There is a recipe in your grandmother's head right now that nobody else on earth can make. Not because it's complicated. Because she never wrote it down, and the way she does it isn't really a recipe — it's a series of small adjustments she makes by feel.
If you sit down with a notebook and ask her how she makes it, she will tell you the wrong thing. Not on purpose. She just doesn't know what she does anymore. It's been forty years. The hands know. The mouth doesn't.
This is the most useful guide we know how to write about capturing those recipes before they slip. We have made every mistake on this list. Most of them more than once.
The mistake everyone makes first
You call her up. You say, "Grandma, can you write down your meatballs for me?" She says yes. Three weeks later there's nothing.
She didn't forget. She tried. She sat at the table with the pen and the paper, and the second she tried to put it into words, the recipe stopped existing. You can't write down what you don't know you're doing.
The way around this is to never ask her to write it down. Ask her to make it instead. Or ask her to talk about making it. The moment she is describing the action — what her hands do, what the kitchen smells like, what she's looking for — the recipe comes out.
What to bring (and not bring)
Don't bring a notebook. Notebooks make grandmas nervous. They feel like a test.
Bring:
- A phone that can record audio (every modern phone). Put it on airplane mode so you don't get interrupted.
- A second phone in case the first one runs out of battery.
- A roll of paper towels. Some recipes are messy and she'll relax when you wipe up after her.
- Snacks for yourself. This will take longer than you think.
Tell her you're recording. Don't try to hide it. Most grandmothers are flattered. ("Oh, are you taking this for posterity?" yes, Nana, exactly.)
The questions that actually work
These are the questions that pull recipes out of people who don't know they have them. We have asked hundreds of people thousands of these. The good ones are the ones that ask about the senses, the day, or what people get wrong.
Senses
- What did the kitchen smell like when you were halfway done?
- What sound do you listen for?
- What does it look like when it's ready? Not finished — almost finished.
- When you taste it, what are you tasting for?
The day
- Who else was usually in the room?
- What time of day did you start? Why that time?
- What were you doing while it cooked?
- Who set the table? Who did the dishes?
What people get wrong
- What do most people get wrong when they make this?
- What's the part that's not in any cookbook?
- If your daughter called you in tears tomorrow saying she'd ruined this, what would you tell her she did wrong?
That last one is the magic question. It is faster than asking her how to make it. It pulls out everything she knows in the order it actually matters.
Recording the technique she doesn't know she has
Sit at the kitchen counter and narrate. Don't be a journalist. Be a five-year-old. Ask why she's doing the thing she just did. She is doing twenty things she doesn't realize.
"Why did you take the onion out instead of letting it dissolve?"
"Why did you wait until now to add the salt?"
"Why are you stirring with a wooden spoon and not a metal one?"
"Why are you tilting the pan?"
She will say: because that's how you do it. That's fine. Ask again, gently. Half the time, she'll come up with the reason — and it will be a real reason, and it will be the reason her mother gave her, and it will be the reason her mother's mother gave her too.
The amounts question
Almost no grandmother measures. This is the hardest part of capturing recipes from people who learned by watching.
Don't try to make her give you measurements. You will both get frustrated. Instead, when she's done, ask her to do it again the next time you visit and bring measuring cups and a kitchen scale. As she goes, you measure into the cup before it goes into the pot. Then weigh it after.
You will spend a Saturday afternoon discovering that her "a couple cups of flour" is 320 grams, every single time, give or take a teaspoon. Hands know things mouths don't.
What to do with the recording
Here is where most family recipe projects fail. You have four hours of audio. You have nine pages of notes. You have a phone full of pictures of the pot at different stages. You are tired. You put the phone down. You never come back to it.
You have two options for what to do next:
- Do it yourself. Block out a Saturday. Transcribe the audio (the iPhone Voice Memos app does this automatically now, as do free tools like Otter.ai). Cross-reference the photos. Write out the recipe in the order she did it, not in cookbook order. Include the things she said about it.
- Use a tool that handles this part. This is the part we built Hearth to do. You record her — or we call her for you — and we turn the conversation into a structured recipe + the story behind it, designed and printed as a real cookbook. It exists because we kept letting our own grandmothers' recipes go.
Either way, the moment to act is now. Recipes don't stop being lost when the cook stops cooking — they stop being lost when someone catches them.
A few last things we wish we'd known sooner
- Do one recipe at a time. Trying to capture "all of Grandma's recipes" is too big a project. Each individual recipe takes about an hour of real attention if you want to get it right.
- Capture the ones she made every week, not the holiday ones. The Christmas Eve fish is important, but the Wednesday frittata is the recipe that is her cooking. Those are the ones that disappear silently. The holiday recipes have witnesses.
- Don't fix anything. If she says "a knob of butter" leave it as a knob of butter. The voice is the recipe. If you sanitize it into "2 tablespoons of unsalted butter" you lose her.
- Take photos of her hands. Not her face. Her hands holding the spoon, kneading the dough, breaking the bread. Hands cook. Hands age. Hands are what you'll miss.
The single most important sentence in this whole guide is the one you already know: it gets harder later. Not someday. Six months from now. Sit with her this Sunday. Bring the phone. Ask her how she makes the thing.
Hearth is a service that captures family recipes the way they actually exist — in conversation — and turns them into a printed hardcover cookbook. We call your grandmother on a regular phone. She just talks. We do the rest. Start a project for $9/mo.