Also, to be realistic, any notes I take will require far more room than the margin of an index card.” “Writing on a really old recipe card makes me feel like I’m writing in a book. “Though any time anyone in the family asked her how she did things, she tended to leave information out, and we never knew if that was intentional!”ĭeb Perelman, the seasoned blogger behind Smitten Kitchen and author of Smitten Kitchen Keepers, adds, “So many comments on my site are from people who’ve been trying to learn how to make a lost family recipe that was never written down and feel sad they can never get it right.” For her, though, original recipes are not to be messed with-they’re there for guidance alone. “My grandmother never wrote recipes down, and to this day, I truly regret not spending more time asking her questions about her cooking and recording the information,” Rito says. However, these approaches are solely replicated from memory. They incorporate Angie’s grandmother’s red sauce-a simple combination of olive oil, garlic, puréed tomatoes, and basil-in their famous pinwheel lasagna and use her method of dehydrating herbs to sneak house-dried oregano into various dishes. At her restaurant, Rito and husband Scott Tacinelli honor the recipes of their respective Italian American families. “Hand-written recipes can bring people together across generations,” says Angie Rito, co-founder of New York City’s Don Angie. “I have a photo of it on my phone, and I think it’s so funny how a whole recipe could be whittled down into just four sentences and a list of ingredients.” “By now I’ve changed the recipe in a few different ways, but I go back to the clipping for the nostalgia of it,” she says. To me, that’s something so personal and nostalgic, especially when those recipes get referenced over and over and later passed down.”ĭoiron has one worn recipe that she holds onto-a newspaper clipping for pumpkin bread that’s been in her family for years. “It feels like you either remember the site, or you save it to something like Pinterest. “Now that more and more people are cooking from the internet, I do mourn the fact that people don’t collect their favorite recipes in a physical form anymore,” says Justine Doiron, the creator behind a recipe account with 2 million followers on TikTok. The need to save a recipe for a future you, let alone a future generation, no longer feels urgent when the answer to any cooking questions can be googled. Some cooks go off of vibes, while others rely on their Notes app to jot things down. Perhaps hand-written recipes are a lost art. It was like looking at a relic of a previous self-simultaneously jarring and endearing. The name was written phonetically, like “croschiqui,” and featured the kind of handwriting I copied from all the popular girls at school ( IYKYK). The recipe was for kruschiki, a Polish dessert of deep-fried bow ties covered in powdered sugar that my family always made at Christmastime. Not too long ago, I sifted through that folder and stumbled upon an index card that made my heart swell. Whenever I introduce her to my latest food fixation, she begs me to write the instructions down. It’s filled with everything from hand-written notes to faded printouts from. She keeps a grease-stained manila folder labeled “RECIPES” in black Sharpie. This vexes my mother, who relies quite heavily on physical recipes. I’ll type those exact keywords into the search bar and click on the link that comes up purple, or says, “You visited this page 27 times.” I’ll usually remember the words I googled when I first searched it (something like, “baked oats no egg,” because I was out of eggs). I’m ashamed to reveal my haphazard recipe-tracking process. The ephemerality of virtual recipes spurs us to wonder how we can record our favorite meals now and for generations to come. Now, we face a very modern predicament: Cooking along to a TikTok and restarting the loop from the beginning each time you miss something. Pre-internet we might have gone through the trouble of laminating our handwritten index cards to protect them from spillage. It’s funny how we go about preserving these keepsakes. That loved one is saying, “Here’s something to remember me by,” but also, “Nourish yourself with this meal, right now.” It’s a physical object, just like any other memento or heirloom, but it lives in the past as well as the future. There’s something timeless about a passed-down recipe, whether it’s from someone who’s no longer here, or someone who feels far away.
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