When Laura Brill opens up her copy of “The Family Cookbook,” she is taken back to one specific Christmas where she can taste her mother’s cookies. She can see the family friends who poured into her home to try them out.
When Gwen Manto, Brill’s younger sister, opens up her copy of the book, she looks at a picture of her entire family gathered around the table that still sits in her mother’s home. She now has to set up that same table for a reception to honor her mother, Ann Kallay.
Kallay of Decatur died of a heart attack in an ambulance on the way to the hospital on Monday. She was 80.
The body has been cremated by A.S. Turner & Sons Funeral Home & Crematory. The family will hold a memorial service at 11 a.m. on Nov. 9 at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church.
Each of Kallay’s four children owns a copy of her handwritten cookbook, in which all of her recipes are accompanied by an in-depth story about the recipe and pictures that chronicle the family’s history all the way back to her childhood in Rhodesia. Years ago, Kallay — who was a longtime member of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church — would head down to the copy center to make copies of every page in her book, hole-punch them and bind them together for anyone who wanted it.
“It’s been a treasure ever since,” Manto said, adding that now the rest of the family heads down to Kinko’s to reprint the book for other friends and family members. “She felt that recipes should be shared not hoarded.”
For Manto, the cookbook represents all her mother’s family meals and dinner parties.
“She was the nucleus of all the parties we had as kids,” she said. “I do believe that legacy will live on.”
Brill said the book takes her back to the oyster dressing that her mother cooked for every Thanksgiving.
“She could cook anything,” Brill said. “She was very inspirational and if you read the cookbook, you can see how she inspired us.”
Kallay’s friend Marica Donnell, who met Kallay about 40 years ago, said she was inspired by her friend’s monthly dinner parties as well.
“I was amazed that she could put it all together,” she said, describing how Kallay’s dinner table — china, flowers and food — never looked the same. “She was not someone who was very socially outgoing … It was just so effortlessly elegant and she would cook but she would rarely get stressed about it. It was just a pleasant experience going to her home.”
Manto said her mother’s home was a calm and accepting environment, that will forever be encapsulated in the family recipes.
“Some people see their family history one way,” Manto said, “and for us, it’s this cookbook.”
Along with Manto and Brill, Kallay is survived by her husband, Eugene “Wynn” Kallay I of Decatur; her brother, Richard Willis of Baltimore; her daughter Carole Guzman of Atlanta; her son, Wynn Kallay II of Waycross and her 17 grandchildren.
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