Avoiding recipe regret: how to record and revive your family recipes | Food
Lisa Goldberg still experiences regret when she thinks about recipes from her aunt she wasn’t able to record. “My aunt was the best cook … [but] I only got a handful of recipes from her,” she says.
Goldberg, the Sydney-based founding member of the Monday Morning Cooking Club, a not-for-profit dedicated to curating and documenting recipes from Jewish kitchens across Australia and the world, doesn’t want her children to have the same “recipe regret”: the particular kind of sadness you feel when you’ve lost your chance to record a recipe and can’t get it back.
If some of your family recipes remain unwritten or are scribbled on scraps of paper, here are some ways to record, revive and preserve them to avoid recipe regret for yourself, and future generations.
Getting organised
Before recording your family recipes, write a list of the people whose recipes you’d like to document and the specific dishes you’d like to capture.
Next, schedule a regular time to capture those recipes, either in person or via video call. This is how writer and author Jaclyn Crupi recorded her Nonna’s recipes, which she featured in the book Nonna Knows Best.
“I would go around to my Nonna’s house every Sunday and I would cook with her,” says Crupi. She wrote her Nonna’s recipes down and drew pictures to capture the details of techniques like