There is a particular kind of grief in being two generations away from a place you can't go back to and realizing the food is starting to disappear with the people who knew it.
This guide is for that. It is for the granddaughter of the Filipina nurse who came in the 70s and made her own bagoong because she couldn't find good kind here. It is for the grandson of the Italian baker who never measured a thing in his life. It is for the kid of the Iranian family that has been making the same khoresh for nine hundred years and now nobody under fifty knows the spice mix. The grandkids of the Mexican abuela whose mole has thirty-two ingredients and she does it without thinking.
The food doesn't have to disappear with them. But the window to catch it is smaller than people think — and the right way to catch immigrant family recipes is not the same as the right way to catch your average American Sunday roast.
What makes immigrant recipes hard to capture
A few specific things make heritage recipes harder than a generic family recipe:
- The ingredients aren't always available where you live. The exact bread flour her cousin sent. The variety of chili. The cut of meat the local butcher in Oaxaca calls one thing and the grocery store here calls another.
- The technique is the recipe. "You cook it until it's done" describes about 80% of the world's traditional dishes. The recipe is what done looks like — color, smell, sound, texture — and her eye knows but the words don't.
- The recipe doesn't have a name in English. Or it has a name in English that doesn't quite mean the same thing. Your grandmother's adobo isn't anyone else's adobo. Translating prematurely loses the dish.
- There is shame and pride tangled together. Many first-generation immigrants made hard compromises to feed their families with what was available. They are sometimes embarrassed about the substitutions. They will downplay the dish or apologize for it. They shouldn't. Those are the most important versions.
- The recipe IS the migration story. What she changed, what she couldn't replace, what she gave up — that is the food. You can't separate the recipe from the move.
The questions that work for heritage recipes
The generic recipe-capture questions ("what does the kitchen smell like?") work. But for heritage cooking, you need a few more.
On the original version:
- How did your mother make this? Your grandmother?
- What did you change when you came here? What couldn't you get?
- What's the closest you can get to the real thing now?
On the substitution:
- What did you use instead of [ingredient]? How did you figure that out?
- Did the dish work the first time you tried it here? What went wrong?
- Is what you make now better or worse than what you ate at home? Different but good?
On the language:
- What is this dish called? In your language. Spell it for me.
- What does the name mean? Where does it come from?
- Is there a saying about it? A song? A blessing?
On the occasion:
- When did you eat this at home?
- Did you make it here for the same occasion? Different one?
- Who do you make it for now?
That last batch is where the deepest material is. Heritage recipes are tied to occasions — weddings, holy days, harvest, mourning — and those occasions are how they survive (and how they don't, when nobody marks them anymore).
Capture in her language. Translate later. Or never.
The single biggest mistake in heritage cookbook projects is making the storyteller speak English to you.
If you share a heritage language, even badly: speak in it. Let her cook in it. The ingredient names will come out right. The technique words will come out right. ("Knead until sashasahta" — Polish for a specific kind of springy-elastic texture — has no English equivalent, and if you translate it to "knead until smooth and elastic" you have already softened the recipe to nothing.)
Record in the original language. Worry about translation in the book later — and even then, do not translate the technique words. Keep the original word, italicize it, add a footnote. The book becomes a glossary as well as a cookbook, and the people who'll cook from it in the future will need the glossary more than the translation.
On photographs
For heritage cookbook projects, take photographs of three things:
- The cooking, while it's happening. Especially her hands. Especially the moments when she touches the food — kneading, salting, tasting.
- The ingredients themselves. If she gets a specific cheese from the specific shop in Queens, photograph the wrapper. Half of preserving heritage cooking is preserving the supply chain.
- The objects. The mortar her mother used. The hand-thrown pot. The knife with the wooden handle. Things she will leave to one of you. Photograph them now, on the table, with the food.
Avoid posed photographs of her holding a plate of food. They are dishonest. They are about her looking like an immigrant grandmother. You want her looking like herself.
On grief, and on time
Most heritage cookbook projects are urgent in ways the family is reluctant to name. Someone is older now. Someone moved into the apartment. Someone had a fall. The cookbook is partly the cookbook and partly the way you organize spending time with her this year.
It is okay if that's why you're doing it. It is good if that's why you're doing it. Just don't wait until you can't.
What we built
Hearth is for this — the recipe-anchored cookbook project. We work in eleven languages at launch (English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Tagalog, French, German, Polish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese) and we are especially interested in heritage cookbook projects. If you don't see your family's language listed, write us — we add languages quickly when there's demand.
The interview can be in her first language, the book can be in any combination of hers and yours, and we won't try to flatten her words into someone else's editorial voice. The book sounds like her because we leave her words alone.
It is the project we wish someone had built for our own families ten years ago. We are sorry we are late. We are not late for everyone.
Start a Hearth Project for a parent or grandparent — $9/mo while the project runs, then $129 for a hardcover Volume. Heritage and diaspora projects are our favorite kind.