Open Recent Returns Clear Menu

System settings : Desktop & Dock panel : Recent documents, applications, and servers. Change that from None to how many items you want to appear in your Open Recent sub-menu. Mine is set at 10.

Also, if you deliberately clear that Open Recent sub-menu, you will need to open and save Pages documents before this list of recent documents begins to populate again. Deleted files ae not removed from that list unless pushed off the stack by newer open/save cycles.

You are welcome.

Apple completely rewrote the System Preferences (which it now refers to as Settings) in Ventura and many things are no longer in their pre-Ventura location.