When Elvira Clegg thinks about Easter dinners from her childhood, she remembers her Aunt Ann’s chocolate rainbow cake. “It was six layers, with all of the different colors of a rainbow,“ recalled Clegg, who lives in Richmond’s Jackson Ward. “She would decorate it with chocolate frosting and top it with jelly beans, plus she made homemade ice cream to serve with the cake. I remember how beautiful it looked on the dinner table.“

A few years ago on a trip to visit friends in Kiawah Island, S.C., Lindsay Denny wasn’t sure what sort of dish she should take. “The person who invited us is a professional chef, so I was a little intimidated as to what to bring,“ she said. “I ended up making a batch of Gold Bars.“ Gold Bars feature, among other ingredients, yellow cake mix, eggs and cream cheese. The South Carolina gathering included four adults and three children, and the Gold Bars, which she’d packed in a disposable plastic container, went quickly.

Recipe Exchange Preschoolers bake this special cookie in class Julie Ratchford of Midlothian combined her professional skills with her favorite hobby to create a new job for herself: She teaches preschoolers how to bake. The former special-education teacher started bakeworks in 2007 and now teaches afterschool enrichment classes at All Saints Episcopal Preschool and Canterbury Community Nursery School.

When Susan O’Hara Christopher makes barmbrack, a yeasty fruitcake, she can’t help thinking of her home. Her ancestral home. The O’Hara family ancestral home was Raheen in County Galway in Ireland. The recipe she uses came from Lady Augusta Gregory, an Irish folklorist who was a key figure in the Irish literary revival of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Lady Gregory’s estate was Coole Park, next door to Raheen, and she used to make this cake and serve it to such writers and actors as W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Lennox Robinson, Sean O’Casey and Barry Fitzgerald, said Christopher, who lives in Wicomico Church.

When Bill Rice shows up for concerts at In Your Ear Music & Recording, he arrives with a ticket for the show and a dish to share. Potluck suppers have become a tradition at the JAMinc concert series.

Navy Bean Soup is the official—and obvious—name, but Emilie Townsend knows this dish by another. “This has been called ‘End of the Month Soup’ because . . . it was cheap to make and didn’t require any ingredients that weren’t easily available,“ said Townsend, who lives in Manquin in King William County. She’s been making the soup for 47 years, since her husband, Guy, came across it when invited to dinner by an Army buddy and his wife, who prepared the soup. Guy enjoyed it, and after the Townsends married the friend’s wife sent Emilie the recipe and told her she called it “End of the Month Soup.“

In the Elder household, all of the children have chores. For one of her chores, 11-year-old Esther, the oldest of the four, volunteered to cook dinner once a week. “I wouldn’t have given [that job] to her at this age,“ said her mom, Jane, “but she asked for it.

When organizers were planning last year’s Jewish Food Festival at Keneseth Beth Israel, they realized they had no one to make stuffed cabbage. “I said, ‘You can’t have a food festival without stuffed cabbage,‘“ recalled Beverley Soble. “I said, ‘Let me see if I can remember my mother’s recipe.‘“