried your chocolate cake recipe," she told me last week, vowing to dig it out one day soon.

As for me, well, I think I'm going to have to make a copy of that 1974 banana bread recipe.

Recipes can be entered in this year's contest until Friday, Feb. 14. Click Here To Enter Online and read complete contest details.

Lisa Miller is The Daily Star's community editor. She can be reached at (607) 441-7216 or lmiller@thedailystar.com.