· Our Family Letters
How to preserve family recipes — including the ones she never wrote down
One woman, five years after losing her mum, put her finger on something every family learns eventually: “the things that were most dear to me were things with her handwriting on them.” And another, tasting a recreated dish: “it transported me right back to her kitchen. That first bite literally brought tears to my eyes.”
A family recipe is two things at once — a method and a memory — and most preservation advice only saves the first. This guide covers both: the cards worth keeping exactly as they are, the recipes that have never been written down at all, and the stories that make a dish worth cooking in thirty years.
First, sort them into three piles
The written ones — cards, notebook pages, clippings with her notes in the margin. These need protecting as objects (more below), not just transcribing.
The never-written-down ones — the dish she makes with “handfuls” and “about this much”, where, as one granddaughter found trying to save her nan’s baking, “a lot of knowledge about how to proceed was assumed and not written down.” These need extracting, and there’s a method for it.
And the already-fading ones — dishes nobody has made since a grandmother died, which live only in the taste memory of the people who ate them. These can often be reconstructed, and the FAQ covers how. Sort your family’s recipes into these piles and the rest of this page tells you what to do with each.
The cooking-alongside method (for the unwritten ones)
Don’t ask her to write it down — that request has failed in every family that’s tried it, because the recipe isn’t in words, it’s in her hands. Instead, book a cooking afternoon: you’re making the dish together “so I can learn it”, which is true, and which she’ll enjoy far more than an interview.
Your job is scribe. Put digital scales under everything: when she grabs a handful of flour, it lands on the scales on its way to the bowl — her handful, weighed, without changing anything she does. Photograph each stage. Note the pan she uses (size matters), the hob setting, the gas mark, and — most precious — her sensory cues, verbatim: “until it smells nutty”, “when it comes away from the sides”, “it should sigh when you press it”. Those cues ARE the recipe; a version without them is a different dish.
Then make it twice more: once with her watching and correcting (write down every correction — that’s the assumed knowledge surfacing), and once alone. When yours tastes right to her, the recipe is saved. Not before.
Record her while she cooks
Put your phone on the worktop, recording — audio at minimum, video if she doesn’t mind. Not for the method (your notes have that) but for everything else that comes out of a person cooking their mother’s dish: who taught her, what the kitchen was like, the Christmas it went wrong. People talk while they cook in a way they never talk across a table, and the recording keeps her voice saying “about this much” — which, one day, will be worth more than the dish.
The questions that save the story with the dish
Ask these about any family dish
A recipe with its story attached becomes a letter. These take five minutes over the mixing bowl.
- Who taught you this — and were you allowed to help, or just watch?
- When did this get made? Sundays, birthdays, after funerals?
- What did we call it at home? (The real name, not the cookbook name.)
- What do most people get wrong when they try to make it?
- What did it taste like when your mother made it — is yours the same?
- What’s the time it went wrong that the family still talks about?
- Who do you hope makes this when you can’t be bothered any more?
If the stories start flowing
- Write her answers on the back of the recipe itself, dated. That’s the whole archive system — no app required.
Keep the handwriting — it’s the artefact
Scan or photograph every card and notebook page exactly as it is — the splatters, the crossings-out, the “good!!” in the margin are the record of a cook mid-life, and retyping them away throws out what your children will most want. Store the originals flat, out of sunlight, in plastic sleeves; cook from printed copies of the scans, never from the originals.
And promote one to the wall: a framed scan of the most-loved card, hung in your kitchen, is the cheapest family heirloom that exists. The typed, tidy version can live alongside — useful for actually cooking — but it’s the copy, not the thing.
Keep her units, too
If she works in ounces and gas marks, preserve ounces and gas marks — add your grams and Celsius in brackets alongside, never instead. It’s the same principle as keeping a story in the language it was lived in: “8 oz plain flour, gas mark 4” is how the recipe sounds in her voice, and converting it away Americanises or modernises a document whose whole value is that it’s hers. Faithful first, convenient second.
One recipe a week beats one big weekend
Every guide to this frames it as an archiving project — the great scanning weekend, the app, the binder. Projects stall. What doesn’t stall is one small question a week: “this week, tell me about the trifle — who taught you, and what’s the bit nobody gets right?” Over a few months, gently, the whole kitchen gets saved, story by story, and she gets months of being asked about something she’s quietly proud of, instead of one afternoon of being archived.
That weekly rhythm is the thing we build at Our Family Letters — one gentle question by email, her answers kept in her own words — and recipes and their stories are some of the best answers that come back. But the shoebox-and-Sunday-phone-call version works for the same reason. Pick the version your family will still be doing at Christmas.
Questions families ask us
- The recipe died with her. Can we get it back?
- Often, mostly. Gather the people who ate it and pool the taste memory: what colour, what texture, what it was served with, what made it different from the shop version. Find period recipes as a starting skeleton (a 1960s cookbook or the back of the same brand’s packet), then iterate — cook it, taste it against everyone’s memory, adjust. Families report getting to “that’s it — that’s her cake” within a few attempts, and the reconstruction afternoons become their own tradition.
- She says “it’s nothing special, it’s just what I make.” How do I get her to take it seriously?
- Don’t argue the point — cook the point. Ask her to teach you the dish “because I can’t get it right”, which is flattery she can accept where “your recipes are precious heritage” isn’t. The seriousness arrives on its own the first time she watches you weigh her handful and write down “until it smells right”.
- What’s the best app for storing family recipes?
- The one your family will still open in 2050 — which is probably not an app. Photographs of the original cards plus a plain document (or printed booklet) of the transcriptions, kept where the family keeps photos, beats any recipe platform that can shut down. Print the best dozen as a small booklet and give copies at Christmas; paper has outlasted every format so far.
- She’s embarrassed about being filmed. Voice only?
- Voice is plenty — the worktop recording is about her words and the sounds of her cooking, not her face. Or skip recording entirely on day one and just cook together with a notebook; ask again another time, mid-recipe, when she’s absorbed: “can I record this bit so I get the timings right?” framed as your need, not her performance, usually gets a yes.
You could ask these questions yourself.
Most families mean to, and never quite do. We send them one gentle question a week, by email, and keep every reply — in their words, forever.
Free to start. No pressure on them, ever.