Passing on family recipes: gather, write, keep

You may have already tried. Asking your mother for her gratin recipe, your grandfather for his marinade, your aunt for her pastry. The answer almost always comes in the same form: “I put some, I stir, I taste, I add a bit.” And you leave without having noted much.

Family recipes resist the page. That’s precisely why they vanish. This article offers a concrete way to gather them before they go, and to keep them in a form your children, your nieces and nephews, or you yourself in ten years, can actually use.

A recipe is more than a list#

When you type gratin dauphinois into a search engine, you find a thousand recipes. None is your grandmother’s. Not because she invented anything (she often followed plain conventions), but because she had her way. The lid set halfway through cooking. The garlic clove rubbed into the dish. The “much more than that” of cream when in doubt. The cooking finished by ten minutes in the off oven, door open.

That’s what’s lost: not the list of ingredients (that, you can find again). The gesture. The adjustment. The knack that makes the family version different from all the others.

Gathering a family recipe means doing two things:

1. Noting what’s measurable (ingredients, proportions, times).
2. Noting what isn’t (gestures, sensory markers, exceptions, context).

Gathering from elders#

Three approaches work, depending on your family.

Cook with them. It’s the best way. You ask your mother, your father, your grandmother, to make the recipe in your presence. You note as it goes, or you film with the phone laid on the worktop. You see the gestures. You hear the hesitations. You understand when the marker is “it should make a blop” and not “two minutes”.

Have them tell. If cooking together isn’t possible, sit down with a notebook or a recording phone. Ask: “how do you do it, exactly?” And let them. The person will describe, hesitate, correct themselves. Note everything, including hesitations: they’re clues.

Ask for yourself. State the project plainly: “I want to remake your recipe next Sunday and I want it to be like yours. Can you walk me through it?” The prospect of cooking right away frees up much more than the promise of a book.

Keeping what’s lost in the gestures#

Here’s a grid of questions that helps capture the knack, on top of the basic recipe. You can ask them one by one, or slip a few in as the cooking goes.

• Who taught you this recipe? (The story often gives the key: “my mother always did… but my mother-in-law put in…”.)
• For what occasion do you make it? (A Sunday? a big meal? coming home from school?)
• Which moment in the recipe can spoil it all? (There’s always one. That’s where the know-how concentrates.)
• Which mistake have you made and don’t make any more?
• How do you know it’s done? (Colour, sound, smell, gesture with the spoon?)
• What do you change depending on what’s in the kitchen?
• Is there an ingredient that absolutely shouldn’t be replaced?

Note the answers literally. “I know it’s ready when it smells of hazelnut” is more useful than “cook for 8 minutes”.

How to organise it#

Once you’ve gathered a few recipes, give them a form.

One sheet per recipe. Simple format, identical for all:

• The name (with, ideally, the author: “Granny Jeanne’s gratin”).
• The ingredients, in two columns if possible.
• The steps, one by one.
• A “knack” zone: that’s the one that changes everything. Three or four lines on what isn’t in the steps: the expected texture, sensory markers, what not to do.
• A “story” zone: who used to make it, when, for whom, what was told about it.

A notebook or a digital file. The paper notebook is beautiful and works very well if few people use it. To share between siblings, cousins, nephews, a shared digital file (or a service like Carnely) is more practical. Many families do both: digital to gather, printed paper to give.

A photo of the handwritten recipe. If the recipe exists handwritten by someone (on the corner of a diary, on the back of a piece of cardboard), keep the photo of the original handwriting. It’s worth a whole page.

Where to keep it so it doesn’t get lost#

The risk with family recipes isn’t writing them poorly. It’s that they’re written somewhere, then lost. A file on a computer that gets replaced. A notebook stored away during a move. A sheet slipped into a book never opened again.

Three precautions are worth it:

• Centralise. One single place where all recipes live. Not ten notebooks, not twenty files.
• Make a copy. Digital if you write by hand, paper if you write digitally. The duplicate protects from disaster.
• Choose who it goes to. Decide explicitly who this collection comes back to. A daughter, a grandson, the eldest who loves to cook. Designating an heir is often enough for the object to survive.

A service like Carnely can serve this exact purpose: one place to gather the recipes, accessible when the time comes to those you’ve chosen, without depending on a phone, a cloud, or a file format that will have changed by then.

A recipe to begin with#

If you want to test without waiting, pick one recipe tonight (the simplest, the most emblematic of your family) and call the person who makes it best. Ask them three questions:

How do you do it?

What can go wrong?

Who did you learn it from?

Note the answers as they come. You have your first sheet.

Going further#

Recipes often open onto other family conversations. If you’d like to go further, here are thirty questions to ask your parents. And if you’re considering gathering these recipes into an object to pass on, this article describes the possible forms of a family memory book.